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I was thinking about how Easter doesn’t have the same appeal for kids that Christmas does. It’s harder to commercialize. No Easter sales, no Easter lights or decorations, no Easter tree, no payoff for kids with big presents at the end. The Easter bunny is a pretty lame stand-in for Santa.
Even from a biblical perspective, Easter seems more perplexing to kids than Christmas. I mean, who doesn’t get excited at the birth of a baby? New life brings joy to everyone, right? By comparison, the idea of death, crosses, and tombs seems somber, morbid, even with Jesus coming from the ground at the end. If you’re a kid (and maybe to some adults), it doesn’t seem to have the same flourish, the same panache.
American author Frederica Mathewes-Green tells us that kids may not have lived long enough (for most of them, thank the Lord) to fully appreciate Easter:
Easter tells us of something children can’t understand, because it addresses things they don’t yet have to know: the weariness of life, the pain, the profound loneliness and hovering fear of meaninglessness. Yet in the midst of this desolation, we find Jesus, triumphant over death and still shockingly alive, present to us in ways we cannot understand, much less explain. In him we find vibrancy of life, and a firm compassion that does not deny our suffering, but transforms and illuminates it.
The Resurrection (and the Crucifixion) weigh heavily in all their fullness, in their earthiness and transcendence. They are both heaven and earth colliding in fierceness and weight.
People had been raised from the dead before. Lazarus is a notable example from Scripture, and the gospels tell us of dead rising from the grave at Jesus’s death (probably a terrifying sight for all involved). This wasn’t a ghost-survival, like Samuel appearing to Saul after death. Hebrews knew that was possible. This resurrected body of Jesus is a totally new appearance, a never-before-seen being, as completely new as the first Adam was standing in the Garden of Eden on the first day, God’s breath of life emerging as carbon dioxide from his lungs for the very first time. This, as Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15, is a second Adam, a second forebearer, a second first of all who would come after Him, including you and me.
The second Adam, Christ resurrected, was and is a first: not a prototype, but a full realization of what is to come. The first apostles, those who saw the risen Christ in the 40 days after the Resurrection, emerged from this encounter giddy with joy. Before the Resurrection, they were hiding, terrified, hopeless. Afterward, even after Jesus returned to heaven, they were emboldened and empowered to the point that they faced the greatest authorities of their day, tortured and imprisoned, courageous and unrecanting.
They were transformed, not only because their friend whom they loved had been returned to them for a season, not only because His resurrection from the dead affirmed that He was truly God, but because He stood before them as a flesh-and-blood promise of what they would one day become. Paul tells us, “As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” (1 Cor. 15; 48-49).
The resurrected Jesus was hope incarnate, their greatest dreams for their future made real in the flesh. And that reveal, that new reality, removed their fear and made them lions who would conquer the earth at the ultimate cost of their already-dead flesh, in His Name.
That’s the power of the Resurrection–to reveal that same hope to us, to fill us with that same courage and power, so that we can fulfill the same mission in His Name that the disciples had all those years ago. Conquer the world around you with humility, truth, hope, and above all, love. All in the name of Jesus, and in full confidence of what we will become.
How do we live in the light of the Resurrection? We can certainly live with hope. Resurrection Sunday marked three years since my daughter, Annie, had the rollover car accident that changed her life. A 23-year-old young adult with a history of concussions, Annie suffered a head injury in the accident that went undiagnosed at the time, masked by diagnosed PTSD. Months later, extreme and extensive migraine headaches, blurred mentation, and forgetfulness forced her to stop working. After searching all over the state for someone who could help her, we found a care provider in Pittsburgh who treated professional athletes and others from around the country for brain injuries.
Her doctor put Annie through a rigorous and painful exercise regimen for months, one that initially seemed to exacerbate her headaches and nausea, rather than improve them. Over time, Annie began the slow process of recovery. Now, three years later, she’s returned to work in cross-creative fields very different from those she held before, doing event planning, visual merchandising and design, and social media management for various clients. She has not yet fully recovered, requiring dozens of Botox injections every twelve weeks to keep her migraines down to 1-2 per week, and still has intermittent memory problems, which she’s learned to manage.
Last month, she shared her testimony with our school board. She told them that, in the midst of losing so much–career, health, what she once felt were years of her life:
The Lord has been graciously reminding me that He is making a new thing…He is sanctifying me not to who I was before my accident, but to someone who looks more like Christ. I have wrestled with Him over these past three years, but I was not scared to do it. My faith is my foundation. I knew I wasn’t going to lose it. I know He would handle my doubts. The Lord’s character and goodness have been instilled in me as long as I can remember. He has been equipping me all along for all He has for my life.
Tish Harrison Warren reminds us that “The hope God offers us is this: He will keep close to us, even in darkness, in doubt, in fear and vulnerability. He does not promise to keep bad things from happening…He promises that we will not be left alone. He will keep watch with us in the night.” And, His resurrection body is a promise that He is making a new thing in us, that we are being transformed, even and maybe especially through these seasons, into something new, as my Annie is learning in lessons pretty heavy for a 26-year-old. His resurrection also gives us a glimpse into hope for the future, a day when we will emerge on the other side of death into new life, a new body with a new mind, not just fully healed and restored, but capable of things we cannot now conceive or imagine, “imperishable” as Paul tells us.
Finally, we can live in the Resurrection with joy and delight. People have watched God work in Annie, and have said, “You must be proud of her,” and I am. They have said, “You must be glad the Lord is healing her,” and I am. But over the three years Ashley and I have walked with Annie, I have felt all these things, as well: My daughter could walk into a room and capture it- she was charismatic, yet kind. I found myself thinking, “How are you going to use this amazing gift for your glory, Lord?” Over these 3 years, I’ve wondered, “Why would you give her these gifts, and then threaten to take them away?”
Of all my children, she’s the one who suffered the most during her life–the concussions I mentioned, illnesses that took her mostly out of school from January to June of her sophomore year and much of the first semester of her senior year of high school, and other conditions it’s not my place to share. I found myself asking, “Hasn’t she suffered enough? Why not just give it to me? Or take it from her altogether?”
God saved her life that day. He’s healed her remarkably, but not fully. She has desires of her heart, of children, marriage. No one is better with children than Annie. What will be her future?
I’ve watched her in pain, crying, sick to her stomach, and my heart’s been ripped out with her. And in the midst of this pain I’ve carried as I’ve walked with her, I’ve realized that God isn’t just healing her. He’s healing me. Healing me of my arrogance and presuppositions about how life is supposed to work. Teaching me to surrender control of everything by surrendering that which is most precious to me. Teaching me to measure God’s goodness in small graces, and by the cross itself, and not by the trajectory of any of my loved ones’ earthly lives.
He is teaching me that even in my darkest hours, as long as He remains just and good, I still have a claim on Him. And He’s teaching me that He loves my children more than I could ever hope to, and who they’re becoming in the eternal weight of glory is everything to Him, and what I was actually praying for all along on all those nights I knelt by their cribs and their beds.
My children are lions, mighty and courageous in the hope of the Resurrection of Jesus, imperfect and broken in who they are now, but more than conquerors in who Christ has declared them to be, and in who they are becoming. God has placed me in charge (for now) of shepherding and stewarding the place that forged them to become those people, and that is currently making your children those people right now, as we speak. Together, these kids will be the next wave to conquer their work and their generation with peace, hope, and love, in His Name. And nothing brings me greater joy and delight.
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