When I was a boy, Easter was a really important day.  Easter really began the day before when my brothers and I dyed Easter eggs for the next morning’s uniquely competitive Easter egg hunt. Most of the eggs my brothers and I colored on Saturday were the conventional yellows and pinks, blues and purples.  There were pretty two-tone eggs where one end was one color and the other end another color.  Mom had an affinity for the two-toned eggs.  The thing was that any of these “nice eggs” when found the next day, only counted five points.  What made our testosterone-charged egg hunt unique were two special eggs that were scored entirely differently. The most valuable was the golden egg.  It was made with exquisite care by bathing an egg for a few moments in yellow, then in red, then in orange until the egg came out a beautiful golden hue.  If you found it, it was worth fifty points.  The second special egg was made at the very end of the process by dumping together all the dye colors into a muddy, putrid concoction, looking somewhere between gray and green and brown.  From out of that cauldron of dye emerged the rotten egg—worth a negative fifty points.  The next morning Mom, serving as the Easter bunny, hid the eggs around the yard and under the bushes.  Then in a rush of competitive zeal more akin to March Madness than Easter’s love, peace and joy, Greg, Jeff and Mark Smutny each scrambled to get more eggs than the other, searching for the golden egg while we tried to avoid the rotten egg.  Except we had a ground rule, Scout’s honor, that if we saw the rotten egg, we had to pick it up.  After the competitive rush, we eagerly counted up scores, subtracted the rotten egg from whoever got it.  One of us yelled “I won.”  Easter was a big deal.  Then we went to church.

There at the First Presbyterian Church in my small hometown were all the smells and bells of Easter.  In the church Fellowship Hall, by the time we arrived, preparations were well underway for the annual Easter breakfast, a sumptuous feast prepared by the men: stacks of steaming, brown pancakes, hot maple syrup, chunks of butter, sausage and bacon, orange juice for the children and large silvery urns of coffee for the adults.  The atmosphere was cheery and festive. Everyone seemed extra positive.  But before we could eat, we had to go to church.

The sweet smells of lilies and hyacinth permeated the sanctuary.  A brassy trumpet, along with organ, accompanied the singing.  The sermon seemed extra long.  The whole service was extra long.  I couldn’t wait to dig into the pancakes, then get home for another round of hunting Easter eggs.  I’m sure the Easter story was read and proclaimed about Jesus being raised from the dead. I do not recall that part nor do I remember wondering whether it was true or not.  I simply don’t recall it ever entering my mind. 

That began to change when I was a teenager and I became aware of people dying.  There was the classmate who was killed rock-climbing.  My Uncle Keith died of emphysema and Cousin Terry of a brain cyst.  My best friend’s mother committed suicide.

When Grandma Stafford was close to death, we were summoned to the nursing home.  After she breathed her last, the reality of death hit me more squarely than ever before.  Part of it was that I loved her so much and there she was stiff, cold and looking very dead.  A few days later in church at the memorial service, the minister talked about the resurrection of the dead.  I’d heard the words before, but this time, I really listened.  He talked not only about Jesus rising from the dead, but Grandma rising.  I really wanted it to be true.

But I had so many questions.  As an undergrad, I’d taken a few Biblical literature classes and I was a philosophy major, and questions were encouraged.  They were even required.  Was what the Bible said, really true?  When the minister proclaimed the resurrection, was that for all people, or just the saved?  Did people go to heaven?  Where was heaven?  Or did people just go to be with God?  Did they join some kind of energy field?  My questions didn’t go away just because I wanted Easter to be true.

Then at Harvard Divinity School, I encountered all kinds of people who took their faith and religious tradition very seriously, including Jews, Unitarians and Buddhists, but who also insisted that they were, at best, agnostic about life-after-death.  “When you are dead, you’re probably dead,” they said.  Even some followers of Jesus weren’t entirely sure what they believed.   

Still, I had given my life to Jesus Christ and I knew that through my religious studies as an undergrad and seminarian that if there is anything central to Christianity, it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  I learned, too, that church throughout its history, in all its forms, in all of its diversity and divisions, has proclaimed Christ crucified and Christ raised from the dead.  It’s basic.  It’s central.  It’s the very heart of Christianity.

I also learned that when Christians try to define and describe the resurrection we say all kinds of things: some confident, some confusing, some humble, some arrogant.  There are some who insist that the resurrection could have been photographed.  When you point out to them that even the Apostle Paul spoke about the resurrection in terms of metaphor, as he says, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.  For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (I Corinthians 15:52), they stare at you like you are a heretic.  Others simply declare the resurrection to be a mystery to be received with joy and gratitude.

Let’s acknowledge the Easter story is central to Christianity, indeed, without it all the other stories about Jesus lose their force.  Let’s also acknowledge that the Easter story seems a little outlandish to modern, scientific sensibilities: burial clothes in an empty tomb, angels and apparitions walking through walls and doors, mysterious encounters between the man the Romans executed and his weeping followers.  Let’s acknowledge Easter defies our ordinary sensibilities.  What are we to make of it?

The scattered and disheartened followers of Jesus experienced something after his crucifixion that convinced them that death had not finished him.  Otherwise, it is hard imagine why they should have reassembled and insisted on continuing his hazardous work while the same brutal forces that had crucified him were just as powerful and still in charge.  They risked arrest and death like their leader’s because, as they said over and over again, they had encountered him.  In some sense, he was alive, in their midst, working, inspiring and giving them new life.

So we have the resurrection appearances, accounts of Jesus after the grave.  They read not as empirical history, for they convey mystical experience, human encounter with the transcendent. Jesus’ appearances are described not in everyday language describing everyday events, but in the language of symbols, song and silence, the language of mystics, the language of those among us who know we apprehend the reality of the transcendent.

Did you know that Christianity did not invent the idea of resurrection?  It is present in the Hebrew Scriptures.  But there is a difference in the way it is understood.  The stories in the Old Testament about raising the dead do not have anything to do with immortality.  They are about God’s justice.  They are expressions of the human hope that God’s purposes, in the end, will be victorious.  Especially, they disclose the hope that the victims of the powerful, the callous and the cruel will be vindicated and that, in the fullness of time, God’s plan for creation, shalom, will come to be.

In Isaiah, those who sleep in the earth stained red with injustice, violence and warfare, will rise, awake and shout for joy.  In Ezekiel, the same hope is voiced in a poetic passage about how God breathes across the valley filled with the bleached bones of the vanquished, the casualties of imperial conquest.  They reconnect with each other as the prophet says, “The Lord God says to these bones: I am going to put breath into you, and you will live.  I shall fasten sinews on you, clothe you with flesh, cover you with skin, and give you breath, and you shall live” (Ezekiel 36:5-6).  For the Israelites, resurrection did not refer to everlasting life or perfect happiness in heaven; rather it was to express faith in God’s justice as the chief end and goal of history.

Jesus was a Jew.  His community was Jewish.  Clearly, the stories of Jesus’ resurrection in the Gospels contain within them this communal dimension of hope in the fulfillment of God’s divine purpose for creation.  If we remove this Jewish dimension from our understanding of the powerful rabbi from Nazareth and his rising from the dead, we do him a grave injustice.  If we incorporate this dimension, the Gospels become so much richer and the meanings of the resurrection of Jesus become so much more than only an individual’s soul fleeing mortality.

Christians for centuries have spoken of Easter as the “second exodus.”  The idea is that in the original liberation of Jesus from the grip of death, God inflicted a mortal wound not just on human mortality, but on the tyrannical forces that murder innocent people like him.  God raised Jesus and therefore Easter anticipates the final victory of God over all that deforms and destroys life.  In Christ’s resurrection, the victory has been won; therefore, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus,” neither trouble, pain, persecution, danger, warfare, poverty, what happens today nor what happens tomorrow —nothing. 

In this second exodus, God raised an innocent man who placed himself alongside the misfits and the outcasts of his day, who taught people to love their enemies and to pray for them.  He confronted the powerful elite, both religious and political, and told them their kingdom was passing away and that God’s kingdom was the only one that really mattered.  For all these, they killed him — like so many others before and after him — by a depraved system of law and order.

He was murdered, because of what he said, what he did, because of the way he lived.  It’s one thing to bring a dead man back to life.  To bring a crucified man back to life is to strike a decisive blow against his wrongful death and all death systems that continue to cause suffering. The Resurrection story points, yes, to the victory of life over death, but also of the victory of God’s shalom over cruelty, greed, atrocities, disease, fear, torture, lies and injustice.  Do you follow me?  The resurrection of Jesus Christ is both personal and communal.

Still you may ask, “But did it really happen?”  You know — the resurrection?  Dr. Mark, you say that something powerful happened to those disciples, and that their lives were forever marked by his continuing presence and inspiration, well what was it that happened?  What was that something that made them come to know that he was alive?  Was it a hallucination, wishful thinking, a fervent hope, a response to grief or was it the very real presence of the risen Christ?

In our journey of faith, we come to the place where faith and knowledge intersect, or they do not.  At this point, some people find the declaration that “Christ is risen” is nothing more than a far-fetched superstition, while for others it is the sustaining keystone of our entire lives.  As Jesus often said about the kingdom of God, “Here it is, all about you.  Do you see it?”

The resurrection, finally, is not by its nature observable or even credible to neutral investigators. It’s an act of trust and a decision to live in a particular way.  That is why the literalist crowd who insists that you could have photographed Jesus, walking through walls and coming out of graves, is ultimately so unsatisfying.  Proving or disproving the resurrection is entirely beside the point.

To see the resurrected Jesus you have to more than sit around debating and waiting.  When the disciples first encounter Jesus, do you notice initially, they do not recognize him?  At first they have no idea who he is.  In one account, two dejected disciples meet a stranger who walks alongside them.  They have no idea who he is.  Only after they sit down and break bread with him do they see the stranger is the risen Christ.  In another account, Jesus joins his disciples even though the doors are barred.  In another, he sits on the beach and eats broiled fish with them.  For the Apostle Paul, he insists that he never met Jesus in the flesh, but that Jesus spoke to him after he is thrown to the ground on the road to Damascus.  Some hear his voice, but do not see.  Some, like Thomas, have to touch him to know him.

All of these disparate accounts are describing far more than a walking corpse or a soul escaping mortality.  They describe something in the disciples that is completely real, personal and life transforming.  In each of these encounters, two key characteristics shine forth.  First, the confidence that Christ was still alive came not from second-hand reports about him being alive, or finding an empty tomb, and then assenting to those reports, but from a personal, direct experience of the risen Christ, first-hand.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, in each and every one of these encounters, Jesus has the same message:  keep on doing what he was doing both to announce the reality that he is alive, and to demonstrate that he is alive.  Do what he would do.  To believe that he is alive, is not so much to assent to a set of beliefs, but to act as Jesus would act and thereby announce the dawning of a new age.  To know that Jesus is alive, to find Easter, is to do what God would do, and to go where Jesus goes.  To find Easter is to bring hope into circumstances and situations that only seemed hopeless.  What appears to be a crushing defeat is only a temporary setback.  As Harvey Cox says, “To find Easter faith is to allow oneself to hope that despite eons of injustice, pain and death, in some way that eludes our most vivid imagination, God’s shalom, God’s plan for all creation, will triumph.”

Go where God goes and you’ll find Easter.  Go wherever the darkness of despair longs for the candle of hope.  Go wherever the victims of hatred, fear, racism, and homophobia cry out for justice.  Go to the street corners and alleyways and sweatshops where poverty and want crushes the human spirit and bring compassion and social justice.  Go to the places where disease, injury and depression break the human spirit and bring prayer, comfort and healing.  Go to the places in your own heart where you have been broken and defeated and cast your cares with the God who raises up the dead, the God who seeks the lost, and the God who welcomes the prodigal home. Go to Jesus, the crucified and risen One.  Go where God goes and you will find Easter.  My friends, Christ has risen.  He has risen, indeed.  Hallelujah.  Amen.

(c) Copyright 2008 by Mark Smutny.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.