Yearly Resurrection

Thoughts on hope in a Good Friday world

I spent Easter morning sitting on the green grass in my backyard, among a congregation that included my snoring dog, an industrious squirrel, a hungry chipmunk, and at least a dozen singing cardinals, blue jays, and robins. I was recovering from a migraine, and their company was all my frazzled brain could handle that morning. I was sad to miss sharing in this important Christian ritual with my human church community, but I was grateful to be spending it in a verdant landscape that is exploding with life.

As I sat in my chair with my bare feet in the grass, I watched a squirrel hoping around the yard, digging up the last nuts from his winter cache. He watched me and the snoring dog, but our stillness invited him to continue on his quest. Meanwhile along the edge of the fence a chipmunk was fervently eating the seeds from the maple pinwheels that had fallen in the storm the previous night, chewing open each casing and stuffing the seed in his cheek pouch before moving on to the next in his little pile. Their tiny furry bodies were good company on an Easter morning as we were hailed by the bird chorus. All of it was a reminder that the resurrection story is one reenacted each year as spring unfolds in the more temperate regions of the planet.

I have often felt, and heard from others in ministry, that it’s hard to know what message of hope to share in a world that feels too stuck in Good Friday to be able to truly embrace the hopeful vision of Easter. Our neighbors are suffering from war and famine as we in our own country deal with pervasive economic and social injustice. My heart is heavy with the knowledge of all of this suffering.

But I have begun to realize that this reticence to embrace the joy of resurrection is rooted in a misunderstanding of the nature of the hope that Jesus brought to the world over two millennia ago. The miracle of the Easter story is not that everything is now peaceful and cheery. It’s that violence, death and hate never have the last word, that life always persists, that love wins out in the end. Of course there is still death and loss and injustice, but the resurrection hope reminds us that this isn’t the end of the story. Whatever it may look like in the world, death never conquers life, darkness never conquers light. The struggle isn’t over after Easter comes. But we don’t struggle alone. This is a counter-cultural message in a society that sometimes seems too preoccupied with despair and doubt to give hope any kind of foothold.

But intermingled with tragedy, new life and hope are all around us—in the kindness of neighbors and strangers, in the costly love of activism, in the wisdom we earnestly seek out. We are reminded of this too in the yearly abundance of seasonal change. In temperate regions of planet Earth, we are greeted by an extravagance of blossoming life after the cold quiet of winter. Even in tropical climates, there are seasonal changes of wet and dry, times when the earth is parched and baking, until the glorious release of rain returns to bring life in the form of blooming flowers and a return of verdant greenery to the landscape. These changes come, year after year, decade after decade, a reminder that just as there are seasons of death, they are always followed by seasons of new life.

These are the thoughts I pondered as I sat in the yard with the animals and planted herbs and lettuce in the newly-dug soil. A garden is a specific way of living into the hope of new life—tiny tomato and cucumber seedlings growing on the sun porch, waiting for the end of the frosty nights when they can grow under the heat of another summer sun.