Easter Reunions
By Cole Hartin
Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed! Hallelujah!
WHEN I WAS eighteen years old, I left behind everyone I had ever known and travelled West, to begin college in a city just outside Vancouver. It was a wonderful season of my life, and I quickly made friends. But I missed my folks. I missed my friends back home. I missed my church family.
I returned to Ontario during the Christmas holidays and a few of my closest friends showed up at my parents’. It was a wonderful reunion, as we sat, with my parents and sister, ate some snacks and caught up after the longest stretch I had ever been away from home.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this moment, and reunions more generally, because over these past years they’ve become all the more vital. Many of us have gone long months without close contact with those we love, and some may still be separated by lockdown restrictions.
And this Easter, as we celebrate the resurrection from the dead of our Lord Jesus Christ, we also look forward to another reunion, a great feast where we will be intimately connected to our Lord, as well as to all of our sisters and brothers in Christ. It will not only be a time of reconnecting, but it will be the first moment in our experience when everything is put right. There will be no more tears, no more pain, and Christ will be all in all.
Easter Sunday is the entry point into this great feast.
We Arrive at Resurrection by the Cross
We celebrate the resurrection – the wonderful, glorious truth at the heart of the Christian story – at Easter. But this must be set in context. Resurrection only makes sense, only becomes necessary, after death. We cannot arrive at resurrection until we have journeyed with Jesus through his agony, his death, his cross.
This is important as we turn to the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. Mark 16 begins, for instance, with three women – Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome – as they head to Jesus’s tomb to prepare his body for burial. You see, they believed Jesus was dead. They went to find him in the place of the dead and were prepared to wash and anoint his corpse. They were surprised to find that the stone in front of the tomb had been rolled away. They were shocked to find the tomb empty and to hear the angel telling them that Jesus of Nazareth was no longer there because he had been raised.
Jesus’s most devoted followers believed he was dead, and the darkness of their grief was so great that his resurrection caught them off-guard, like a blinding light.
We can learn something from this, even 2000 years later. Many of us as Christians believe – like these three disciples – that we are called to care for Jesus’s remains. Many of us believe that we are here as the Church to carry on the mission of the dead Jesus and to fondly remember him.
But this is not the Gospel. This is not the good news!
The good news of Easter is that Jesus is no longer dead! Jesus is alive, and he has been raised, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. We are not carrying about the message of a dead man but are dwelling in the light and power of the living Son of God!
Jesus’s Triumph and the Death of Death
What happened when Jesus went from death to life?
There is an ancient Orthodox hymn that gets right to this point:
Christ is risen from the dead:
trampling down death by death;
and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!
Jesus defeats death by his death. The great enemy of humanity, the consequence of sin, the shadow that hovers about our lives reminding us of their imminent ends, has been defeated.
Jesus’s resurrection is not just an idea, or a sign that life comes out of decay, but it is the great miracle upon which all of Christianity, our whole faith, rests. Jesus has risen from the dead!
We read in the book of Acts (10:34-43) of St. Peter, one of Jesus’s disciples, preaching about what he witnessed. Of how “God raised Jesus on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”
The resurrected Jesus visited with his disciples. He appeared to many of them and ate and drank with them. He was no apparition or phantom, but in the flesh, bodily present, so that they could see him and touch him and talk with him.
This is the Gospel. This is the good news for us today.
What Does this Good News Mean for Us?
Why is Jesus’s resurrection good news for us, specifically? Isn’t it just a story about Jesus, however miraculous?
We can all point to stories that inspire us, that give us hope. Maybe they are true stories, and maybe they are not. We might point to books or films that are inspiring.
Many people find this story of Jesus to be nothing more than an inspiration. The creator of the universe becomes a poor man, heals the sick, lives and dies on the cross for humanity, and three days later rises to new life. “How nice!” they might think.
But the point of the story is not merely to inspire us; instead, it actually changes the way we live our lives. It shapes reality, it creates a new world for us.
Jesus is not just an inspiration but in a very real way he defeats the power of death so that it is no longer the final word. We now face death not as an ending, as a descent into a darkness from which we will never return, but because of Jesus, we now pass through death as through a gate or door, squeezing by it not into darkness, but into glorious everlasting life. In the Collect for Easter Even or Holy Saturday we pray that “through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection….” (BCP 180).
If we can imagine life without all of the pain, the illness, the poverty, the broken-heartedness we all face, we might glimpse something of the life that Jesus has prepared for us by his resurrection. His resurrection is a guarantee that we have a share in God’s future.
Jesus’ resurrection is a sure sign of our own resurrection. That means that death ceases to be the end, but rather the door into new life, a life that we share with God and others in the world to come. A life that looks an awful lot like a festive party.
It’s the image of a party that I want to dwell on in these last few sentences.
Isaiah 25, verses 6 to 9 shows us “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, or rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear” that will be for all people. And moreover, the shroud of death that hovers behind human life has been destroyed, swallowed up forever in Jesus’s resurrection. God will take away our disgrace, our tears, and our pain. We will be glad and rejoice, we will find rest. We will party.
So, think of all the most wonderful meals you’ve had in your life, think of all of the best parties with your families and friends, think of the little tastes of joy that you’ve had here and there. All of these, the best memories, are only hints, or previews of what Jesus has prepared for us by his death and resurrection. This last reunion will be the one where everything is set right.
It’s been a dark two years. We can pray things will improve in the months to come, but who knows?
Our only fixed point of reference is Jesus. We look toward him, who once entered into time and now stands outside of it, beckoning us to share in his joy, to eat, to drink, to be satisfied, along with all of the saints, with him. There is our final and ultimate hope and joy. TAP
The Rev. Dr. Cole Hartin is rector of St. Luke’s Church in Saint John, NB where he lives with his wife and four sons.
