The greatest story ever told
The two most important “celebrations” in Christian faith are next week. If there is still a big kid inside you, your brain just perked up and said “Hey, the most important celebration is Christmas – yay presents! – but it’s only April, what are you talking about?”
I might argue – think chocolate Easter bunnies, Paska, hot cross buns – but those can’t hold a candle to the wonders, treats and presents of Christmas.
No, Good Friday and Easter are most important because the events they commemorate are at the heart of the Christian gospel (good news) and understanding of life.
(An aside: “Good” Friday is the day we remember how Jesus was crucified – why then is it called “good”? “Good” Friday comes from the understanding of “good” not as “positive” but as a theological designation – “pious, holy” – in the way we speak of the Bible as the “good” book. Many other languages designate it in this way – “Holy Friday.” In German the term is “Karfreitag” meaning “Sorrowful Friday.” Having grown up with “Karfreitag” I am inclined to use the term “Dark Friday” in recognition that on this day humanity killed the Son of God.)
Easter is about how God – the Creator of all things – answers the reality that, notwithstanding the immense beauty and goodness of life, the world is filled with profound suffering and senseless death. Indeed this is often used as a protest against the existence of God or of His goodness and power – how can there be a good God when so much in the world is anything but good?
This is an appropriate and even necessary question to ask, and essential for any would-be faith/religion/philosophy to have an answer to. Easter is Christianity’s answer to that question.
Though appropriate and necessary this question also needs to be asked honestly. If you think suffering and death are a negation of the reality of God, I would ask you to also ask yourself how you would have preferred the Creator do it, or even how would you have created the cosmos if it had been up to you?
Easy you say? It would have been if God were creating only animals who are not creatures of morality and meaning. But the apex of God’s creation was human beings, made in His image/likeness. To be so God had to give us “free will” – the freedom to choose, including to choose to do bad things. This in turn made the possibility of suffering and death a sure thing. Again, any ideas on how this could have been avoided?
Given thus, that suffering and death are undeniable realities of life, the next appropriate and necessary question that needs to be asked honestly is how do we live in such a raw world without despairing and succumbing to cynical nihilism – belief that life is ultimately meaningless and fleeting?
Our culture is yet somewhat grounded in Christian faith so often people who don’t believe in God avoid despair by living with a residual sense that this life is not all there is, that a good place and our loved ones await us ‘on the other side’.
The atheism in our culture has no such expectation. It’s answer to the reality of suffering and death in life is that it is inevitable and we do our best to minimize it, and the most we can do is enjoy life as much as possible. And when we die, we’re done, gone, except as our memory lives on in surviving loved ones. The effect of this perspective is to move us to live more into an ‘animal’ nature – we live to satisfy our various hungers and urges, but sacrifice for the sake of love and self-denial only when it meets our needs.
I have been to several recent funerals where this was the extent of the message: our loved one was dear to us, lived a full life, we’re sad they’re gone but their memory will live on within us. The survivors had no hope of ever seeing their loved one again.
Easter is so important because it celebrates that the Creator God did not leave us to wallow in the transient, meaningless sufferings and death in life without hope. God countered the powers of evil by sending His Son to share life with us and show us that God is love and hope and grace.
In His passion and crucifixion Jesus battled the amassed earthly and cosmic powers of evil in the defining battle between God/good and Satan/evil. They killed Him and it appeared that nihilism and hopelessness had triumphed.
But then God raised Jesus from the dead thereby declaring that evil and its most powerful weapon – death – DO NOT have the final word, that humans can be freed from the oppressions of evil and death. Jesus’ resurrection proclaimed that there is life after death, that at the end of time all people would be likewise raised from the dead.
Therefore the goodness of creation and life is not negated by suffering and death, because God offers the eternal continuation of all the greatest joys of life on earth. And so we can love with abandon and sacrifice generously because in eternity we will realize that love and sacrifice were but building blocks for our never ending love and joy in the presence of God.
Christmas is but the introduction to the greatest story ever told – Dark Friday and Easter Sunday – Jesus’ death and resurrection for us.