By The Rev. Scott Herr
Easter for the Christian community, like the high holidays of Ramadan for the Muslim community, and Passover for the Jewish Community, is a “moveable feast.” It doesn’t have a fixed date (like Christmas always falling on December 25th), but rather changes from year to year based on the lunar calendar. This year, Easter falls early on March 31st. Easter is always the first Sunday following the full moon that occurs on or after the Spring Equinox, which is normally March 21st. The earliest Easter in recent history was in 1818. That year the Paschal Full Moon fell on Saturday, March 21 (the Equinox), so the following Sunday, March 22nd, was Easter. It will not fall again that early until 2285, a span of 467 years!
Holy Week for Christians, then, begins this coming Sunday, known as Palm Sunday, one week before Easter. The week recounts the last week of Jesus’ life from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, to the Last Supper with his disciples on Maundy Thursday, his Crucifixion on Good Friday, silent Saturday and then the climax of his earthly life with the Resurrection on Easter morning.
The word “holy” simply means “set apart,” and in a religious sense is a “holiday” or “holy – day” to remember something important in the religious tradition. Easter is arguably the most important holiday for the Christian faith. Like the Jewish faith which centers on the defining historical event of the Exodus, the Christian faith hinges on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Easter is the “event” of Jesus’ being raised from the dead. Holy week, remembers the events that lead up to this defining moment of Christian faith. The Apostle Paul would argue that the resurrection is not ancillary, but central to the faith, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”1
What too many Christians forget is that God didn’t just raise any Christ (Messiah in the Hebrew, Xristos in the Greek, both meaning “anointed one”) from the dead, but God raised this particular “Jesus the Christ” from the dead. The events leading up to Easter are important because in his final days, Jesus did and said specific things that revealed who he really was. His final symbolic acts were sharing a meal with his disciples, washing their feet on Maundy Thursday, and on Good Griday freely yielding himself to injustice. He willingly became a victim of imperial violence, falsely accused, arrested, tortured, and on “Good” Friday, executed by crucifixion.
Marx and Nietzsche, among others, have decried Christian faith for being a poisonous dream, misdirecting our longing from our home in this world to an eternal, ghostly one. But the biblical vision, from Genesis through to the Revelation, asserts God has determined to make God’s home with us here on planet earth and with all creation. Central to that divine invasion meant absorbing into Godself even our most violent tendencies. Instead of retributive or punative justice, God has chosen restorative justice, aligning as the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann suggests, with all of the victims of injustice in the world, showing the way of forgiveness and self-giving love. Ironically, the God Christians believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the cross.” It was this Jesus Christ God raised from the dead.
That’s important to remember if you want to understand what C.S. Lewis called in the Chronicles of Narnia “the deeper magic” of self-emptying love, the path Jesus lived and to which he calls his followers.
It was a small circle of friends in Oxford in the 1930’s and 40’s who called themselves The Inklings. J.R.R. Tolkien and Jack Lewis (better known as C. S. Lewis), were part of the group and they shared their writing with one another. It was Lewis who encouraged Tolkien to complete and publish his fantasy stories about little creatures called Hobbits. Tolkien thought nobody would read it, but Lewis thought otherwise. Can you imagine the world without Bilbo Baggins, Frodo and Samwise Gamjee, Gimli and Gandolf? But it was Tolkien who told Lewis, an atheist, why he believed the Christian story of the Resurrection.
They went for a walk along the river Isis, and Tolkien said, Jack, “In all of the best fantasy literature, there is a protagonist, an antagonist, and there is always some kind of catastrophe that happens to the protagonist and it looks like all is lost… But then a eu-catastrophe happens, a “good-catastrophe,” a great reversal, and the protagonist is saved.
In Christianity, Jesus is the protagonist, and the Roman oppressors the antagonists, and of course the great catastrophe was that this innocent man Jesus was killed on a cross. But then the great eu-catastrophe happens, the Resurrection, and everything is changed!
Lewis writes later that Tolkien looked him in the eye and said, we all know that’s how it works in fantasy literature. But the difference in Christianity is that… it’s true. Surprisingly, it really happened! Lewis writes this is what moved him to faith.
It was a small circle of scared friends of Jesus who were met again by the Risen Lord and were changed from hiding and silent cowards to faithful and outgoing witnesses to the good news of God’s love and grace. In a world with plenty of suffering and injustice to go around, friends of Jesus continue to enter into the suffering of others because Jesus came back and showed his disciples his scars and gave the promise that he will never forsake us and that he will be with us always. I think that’s what makes holy week “holy.” Paradoxically, and wonderfully, the Easter good news is that there is nothing too holy for, or “set apart” fully, from the transforming love and grace of God.
1 | Corinthians 15:19
The Rev. Dr. Scott Herr serves as one of the pastors at the First Presbyterian Church in New Canaan.
