And a lot of it misses the point of Easter.
By a lot!
The fundamental problem is that Easter is not about documenting history or even trying to tell the Passion story in a dramatic way. Fundamentally all those efforts look backward.
Easter faith looks forward. It is about the way God in Christ Jesus blows right through death, blasting right on through the barrier of history into the new world, the new age, the new life to come. The tales of Easter so beloved by religious filmmakers or the explanations of what happened that day and that week preceding so beloved by documentary makers are all about what happened. A true Easter faith is about what is happening and what will yet happen. Happening. Not happened.
The point is that Jesus is out and about, out of the tomb, escaped, out “at large.” He is not in the tomb; he is alive and making a difference in the lives of believers (and even people who don’t believe themselves but are part of the human Easter experience). It’s not about a strange morning around AD 33 that people are still talking about. It’s in the people who are still talking about it!
Even the church can make the mistake of thinking Jesus is just in the institutional church, but Jesus won’t let big wooden church doors block him from going into the world and changing lives any more than the stone across the door of that cemetery. We can’t entomb Jesus in our buildings either. Jesus is not just here. Jesus is out there. Loose in the world. Making a difference. Whether we get that or not.
The other thing that irritates me about the conventional religious programming is that it makes us “viewers.” They keep us nicely removed from the story, not just by time and distance but behind glass, uninvolved, untouched, unmoved. It stays between our eyeballs and our brains.
Easter is really all about our hearts. So the real place to encounter the grace and celebration of Christ’s Resurrection is in worship. That is irreducibly the point. Easter is about being with other souls seeking to follow Jesus, being together in worship, being in a real place with real people with real turmoil’s experiencing real emotions. We are not viewers; we are worshippers. No CNN documentary is going to touch actually sitting in a sanctuary with other live human beings, with the scent of spring flowers and Easter lilies, of seeing stunning white sanctuary hanging, of hearing trumpet fanfares, of opening your own mouth to sing the glorious hymn, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” This is full-contact, totally immersive worship. And it is in our worship that our Risen Savior is most truly encountered. That’s how Easter becomes real. Very, very, very real.
Sorry CNN, internet posters, media pundits: Jesus is not here in your stale retellings. Jesus is in the hearts and souls of believers. In churches and in upper rooms and sunrise services and in worshipping in all sorts of places. Compared to living worship, all the Easter movies and documentaries are just new ways of enclosing Jesus. Worshipping together is how we express that Jesus is not “here,” he is risen.
You really find Christ risen in his followers, even now, even Easter Sunday, even today, even tomorrow and next week. Please join other thrilled souls in worship this Easter Sunday at 6:30, 9, or 11 am with others who know Jesus is not closed in, but alive.
Christ is risen!
Indeed!!!
In Christ,
David
Texts For Sunday Worship:
From the Epistles Acts 10:34-43
From the Gospels John 20:1-18
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