Easter is Not North-Centric

Ben Myers at Faith and Theology sure knows how to shake things up. He posted one more Easter sermon on Sunday from Douglas Harink theology professor at the Kings's University College in Edmonton. Harink challenges some of northern-based miscalculations about Easter...

We may be forgiven for thinking that spring is the season of resurrection. Yes, we may be forgiven. But it is forgiveness that we would need. Think for a moment: if you were to travel on this very Easter day to New Zealand perhaps, or the southern tips of Chile or Argentina, another season altogether would be making itself felt, with ever shorter days, and a chill in the air, and leaves falling, and sweaters and jackets being donned rather than doffed. The birds would be flying to warmer climes. The natural rhythm would be tending toward the cold and the dark and the dormant.

Easter is not a season in nature’s cycle. Resurrection is not a stage in the circle of life. The kingdom of God is not a hidden potential in this world. There is no power within us that will bring about the new creation.

Ouch.

Talk about afflicting the comfortable. That throws all of our cutesy, cuddly Easter ideas into a tailspin. Even our "English" word for the holiday- Easter- is based on a spring fertility goddess.

Again I say "Ouch."

In fact, there is nothing natural in any of the events of these days. On Good Friday all of Jesus’ natural human powers – and at the age of about 30 years those would be at their peak – all of his natural human powers are abruptly interrupted, halted, snuffed out: he is arrested, tried, and brutally executed. He is truly dead and buried. On the next day, the Sabbath, Jesus is not resting, as a faithful Jew should. No, he is dead, lifeless, empty – a corpse. His life has come to an end; he has no inner resources of renewal, there is no vital force of nature that can bring him back.

And so Easter is in no sense an awakening; it is not a rejuvenation; it is not a resuscitation, it is not even a miraculous reversal of death. Resurrection is not simply the next thing that Jesus does, or the next thing that happens to him in the natural course of things. No. Resurrection is something else altogether, something wholly other, something from beyond, something purely unnatural.

Resurrection is God. (Emphasis added.)

Thanks. I really needed that. Not because I was in any danger of forgetting the power of the resurrection, but because after all these years as a Christian I was coming to expect it as a rite of spring. I was more easily able to forget that Easter is NOT a spring renewal, even if that is when it happened in the northern hemisphere. Easter is about new life that crashes in on us with surprise and hope and with no logical, natural, it's-that-time-year repetitiveness.

Thanks be to God - and God alone - who has done this for us.