Theological Journal - April m12: Toward the 8th Day (Easter Sunday)

 

A most peculiar Easter Sunday this year. A raging worldwide pandemic, massive unemployment and financial dislocation, death, death, and more death. Severe and even tornadic weather threatens us here in East Texas. I had originally included John Updike’s famous Easter poem “Seven Stanzas of Easter” here for today’s post. But I feel compelled to go a different direction with this Easter post this year.

I have three things bouncing around incessantly and insistently in my mind and heart this morning. Three related yet distinct notes keep sounding over and over again as I sit before the he engulfing tragedy that has beset our nation and world, the regional storms in our area, and the inner turmoil I feel as I try to process all this chaos.

-“fearful, tearful, yet cheerful”: I cannot and do not want to avoid the terror and destruction tearing us apart. Yet I cannot deny the hope that comes with Easter that Christ is risen, death is defeated, and all deathly things that threaten and frighten us will finally come to nought. Holding utter realism and extravagant hope together at the same time is a hallmark of biblical faith. Denying neither the reality that death seems yet to reign nor that Christ has defeated death I/we live at the nexus to the two under the assurance that the latter will prevail. That makes our journey through history what J. R. R Tolkien aptly called a “sorrowing joy.” I feel that intensely this Easter morning!

-similarly, the biblical admonition to grieve, but not without hope (1 Thess.4:13). The utter realism we unflinchingly face in faith is not without cost. We pay for with our grief. No stoicism allowed for Christians. It hurts to live, to love, and to hope. And we feel it. And we can feel it. Embrace that grief because of the hope we have in Christ. Our losses, hurts, and disappointments are real and painful, but they are not final. Joy, full joy, will come! And how we long for it!

- “...'joy' in Philippians is a defiant 'Nevertheless!' that Paul sets like a full stop against the Philippians' anxiety...”  -Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Philippians. That joy, the joy of Easter, I find most most powerfully and poignantly expressed in the third stanza of the Easter Hymn “Christ is Risen! Shout Hosanna!”:

Christ is risen! Earth and heaven
nevermore shall be the same.
Break the bread of new creation
where the world is still in pain.
Tell its grim, demonic chorus:
“Christ is risen! Get you gone!”
God the First and Last is with us.
Sing Hosanna everyone!

This world, this life, is intolerable without such hope. Even with it, at times like this especially, only barely so. Yet it is so. That is my faith and my joy, this Easter. Not much, perhaps, I grant you. But all there is as far as I can tell. So I raise my voice today in a defiant “Nevertheless” and sing the hymn lustily “Sing Hosanna everyone!”