“Looking through the Shadows toward Easter Sunrise”
I write this on the day of yet another school shooting in Colorado. That’s a mighty shadowy context, as I sit trying to look ahead to Easter morning. With breaking-news heartbreak and the protracted horror of Ukraine, it’s hard sometimes to imagine light outside the Tomb.
Considering this, I guess I can see how easy it was in the little church of my childhood to flee to Easter joy as a welcome relief from the mess that is the world (even in the days before cable news!). I have come to see, however, that Jesus is precisely God’s answer for our self-destroying addiction to violence and power. Jesus was executed by those who loved law and order above all else, wasn’t he? They recognized in him a genuine threat to Rome’s jealous claim on the whole person: political, cultural, economic, and religious. And of course, if he is the same living Savior today that he was then, he is still such a threat.
But I struggle with how to present Jesus to a world still bent on securing good through coercive force. It seems certain that our pitched season of division as a society, and quite painfully as The United Methodist Church, won’t be letting up in the months after Easter. Nope, we will be invited, again and again, to choose our tribe, to cement our deepest convictions and grievances, and to see The Other as the embodiment of all that is wrong in our community, our nation, and the world.
My prayer before the Day of Resurrection comes is that we would find a much deeper unity than what accompanies a mere truce before the next battle. In the words of Malachi, "Do we not all have one Father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously, each against his brother, so as to profane the covenant of our fathers?” (2:10). Sure, we each as individuals want to honor God by acting justly and living in accordance with the Scriptures. But Easter means a dead reckoning of how Jesus gave his life to place us in a reconciled and reconciling community (1 Peter 2:9-10; Galatians 3:26-27; Ephesians 2:17-19). That means holding to those whom Christ has made our family, as a sign of mystical, sweet communion in a fractious world.
I suppose it’s not easy to be such a family - in any season. But if it were, we’d likely never learn what reconciling Grace is really about. And what kind of Easter would that be?
A Blessed Easter to you, and to all.
~ Pastor Dave Rochford
*Sadly, the week after Pastor Dave wrote this, there was still another school shooting – this time at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville TN.
