Hopefully you had a refreshing and spiritually uplifting time with family and friends and Jesus this weekend, that you stuffed yourself full of jelly beans and novelty chocolate, and that artificial grass is perpetually stuck to your floor. All of these things sound like the making of a really great Easter song. Why are there no secular Easter songs aside from "Here Comes Peter Cottontail?"
- side note: I found out funny things about my Dad this weekend. Apparently for school when he was little he had to sing "Peter Cottontail" and we still have it on tape. My siblings said they heard it and at one point he screws up, making his little baby voice get all choked...and he starts crying because he messed up! If you knew my Dad better you could more fully understand how hilarious and heartbreakingly cute that is. Picture the fluffiest blond hair and the biggest 4-year old blue eyes and blue suspender shorts with a puffy bowtie... Man I love my Dad. I'm glad these stories about parents come out into the open every now and again. okay. end side note -
This Holy Week was really awesome. I mean, it always is, right? Best week of church of the year, what with the waving branches and communion and great hymns and tenebre services and lilies on Sunday morning. Good stuff. But below the pomp and circumstance, the truth of what happened that week 2000 years ago always expresses itself to me differently year by year. We can hear "He is risen! He is risen indeed!" 21 years in a row and I still don't get it. I don't think we as humans are supposed to understand how God gave His son over to such a crude human fate as death to save us - it's illogical. It's impractical. Most of all, it's confusing.
Something that happened over Easter really opened my eyes to how painful Jesus' death must have been for His family, earthly and heavenly. A family at Grace by the name of Trotter had the unthinkable happen - their two year old daughter mysteriously got very sick very quickly and died on April 12th, 2011. Her name was Clara. They have three other daughters, aged 6, 4, and then there's a younger baby girl too I think. I'm not sure about their daughter's illness or how it all exactly happened, but Mr and Mrs Trotter were there, bright and early at the sunrise service on Easter Sunday. They buried their little girl a week ago.
Anyway, they went up to communion holding two of their daughters and it really made a statement, to me at least. Mr. Trotter is the president of the congregation, and I think he was a good example to everyone at Grace that even in the midst of tragedy, worshipping God is vital. As Mr and Mrs Trotter stood up in front of church holding their daughters I couldn't help but think that they were holding on to everything they had left - and bringing it all before God. I think it would be terribly heart-wrenching to get up, dress your remaining children in frilly dresses and cart them off to a church bedecked with flowers to listen to arguably the happiest story in the whole Bible proclaiming Jesus' miraculous rise from His tomb when you know that your little girl is moldering in hers. If I was that little girl's mother I would still be in bed. How do you get happy after that? How do you go on with your life?
Can you imagine how Mary felt? Jesus was her miracle baby, the Son she could not explain, and she had to watch soldiers flay the skin from His back. Think about how worried your mother used to get about you when you were little and skinned your knee - and now picture how your mother would feel if she watched you die? If she helplessly watched crowds chant for your murder, and finally couldn't tear her eyes away from you as you were slaughtered on a hillside? Think about how terrible Mrs Trotter must have felt when there were only 3 Easter baskets this year instead of 4. Think about how it feels to know you are separate from someone you love, and you have no way of bringing them back to you. You have no way to talk to them again. You have no way to hear their laugh or hold them again. The wretchedness of losing a child truly is a pain unlike any other, and we have to remember Jesus was a baby - a baby that died.
I don't have a child of my own and can't come close to understanding that kind of emotional trauma; I can't understand how as a mother you get up and put on a smile and go to work and keeping being a mother to your other kids. I don't know how you stop the tears. I don't know how you stop being sad - I don't think you ever do. Time heals, even though that pain probably only resides to a dull throb. It never goes away. There's nothing more hopeless.
How to people who don't know the Gospel message cope with this kind of tragedy? Because though the Trotter's may grieve now - grieve forever, maybe - they can have hope. They know that Jesus didn't stay dead, that He rose in three days as He continually promised, and that someday they WILL see their daughter in heaven again. They can be sure about this. There's no reason to doubt it - she's in heaven. And all those who believe in Him will be as well!
"Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance..."
(John 20:1)
"... suddenly, two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, 'Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; He has RISEN!"
(Luke 24:4-6)
That's literally the best news you can ever tell anyone. HE HAS RISEN! In that phrase lies the completion of prophecy, validation of thousands of years of faith, and gives the reason why we can get out of bed after tragedy and say "I know that my Redeemer lives." It's the reason we go on, it's the reason we live - the empty tomb! It's emptiness means the grave is not our final destination. It means we get eternal paradise instead of 6 feet of dirt and a box in the ground, or worse, eternal separation from love and joy and God for all eternity. That tomb's open. He has risen!
Why don't we tell people this all the time? Why do we instead cave and let opportunity after opportunity to share the gospel with our family, friends, and strangers walk right by us every day? KC reminded me this weekend something that our teacher Mr. Greschner said in high school - to not tell people the Gospel is the same as straight up telling them, "I hate you." Do you hate your family and friends? By no means! Then why don't we tell them about what Jesus did more openly? Because we're afraid we'll look dumb? Not be "cool" anymore? Suffer social consequences? When you do that, you hate the people you claim to love.
Right after the Bible tells us Jesus rose, He gives us a direct command:
"Therefore, go and make disciples of all nation, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." - Matthew 28:19-20
We have to tell people about this amazing news! The clock is ticking! Souls need saving and God Himself tells us to get His saving message out in the open.
The tomb is open.
He is Risen.
Now get that message out there.
Happy Easter!
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