Jonathan's Journals - April 2006

Easter !!!
Well, Christmas has come and gone. Remember Christmas? That’s the holiday of Christ’ Mass. It’s the holiday we are supposed to remember Jesus’ birth. Only problem was that about 50 years ago, we started associating it with Santa Claus and Rudolph instead. We Christians allowed ourselves to let Christmas have some vague, sentimental meaning about good will and happiness. Terrible theology. But it sold well. Christmas became a big boost for sales, and then we couldn’t get enough of it. It was marketed, packaged, and served up with eggnog and chestnuts roasting by an open fire.

We became a victim of our own success. No longer was Christmas a distinctive celebration of the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity; it was just a nice bland holiday, clearly not offensive to anyone. But then Christians noticed something. We were taking Christmas for granted. People weren’t saying “Merry Christmas” any more. They were saying, “Happy Holidays.” That made some Christians mad. They wanted us to remember Jesus as we walked into the department stores to indulge ourselves and spoil our children. People started objecting, holding demonstrations to “save Christmas.” I even remember this past December one man demonstrating in front of a department store. He was holding a sign that said, “Remember the reason for the season.” But this man was dressed up as Santa Claus. How confused can you get?

Well, now it’s Easter. We still have a chance with Easter. We haven’t messed it up yet. It’s hard to market a man being tortured to death and then God raising him from the dead, unless your name is Mel Gibson. But for most of us Easter is still weird. Let’s keep it that way.

Let’s not cozy up to Easter. It’s strange, frightening, earth-shattering, world-changing. Let’s not turn it into “Here comes Peter Cotton tail, hopping down the bunny trail.” Let’s remember: this is about God.

I don’t think Christmas is redeemable, from the standpoint of the general American public. We’ve allowed it to be so sentimentalized that people will never be scandalized by it again. But Easter’s a different story.

At Easter, we remember how distinctively Jewish Jesus was. We remember how he came to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and was hailed as the Son of David, the Messiah (a term meaning “one who is anointed to rule.”) We remember how he observed Passover with his disciples, and shocked them by announcing that one of them would betray him. Judas kissed him, and the Romans arrested him. Caesar’s representative, Pontius Pilate, had him sentenced to death. The disciples fled. Even Peter denied him three times. The Romans crucified him, because they believed in law, order, and swift justice (capital punishment).

The world came to a screeching halt. Darkness in the middle of the day. Earthquakes, rocks splitting, temple veils being torn from the top down, dead people getting up out of their graves (Matthew 27:52). Confusion. Chaos. The disciples, huddling together in fear, wondering when the Romans would come after them too. Judas committed suicide. Peter wept bitterly. How could things get any worse?

Then, suddenly…… Easter! The world is made new. The first fruits of God’s new creation. The promise of resurrection come true. God wins. Jesus appears to the disciples who had betrayed him, offering them forgiveness, new life, hope, a brand new start. Jesus commissions them to turn the world upside down. Or rather, Jesus commissions them to tell the world that He has turned it upside-down, or right-side up. What a story! What a Savior! What a God! Don’t trade it all in for chocolate bunnies.

Remember the lesson we learned from Christmas. Who knows? If we restore the original sense of adventure associated with Easter, we may also re-discover what an extraordinary and shocking miracle Christmas is as well!

Don’t like it when Christmas is secularized? Come to church on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.