An unexpected Easter
In her book Pastrix[1], Nadia Bolz-Weber describes Easter as “a story about flesh and dirt and bodies and confusion. And it is a story about how God never seems to adhere to our expectations of what a proper God would do, as in not get himself killed in a totally avoidable way. Jesus did not seem very impressive at Easter. Not in the churchy sense and certainly not if Mary Magdalene mistook him for a gardener. Perhaps Mary Magdalene thought Jesus was the gardener because Jesus still had the dirt from his tomb under his nails…. Depictions of Christ never show dirt under his nails. He looks more like a wingless angel than a gardener…. My experience however is the God of Easter is a God with dirt under his nails. Resurrection never feels like being made clean and nice and pious like in those easter pictures.
Instead, what I subconsciously know is that God is not interested in making me spiffy. God is interested in making me new. And new is not perfect. In the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it. New looks like every time I admit I am wrong and every time I don’t mention it when I am right. New is every fresh start, every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn’t live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never see coming, never even hope for, but ends up being the thing we needed all along. It happens to all of us.
God simply keeps bending down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig ourselves through our violence, our lies, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.”[2]
This year we are listening to Mark’s version of the Easter story. It is a little unsettling and a bit disappointing. It is very short! 8 verses! Jesus appears to the women and tells them to go to his brothers and to tell them he has gone ahead to Galilee. And they are terrified. Not excited, relieved, or overjoyed. Terrified into silence. I have so many questions about Marks’s version. And that is the point. This is not a story that happened long ago in a far away land. This is a story that happens again and again right where we are. Jesus went ahead to Galilee, to Rome where tradition has Mark writing this gospel, and to Tauranga. The story of God reaching down into the graves we dig ourselves through all who trust in God’s love found in Jesus and loving us back to life over and over keeps happening. And after this year that is an Easter message we need to hold on to, and to tell again and again.
Comments