I read something the other day that has struck me. I just happened to read it earlier this week and it happened to be about Easter. I've been reading N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope ever so slowly over the past few years (yes, years). It is not a light read, but it is brilliant. And I picked it up the other day and I think I have struck upon my favorite part.Easter has always been my favorite holiday (read: holy-day). Not just to celebrate the risen Christ, but to remember the depth of sacrifice that Good Friday brought on our behalf and then to wake Easter morn knowing that He was miraculously risen that day - fulfilling all hope, conquering death, and promising us life eternal if we choose to take it.
I grew up without the observation of Lent as a precursor to this holiday, so it is a bit foreign to me, but in the last few years my husband and I have chosen to give up things in preparation for the Easter season. This year we gave up sugar in it's most obvious forms (it is hidden everywhere, so we didn't go much farther than to ban candy, baked goods, pop and chocolate). It has been good to sacrifice something that I crave constantly and depend on in times of emotional turmoil, so that I can learn that sugar, and chocolate in particular, cannot love me back, even though it seems, at times, like it must.
Getting back to NT Wright, this little excerpt from his book has filled me up to bursting with the need to celebrate Easter anew, though I'm not quite sure how to go about it just yet. Let me share with you some of what he said about how the Church could celebrate the risen Christ more appropriately:
"Easter is about the wild delight of God's creative power...we ought to shout Alleluias instead of murmuring them...we should give every man, woman, child, dog, cat and mouse in the [church] a candle to hold; we should have a real bonfire...
...But my biggest problem starts on Easter Monday. I regard it as absurd and unjustifiable that we should spend forty days keeping Lent, pondering what it means, preaching about self-denial, being at least a little gloomy, and then bringing it all to a peak with Holy Week...and then after a rather odd Holy Saturday, we have a single day of celebration.
Easter week itself ought...to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before, with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems...
...if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again - well, of course. Christian holiness was never meant to be merely negative...the forty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up, some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving.
It might bring something of Easter into your innermost life. It might make you wake up in a whole new way. And that's what Easter is about."
Every time I read this it makes me want to have a party and dance in the rain and soak in the sunshine. It reminds me that we have something to exclaim to the world that is particularly wonderful.
Not only did Jesus die for our sins, but he rose from the dead, bringing new life and hope to the world. 40 days of celebration after 40 days of sacrifice. That sounds like something Jesus would delight in.
So, for the next 40 days I am going to celebrate, have a piece of chocolate after dinner, hug my kids, kiss my husband, maybe even walk in the rain and soak in the sun. I'm not sure what it will entail, but that I will remember that I have reason to rejoice.
