Last week we reflected on how we are “an Easter people” and what that means. Now as we enter into our 50 day long celebration of Easter we might ask an even more basic question – what is Easter? This might seem a strange question – isn’t the answer obvious? It’s the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection.
But is it? There are a some problems with this answer. First it turns Easter into the celebration of an event. Christmas marks the beginning of Jesus life, Easter marks the end. But when was that event? Sometime between Friday midday and Sunday morning. But no one witnessed the resurrection itself and the morning after even those closest to Jesus had no idea what was going on. That understanding grew gradually. Some theologians have said the event was the empty tomb. That would make it an event, but somehow it doesn’t feel like a very good answer to what are we celebrating.
The second issue is whose resurrection are we celebrating. Yes, Jesus rose from the dead, but more significantly we also rose from the dead (“we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him” as Paul puts it, Rom 6:1). At least part of this celebration should be directed towards the fact that we are risen from dead, “to sin no more”.
Taking these points together it seems that we shouldn’t be thinking of Easter as an event in Jesus’s life, but rather as a process, in our lives. A process that the disciples went through, and a process that we go through. It’s a process without a clear beginning or end. We are becoming Christians, over a lifetime – not signing a recruitment deal.
Our scripture readings this week illustrate this point. They are three very different accounts of how the resurrection affected different people at different times in different ways – three versions of the Easter experience.
Taking them in chronological order we start with an account set very soon after Jesus death (John 20:19-31). Even for those closest to Jesus, immediately after his death, the Easter process was working out in different ways, as we see with Thomas. In the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 5:12-16) time has moved on and the disciples have got it together. There are now many other people experiencing Easter, in a way which is perhaps even more mysterious than for the disciples. Then we come to Saint John (probably not the same John as the evangelist) who tells of his vision (Revelation 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19). This is now a personal and direct experience of the risen Lord, outside the context of disciples and the social structures of the early church.
We can also look at these three stories from a different perspective and see how one is about an individual relationship with Christ (what has come to be known as a mystical experience); another is about the group joined together in the church (the disciples); and the third is about how this experience ripples out into the wider world. Some people join the group, the church, some may even have the mystical experience of John, as did St Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, St John of the Cross, and others.
Easter arrives for everyone in different ways. God glories in our difference, after all he created all this variety. He finds a way to bring the Easter experience to everyone. They don’t have to deserve it, quite the opposite. They don’t even have to want it, he offers it regardless. So we celebrate the gift in this season and enjoy it as best we can.