Easter

I'll resume my weekly Book of Mormon reading next Sunday. Today, I'm posting an Easter reflection I worked on during Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

The Easter story is at the very center of the Christian gospel. Visions of the risen Jesus were what kept embryonic Christianity from collapsing like many other failed messianic movements have done over the centuries. Theologically speaking, all Christian teaching and practice tie back to Christ's resurrection. Whatever gospel principle or concept is most central to your spirituality, it can be expressed in terms of Christ's resurrection:

• The Atonement is not complete until the risen Christ ascends into heaven, filled with compassion, to intercede for us (Mosiah 15:7-9).
  
• The Restoration can be understood as a modern-day witness of the risen Christ (JS-H 1:17).
  
• Baptism brings us into newness of life, in the likeness of Christ's death and resurrection (Rom. 6:3-8).
  
• Our temple covenants prepare us to pass into God's presence, as Christ, our great high priest, has entered in before us (Heb. 6:18-20).
  
• We are able to have a personal relationship with Christ because, having risen from death, he is with us forever (Matt. 28:20; D&C 108:8).
  
• We are able to build up the kingdom because the Father has raised Christ from death to rule at his right hand forever and has placed all things in subjection under his feet (D&C 20:23-24; Eph. 1:19-23).
  
• Service to others is how Christ, living and working in us, continues to carry out his ministry (Gal. 2:20; Col. 1:27-29)
  

And so on . . .

My point is that Easter is not only about the promise of a future triumph over physical death. Christ's resurrection frames everything we do, here and now, as people committed to being Christ's disciples. The Easter story, and images associated with it, are the basis of our entire religious vocabulary of hope, mission, and relationship with the divine. The resurrection refers to much more than a future reunion of spirit and body. It stands for Christ's entire redemptive work. Every good thing that God brings to pass in our time can be thought of as a ripple effect of Christ's resurrection. Every good thing that happens is the risen Christ continuing to bring his work to fruition.

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I'm now going to add some thoughts intended for readers who are experiencing doubts about the literal reality of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead or about the literal reality of the future resurrection. If you don't fall into that category, feel free to skip down to the next set of asterisks.

At this point in my life, I don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the grave, and I don't know if there's an afterlife (though I certainly hope there is, and I tend to assume there is). But I still celebrate Easter every year—and I celebrate it religiously. Why? Because while I don't regard the Easter story as history, I revere it as sacred story and as icon. On those terms, the Easter story communicates truths that are central to my faith and spiritual life.

This image is one of my favorite icons of the resurrection. It's a painting that hangs in the Alcazar de Colón in Santo Domingo (the palace of Christopher Columbus's son Diego, now a museum). This icon captures some of the truths that make the Easter story so important to me. This icon tells me of a Christ who is energetic and triumphant. It tells me of a God who doesn't allow oppression, betrayal, cruelty, death, loss, grief, disillusion, and despair to be the end of the story. That's the God I put my faith in. That's the Christ whose work I want to do in this world. I believe, literally, that this God exists—or more precisely, I'm taking the gamble of faith that this God literally exists. I believe that the Christ of the Easter story is an image of this God. In other words, I believe that Christ's resurrection is a symbol of the work that God literally carries out in the world—a life-giving, liberating, illuminating, transforming work. Through the language of the Easter story, God communicates a promise—a literal promise—that everything which keeps us and our world from filling the measure of our creation can be overcome. Maybe that includes life after death, maybe it doesn't; I'm not really invested in that question. But I do have some definite convictions about what filling the measure of our creation includes, and the Easter story gives me a vocabulary for articulating those convictions and the hopes that go along with them.

If that all sounded a bit abstract . . . well, that's why God gives us a concrete story: so we can let the story work on our minds and hearts instead of trying to live by abstractions only, which may feel cold or clinical or cerebral by comparison.

The bottom line is this: Whether or not the Easter story is literally true does not, fundamentally, matter. Of course, it matters in a real, pressing sense if, for example, your bishop or stake president won't sign your temple recommend unless you tell him that you believe it's a historical truth that Jesus rose from the tomb. But historicity is entirely irrelevant to whether or not you embrace this story as part of the spiritual foundation on which you build your life. What does matter is: Do you hear God communicating to you through the Easter story? Does the story dramatize in symbolic form promises or principles that you believe are literally true—or that you're willing to exercise faith are literally true? Whether or not the story is literally true is a secondary consideration.

At least that's how I see it.

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So now I want to bear a testimony of Christ's resurrection. I say "a" testimony because I hear God communicating many different truths to me through the Easter story, and I see the resurrection at work in the world in many different ways. Some have to do with personal transformation or interpersonal relationships; others have to do with social justice. Here's one testimony. For future Easters, I'll post others.


This photo was taken during a trip I made to Haiti over this past Christmas break with a group from the Advocate, the Episcopal church here in Chapel Hill whose Easter Vigil service Hugo and I just got back from. The purpose of the trip over Christmas break was to deliver funds, school materials, and medical supplies to an Episcopal church in Haiti that the Advocate wants to partner with. It was my first trip to Haiti, though I'd been to the Dominican Republic, on the other side of the island, a number of times, beginning with my LDS mission. As we drove through Port-au-Prince, it reminded me of the poorer neighborhoods where I'd worked in Santo Domingo—except that the entire city of Port-au-Prince, as far as we could see, was at that same level of poverty, apart from a few well-guarded enclaves for the rich or for foreign visitors like ourselves.

The photo shows what's supposed to be a major river. As you can see, it's dried up. It's polluted with garbage. But people are still trying to make what use they can of the water.

Change of scene: Several years ago, when I still lived in Salt Lake, I was standing at a bus stop, wearing a t-shirt with the name of a medical mission I did interpretation for during a return trip to the Dominican Republic. A man waiting at the same bus stop struck up a conversation about the t-shirt. He had lived in Vietnam for a while, and he made a comment about how it's heart-rending to see how much poverty there is in places like that, but you have to accept that that's just how things are, and there isn't anything that can be done about it.

I think I kept my cool, but inside I was appalled. I don't believe—I can't believe—that there isn't anything that can be done about problems like poverty, pollution, deforestation, desertification, or famine. They're enormous problems that get more and more out of hand every day . . . in part because many of the people who have the financial and intellectual resources that could be used to address these problems are unaware or apathetic or fatalistic. But I can't be fatalistic about them. For one thing, I feel that these problems hit close to home for me because I personally know individuals who have to cope with them day in and day out.

And at a more theological level, I simply can't accept that the forces of death and destruction are more powerful than the forces of life and renewal and restoration. The Easter story tells me they're not. Christ has triumphed over death. All things have been placed under his feet; all things are subject to him. There is no reason that river in Port-au-Prince has to keep looking the way it does in that photo. There is no reason people have to keep living under those conditions. Christ has the power to change it—if we're available to be the conduits or servants of that power.

That's a testimony of the resurrection. It's one of the things I mean when I say, "Christ is risen!"

In Christ's name, amen.