It’s a surreal experience to walk through the grocery store and see piles of pastel Easter candy, mountains of colorful Easter baskets, and big stacks of bright yellow Peeps staring at you with those little eager eyes. They seem to shout “Easter is here! Easter is here!” A great message for sure, but a strange one when it’s mid-March and smack dab in the middle of Lent, well before Holy Week has even arrived. When you’re trying to observe a faithful Lent, live in the moment, and cherish the desert journey, the early Easter onslaught can be a bit jarring. Nonetheless one can’t help but be pricked with a bit of joy by the preview of what’s to come, even if it’s highly commercialized fanfare!

This all seems to be a theme for our fast paced, consumer driven world. Beat your competitor to the punch. Rush to get to the next holiday first. And when the big day arrives drop it like a bad habit and move on to the next big thing. From a business perspective it makes perfect sense. Maximize profits and give the people what you think they want. If we were all business men and women we’d probably be on that train. But we are not. And there are drawbacks to it. A society whose rhythms are set not by holy days of community observance but holidays of commercial consumption loses something vital to its health. Depth of meaning is traded away for good vibes and sentimentality. And I say this as someone who is, at heart, hopelessly sentimental!

Easter is so much more than colorful eggs, bunnies, and lilies (which are great!). It is the culmination and climax of the entire biblical narrative of salvation. At Christmas we realize the depth of God’s love in the way God came among us in flesh and bone with the full weight of the human condition. He participated in our joys and our deepest sorrows. He wept at the grave of his friend, Lazarus, and experienced profound anger at the sight of the money changers making a mockery of God’s house of prayer. He had crowds of people follow and cheer him wherever he went and he had crowds jeer him and abandon him to death. He had a beloved father and mother who lost him in the Temple at age 12 and watched with horror as he was nailed to a Roman cross at age 33. God, who created the world and watched it go cattywampus with human folly, entered this world to set it right side up. At Easter we see that Jesus was, indeed, no mere representative or stand-in for God, but God himself defeating death itself.

As one thinks about loved ones they’ve lost one can’t help but think about Easter. Not only of the many Easter brunches shared with them, or the Easter egg hunts that brought special joy, but of the meaning of Easter. With Easter there is an unshakable, unquestionable assurance that those who have preceded us are not gone, but are in fact alive. Not symbolically or theoretically, but truly and actually alive. Easter not only gives the heart comfort in this regard, but sets it completely free in all others.

Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed!

Yours in Christ,

Drew+