It’s been over 2000 years since the first Easter, which means that it’s very easy to take it all for granted. We are so familiar with the story of Jesus suffering, dying, and rising from the dead that the disciples’ unbelief seems comical. How could they be so dumb?
To break out of this, we have to shock ourselves back into what the first Easter was really like. In our last exciting episode, Jesus had let everyone down appallingly. He’d failed as a superstar political champion and exposed his closest friends to terrible danger.
He’d put the bad people right back on top. His movement was utterly crushed.
What Jesus did in rising from the dead was literally unthinkable. There was no precedent for this. Yes, he’d raised people from the dead, but they went back to their ordinary human lives. And if he was dead, who was going to raise him up?
What’s amazing about Christianity is not that so many people believed it, but that anyone believed it. And yet human beings don’t go to painful and humiliating deaths for fairy stories.
Judaism was strictly monotheistic and God was spirit. The idea of God becoming human was positively awful to devout Jews. And for those who could get past this obstacle, the idea of the God-man suffering such a terrible public humiliation and being executed simply didn’t make sense.
Jesus did the unthinkable – and in doing so, he did the unbelievable. It’s quite hard to believe in something that you’ve never seen happen before.
The 40 days between his resurrection and ascension are awkward. There are appearances, disappearances, reunions, disbelief, upbraiding, and reprimands. No wonder that even at the point of his ascension, “some hesitated” when it came to worshipping him as God (Matt 28:17).
At the same time, there are bold declarations of faith, repentance, forgiveness, and hearts that catch fire. But it still took Jesus personally catechising his two followers on the road to Emmaus to show them how the whole story hung together.
The descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost starts to make more sense when you realise just how unfinished the job of salvation history was.
One of the greatest joys in life can be when it turns out that you were wrong about something. You thought the worst, and lo! the truth is much better than you expected. This is very much what the first Easter morning was like.
On Palm Sunday, everyone thought that Jesus was the Messiah, that heaven was coming on earth, and that paradise was just around the corner. They were right on all three counts, but not in the way they expected. They wanted a merely anointed one, but they got God himself in human form on earth.
They wanted to be fed and never go hungry again. They got food that leads to eternal life – transformed bread and wine, the scriptures, and all the sacraments. They wanted God to live on earth. They got a new tabernacle with an ever-present loving God.
They wanted a way to worship God that wasn’t tied up with an exploitative ruling class, endless recriminations, and petty legalism. I will leave you to ponder that one, because I think it’s still a work in progress.
But on the bright side, Jesus abolished messy animal sacrifices (which as an animal lover I would have found very difficult).
Jesus breathed new life into the Torah, causing it to burst into flame and seize more hearts than ever. He grafted the non-Jewish nations on to the sturdy chosen tree of Israel. He invigorated all the Judaic laws that gave women more dignity and respect than any other culture on earth.
And he conquered death itself – the ultimate slap in the face for our worst adversaries.
The answers were always there – if only his friends had been really listening. Instead, they got the whole thing thumpingly wrong. How good it is to be wrong about things. How good it is to accept God’s version of salvation for us. It’s so much better than the one we imagine for ourselves.
So what can we learn from this Easter? Listen. Listen more. Listen more closely.
Do I really know what’s best for my salvation and other people’s? Is it just possible that I am completely wrong about something? I guarantee that you’re probably quite wrong about all sorts of things, and that everyone would be happier and better off if you realised this.
Give it a go. What have you got to lose? And happy Easter.
