the table

This Easter looks a lot different than what I think we were all hoping for. No one will gather in a church and celebrate in nice dresses, pressed khakis, or shined shoes. I won’t be able to go to my grandparent’s church in the mountains and eat Easter donuts with a sweet congregation of grandmas and grandpas asking me about my job and if I’m married yet. The thick smell of my grandma’s rose perfume won’t leave its imprint on my brightly colored, out-of-character dress that I wear every Easter in an attempt to please her. 

No, this year we find ourselves in our homes, some of us alone, some with a small group of roommates or family that may or may not give any significance to this day. This year, we mourn the loss of the people we could have seen and the traditions we hold tightly to. 

But even so, I stepped out of my house this morning to take in the sunrise as so many do on Easter morning. The sight was a reminder of what Easter is like this year for so many people…the clouds covered the horizon, blocking the magnificence of the colors in a hazy, blue-grey blanket. I stepped into the yard and laughed. It felt more like Good Friday than Easter Sunday. But a pocket of sky was open and sunlight glowed inside of it, exposing a faint orange lining of clouds, revealing a baby-blue sky peeking through in subtle defiance against the clouds surrounding it. And what a beautiful reminder it was. 

It was a reminder not only of an empty tomb, but that beauty is most often found in the midst of ugliness; that light is the brightest in the midst of darkness. And that our God is not unacquainted with grief. It’s easy in this time to feel abandoned by God. To wonder where He is. But when we look at the cross, and his death, and his resurrection, we find a God who is ever-present in chaos. It has nothing to do with abandonment, and everything to do with perfect love displayed. It has nothing to do with our punishment, and everything to do with a God who would rather become the victim of our viciousness than allow us to experience it any longer. 

It was on a sacred tree that the God of Creation made himself perfectly known. He came wrapped in flesh, in a humble barn because the world wasn’t ready for Him. The world was expecting something different—a warrior. Maybe if he presented Himself that way, we would have noticed Him sooner. But instead, the King of Kings came not just in the form of a covenant, but as a man. A man who lived with our struggles, felt our pain, and experienced our joy. A man who lived an entire life that shows us exactly who He is once and for all. A first-hand account of what God is like. And if we see anything in the life of Christ—of God wrapped in flesh—it’s that he has no issue getting His divine hands dirty. He ate with sinners. He touched the unclean. And he allowed nails to pierce those same hands on our behalf. 

But it was not on the cross that God’s wrath was carried out on a victim finally worthy. At the cross, Jesus does not reveal an angry God demanding a worthy sacrifice. He reveals God as a man who went willingly to death in the face of injustice, and didn’t speak a word to stop it. He revealed pierced hands and a bloodied back. He revealed love perfectly displayed by his life laid down. Not to save us from God, but to save us from ourselves.

It’s easy to picture God as separate from Jesus in the crucifixion…as the one who looks away in Jesus’ pain because He can’t bear the sight of it. But in the trinity, we do not serve three gods. We serve one. 

In Matthew 27:46 Jesus cries “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” It is in this moment of extreme pain, though he knew the outcome of what would happen three days later, that he quotes Psalm 22. Jesus experiences the 100% human part of himself that is feeling what it’s like for us to feel hidden from God. The same pain the Psalmist was feeling so many years before. For all the darkness that is laid upon him in his death, he is feeling the weight of the human experience of being lost. But we know that God has not forsaken him, because just before he was taken into custody, Jesus was talking to the disciples about the days to come. He told them, “A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me,” (John 16:32).  In the very same Psalm Jesus quotes in his pain, verse 24 says this: “For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.” I like to think Jesus heard the whisper of the Father in that moment, reminding him of the end of that same Psalm: “They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!” 

So death is swallowed up in victory. Jesus takes the one thing that Satan had over us—the fear of death—and he descended into the very pit of it, filled it with himself, and defeated the only power it held. He did this not through violence, but through radical forgiveness. He looked in the face of the very people that killed him and said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” (Luke 23:34).  

And He is begging us to do the same. 

There is an invitation extended to us throughout this Holy Weekend. 

On Good Friday, it is an invitation to forgive. To look at our enemies and fight for what’s best for them. Though it may be painful, and the last thing we want to endure, we know that love wins the war. It conquers everything, even death itself. It’s the only thing powerful enough to allow the accused and the accuser to sit at the same table and share a meal of bread and wine; of a body broken and blood poured out. 

Holy Saturday offers the invitation to sit in the tension between Death and Life. It was on that day that the One who came to give us hope had died. Even his closest followers didn’t know what to do, how to grieve, or how to live in a world that Jesus was no longer in. There was no darker day than that Saturday, and maybe that’s what makes it so Holy. Because the world was feeling the deepest level of grief—but that only meant that the highest level of joy was to come.  

And finally, on this Easter Sunday, our invitation is to look at that empty grave—never being able to fully understand what happened on the other side of it—and accept the grace and life that now flow infinitely from it. I don’t think Mary Magdalene was that far off when she mistook Jesus as a gardener when she arrived at the empty tomb. After all, as Brian Zahnd so perfectly enunciates, 

“Jesus is not a conductor punching tickets for a train ride to heaven…Jesus is not a lawyer to get us out of a legal jam with an angry judge…Jesus is not a banker making loans from his surplus of righteousness…

Jesus is a gardener…

A gardener cultivating resurrection life in all who come to him…

A gardener’s work is earthy and intimate…conductors, lawyers, and bankers are concerned with abstract things like tickets, laws, and money. But gardeners handle living things with living hands.” —Brian Zahnd, The Unvarnished Jesus

Salvation is not just about a single prayer we repeat to get a stamp on our hand at the gates of heaven: it’s about a conscious, ever-evolving, ever-difficult decision to continuously lay ourselves down for the ones who we would rather see punished. It’s about choosing forgiveness over revenge. It’s about aligning ourselves with the victims of the world and fighting for justice: not a justice that inflicts, but one that submits. One that is constantly seeking reconciliation from both sides. 

Salvation is about accepting the resurrection that is offered to us through an empty tomb; one that was paid for with blood, tears, and dirt at our hands. One that descends into the messiness of our humanity and brings light flowing up in abundance.

Lord, I pray for an abundance of peace today. 

I pray for a renewal of hope in the middle of a world gone rogue. 

Help us to accept your invitation to new life through forgiveness, sacrifice, and co-suffering love. 

Help us to grasp onto the life that flows up from your grave, recognizing the price you paid for it. 

We thank you this Easter Sunday for overcoming the greatest threat—death itself— and filling it with Yourself. 

Here’s to allowing the Gardener to tend to us with his living hands, and fighting for the world that he died for; one that is founded on an axis of love.