“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
It’s apparently a line from King Lear. Also the title of a little pastoral essay I read this morning. And advice I choose to trust in writing this long-simmering (or marinating) little piece of Easter.
I’m troubled that this year one little part of my inner response to well-meaning wishes of “Happy Easter!” has been a somewhat saddened “Happy for you.” (I recognize that speaking what I feel, not just what I ought to say, is risky.)
I do not doubt Easter and the risen Jesus. I rejoice in the power of love and of God over evil and death. And in the persistence of Jesus in the affairs of the world. So why the sad reserve and slightly cynical reply somewhere deep down inside me?
I know it’s connected to the experience of futility and powerlessness in the face of Japhia’s illness and weakness, continued pandemic isolation, and tiredness from the daily dance of the variety of things to attend to. But everyone is facing similar challenges these days – including, for many, the challenges of ill health and worse.
So why this Easter is the stone not rolled away for me?
It makes me wonder what I expect Easter to be.
I wonder if I expect it to be like Christmas. A time for gifts for me. Everything from chocolate eggs to a promise of life after death, and all kinds of good things in between to make my life happy along the way.
But in the Gospel stories, Easter isn’t like that.
When the risen Jesus appears to the startled disciples, neither he nor they understand his resurrection to be somehow an assuring sign of their own life after death. No one says a word about that in any of the Gospel stories.
Nor does he come bearing gifts. Well, except for a few fish he cooks for their breakfast one day at the seaside.
But by and large, the focus of the stories is the assurance that he is still with them, that God’s kingdom and not evil and death have the last word in the affairs of the world, that in spite of the kinds of people they are he still counts them and counts on them as his friends in the revealing of the kingdom, and that they are (or soon will be) empowered to carry on in the way he has taught them to live in the world.
In other words, to put it in 2021 terms for myself, regardless of personal illness and weakness, pandemic isolation, futility, powerlessness, and tiredness, Jesus is here … the list of woes is not the whole story …and even when we are weak and near-dead in body and soul, there is still some way for each of us to be used by God bring a taste and glimpse of love to someone else.
In other words, Easter is a call. Less about gifts we get to make our life happy, than about seeing that no matter what our life may be like, we are always able to be a gift of God to others.
This change in focus makes me feel a certain kinship with Thomas. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Except maybe what I need to see is not so much the nail-scars in the hands of the risen Jesus, as to see the hands of the risen Jesus somehow alive and present in my hands, as weak as they are and as powerless as they seem.
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