The key to Easter is to journey to and live through it as if we didn’t know the outcome. This way we walk with those caught up in those terrifying and bewildering events of two thousand years ago. And, in doing so, we find a mirror of our own experience as human beings, bound by time and place, trying to make sense of the world while learning that we are not in control of it … and cannot know what will happen next.
This journey is summed up in the title of Richard Holloway’s book Limping Towards the Sunrise, taken from the account in Genesis 32 when Jacob wrestles with God at Peniel and leaves wounded, but also blessed.
This is no twee story, aimed at keeping us religiously happy in the midst of a challenging world. Rather, it makes absolutely clear that God is not there to keep us in an easy life of pious acceptance, but to wrestle with us and, sometimes, to leave us marked by the meeting. We are meant to wrestle with Scripture, wrestle with our faith, wrestle with God … even when we get wounded by it.
This is the reality, the encouragement and the challenge of Easter itself. It runs through the biblical narrative and is most vivid as the friends of Jesus find themselves challenging their theology, their ways of seeing God and the world and the meaning of it all. For the Holy Week and Easter experience is one of confusion, misunderstanding, pain, regret, disappointment and fear. Only having endured that – as they see their hopes bleed into the dust of the rubbish dump that was Golgotha/Calvary – does the sheer shocking sunrise of Easter Day make any sense.
We do not need to be reminded that life is often a bit rubbish and hard to navigate. But, as Jesus looks the reality of evil and darkness in the eye from the cross – deserted by his friends at his point of distress – he confronts the horror. But, the sun rises, the Son rises, and the bewildering challenge of a new hope opens eyes and hearts and minds to a new reality. Resurrection, not death, has the last word. Which is why I can say: Happy Easter (when we get there)!