Easter has the potential to completely disqualify your winter.
In winter, coldness crawling at your bones, you could arrive at Edinburgh's Botanical gardens and walk hard ground, surrounded by grey leafless trees, asphyxiated by ice-like air, a lonesome pilgrim from summer's shores. And walking, you could find yourself suddenly confronted with a beautiful, fragile Victorian glasshouse. Inside, warmth startling the skin, your eyes overcome by colour and your nose by fragrance, a shocking discovery: even in winter spring can be found. Though a glasshouse is fragile it stands contrary to winter. In the middle of silent absence the cold isolation of the soul winter halts at this foreign warmth from tropical encounter: this is the heart of Easter.
All over the world Christians have preached declarative obstinacies denouncing the aberration of Christmas, enraged with culture's colossal misconstrued festivities. At the hijacking of the incarnation of God, Christians go balmy with indolence, livid at the consumerism associated with the Yuletide: Ten thousand militant nuns marched to Buckingham Palace with placards, spray paint and bandannas 93 were shot dead; Four hundred members of a local youth group sacked Inverness town hall last Christmas eve, infuriated that Santa's iron grip over Christmas proceedings left Jesus irrelevant; and seven thousand incandescent Cornish Clergyman walked naked from Bodmin to John O'Groats because fairies were put on the county's Christmas trees instead of angels. This recent act of civil agitation, nay religiously motivated festivicide, is probably justifiable, but what of Easter?
What of Easter? Is it merely an okay holiday, a good time to eat lamb, a confusingly changing date, a lovely bunny, a million spots caused from gargantuan chocolateering? Easter is something but not much, an ant on the year's calendar compared to the all-consuming cultural eruption of Christmas. Easter cards, well, who sends Easter Cards anymore? Who really holds out for Easter TV? Who's ever heard of Easter stockings? Easter is a mediocre affair and nobody protests. Where are the outraged religious sorts? Where are the armed nuns or the militant monks?
Whilst they have been off fighting Christmas, Easter's been left to lope into obscurity. Christians are outraged at the inconsistent noise of Christmas but silent at the absence of Easter. Is it just not important enough? Is the death and resurrection of Jesus really just an average affair?
BY NO MEANS! Easter is simply the greatest festival those sleeping silent Christians have. It is the greatest wonder, the greatest reason to celebrate, the greatest excuse to let loose a loud whoop, to dance silly-senseless, to feast, drink wine, send a card, buy a tree, give a present, and the only true source of love and hope: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead, conquering decay, disconnection, our heartaches and our body-pains. He is risen indeed. Easter is not abstract; we know it now even during this current cold climate. There is, in this world, uncountable grief and unanswerable suffering but we know Easter in it, right now through the meek fragility of faith. Yes, Easter makes it possible to have spring in our glasshouses.
On the very first Easter, after Jesus had been crucified, his friends got up while it was still dark to mourn at His graveside. A woman was there called Mary who stared perplexed through tears of disillusionment at an empty tomb. Having seen their saviour die, it seemed now his body had been stolen. But through her blurry eyes, while the world was still sleeping, Mary recognised the voice of her teacher, her Lord, as he called her by name. He was not among the dead but the living; right in the middle of her pain Jesus came. The strength of God comes at moments of great weakness for those who are prepared to get up early and go to the graveside with all their fears and feelings.
This Easter God is defined not by absence, irrelevance or obscurity but by presence because at Easter we stop and see God with a face, clothed in humanity, stretching out his arms of love and dying for us on an execution tree. Embracing our weakness, he overcame it through the divine sacrifice of Calvary: true love demonstrated. Because of this it is the case that now in our own mortal bodies we carry this all-surpassing hope: right now, our very weakness becomes the greatest strength. And all of this is because of Easter.
Winter cannot last longer than the sun allows it. As the earth orbits the sun, the ice melts and seeds grow into glorious plants.
There comes a time when you don't really want to go in the glasshouse anymore. You enter the botanical gardens; your face feeling the deep warmth as spring has become summer. You walk, maybe bare-footed, enjoying the grass and soft earth. It is as though the glass house has grown beyond its limits. What was only inside in winter has now exploded outwards and consumed everything.
Easter is a seed, not the end of the story but the beginning, the putting to right of all things, the fulfillment of Eden, the reunion of man and maker. It is a seed that will grow until the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as water covers the sea. This will happen one day. But now, like on the very first Easter, we who have seen in faith and believed that Jesus rose from the dead are those who have woken up early, full of hope, to feast at the dawn.
It is time for this Easter to be brought out of exile and given a spring clean. We rebel against its fading significance and terrorise the chocolate bunnies that hide it. We simply announce that Easter is utterly relevant. And with unrelenting optimism celebrate that right in our midst Jesus is Lord!