easter

Like the rest of Holy Week, Easter is also a terrific story. It starts as tragedy: the hero broken and bloody, against all expectation dead, his followers' joyful hope in him entombed with his corpse, the rock rolled into place, sealing their despair.But the curtain doesn't fall there. The next morning at dawn they discover the rock has been rolled back. The tomb is empty, the body's gone! A missing corpse? Great stuff. A whisper of comedy. Now a touch of farce as Mary Magdalen and the guys chase frantically around looking for help, or the corpse, when suddenly, out of nowhere, up it pops__live!Of course it's Jesus, who's done the impossible and beaten death.And they're so amazed they think he's the gardener! It's a payoff way beyond the Hollywood ending: all the flooding emotion and uplift of a tragedy followed by all the bubbling joy and optimism of a comedy.Is that possible? Not just to live happily ever after but to die__nd still live happily ever after? It's the most audacious claim of Christianity, the one element that marks the brand indelibly, that trumps the claims of all other major faiths.

The sure path to tomorrow was plotted in a manger and paved on a cross. And although this sturdy byway is mine for the taking, I have incessantly chosen lesser paths. And maybe it is time to realize that Christmas is a promise that I can walk through the world and never get lost in the woods.

Sooner or later I will realize that the very things I most desperately need are the very things I am unable to give myself. Therefore, I will either be left despising the fact that I am doomed to live out a life that is perpetually empty, or I will realize that an empty tomb is the single thing that will eternally fill me.

Maybe I don__ have enough beginnings in my life because I fought against the endings that were about to birth those beginnings.

Easter is God throwing everything at death so that I can give everything to life.

I am pressed to admit that I don__ have the capacity to understand the bloodied horrors of a cross and the wild exhilaration of an empty tomb. But at the point that I think I completely understand God, I have at that very point humanized Him and in that very action I have lost Him. Therefore, I much prefer to simply marvel.

We need to know that our limits do not define our limitations. And an empty tomb does exactly that.

Do I dare believe such an absurdly outrageous story that a man would die, lay lifeless in some tomb for three days and then somehow live again? Yet, if I dare to consider it, is that not exactly what I so desperately desire for this lifeless life of mine? And is Easter God__ tenderly outrageous way of telling me that that is exactly what I can have?

Of course God does outrageous things. But in reality, what insanity would prompt me to follow a God who did anything less?

Reasonably speaking, we can see the cross as entirely possible. But in considering Easter, we see an empty tomb as entirely impossible. And is it possible that God had to do the impossible to finally get our attention?

A god of the __ossible_ is no God.

Easter is a time when God turned the inevitability of death into the invincibility of life.

There are an incalculable number of things within me that I frantically wish to be emptied of, and despite my most earnest efforts to remove them, they remain. And it is Easter that reminds me that God empties out tombs.

Although I rail against it, death is the dark demarcation beyond which I am at the mercy of my own end. To the contrary, an empty tomb says that my end is at the mercy of God__ beginning.

Easter is the final solution to the finality of death.

God emptied out that first tomb so that He could turn around and empty out me.

My limitations abruptly define the frighteningly negligible extent of my existence, yet my soul utterly perishes if bound by those very same limits. And does this not somehow evidence both the reality of and need for God?

If God has the answer to every question, maybe my appreciation for God should be shaped more by the number of questions and less by the wisdom of the answers.