A BURST OF LIGHT IN THE DARK
Each year the earth turns, the seasons go around, bringing us back again after a long winter to the fresh reawakening of spring. Just a walk outside after being shut up inside a house for months on end can make one almost drunk with the heavy aroma of newly opened flower blossoms and the rich smell of soil finally thawing and warming in the bright sunshine. Growing up in the Deep South I found these spring sensations especially pronounced. My parent’s love for nature translated into a wide yard bordering a forest. Lush flowers and shrubs underneath soaring pine and oak trees invited scores of birds, squirrels and a fair number of crafty snakes looking for an easy meal. Though it wasn’t the Garden of Eden, it certainly awoke within my childlike innocence a sense of God. Somehow I knew he was there, overseeing the multitude of creatures growing and bustling in that place every spring.
Spring also brings memories of a different sort, memories that present a harsher and darker picture. This picture doesn’t easily draw a person into it. If anything, it makes us avert our gaze, because it isn’t a lovely picture with the joyful sights and sounds of strolling in a peaceful garden. This is the picture of suffering and death. It is the picture of a cold, unfeeling, systematic murder of a first century Jew by stretching out his arms and legs and nailing them onto a cross of wooden beams. This man is someone like someone we might know. He was an honest, working class man who had learned the carpentry trade from his father. His family had their share of “skeletons” in the closet, his mother having become pregnant with him before marriage, though no man ever claimed to be the father. He grew up in a modest town and hung around modest, ordinary sorts of friends. True, there were some things about him that would raise an eyebrow or two. In addition to becoming wildly popular because of his public speaking, which finally made the regional government and religious leaders feel unnerved, he reportedly did inexplicable things that still have folks either scratching their heads or bowing in reverence. A couple of guys claimed that after they were stone cold dead, he brought them back to life. Several others claimed he cured their blindness, some having not seen a thing since birth. Many witnesses claim they can corroborate these events.
Dark storm clouds gathered before long ending the good times. The imperial and religious rulers had seen and heard enough. They figured out they couldn’t buy off this guy, couldn’t manage him, couldn’t contain him, he was simply too popular, too persuasive, too…different. They only had one choice left, kill him. So that’s what they did. The Roman authorities had perfected legal murder in the form of crucifixion. Take a man, beat him senseless, nail him stretched out on a cross of wood, let him hang there naked in the hot sun, watch him eventually expire from blood loss and suffocation. Politically entrenched religious leaders lobbied the imperial government to crucify this troublemaker, this threat to everything they held dear.
The bleeding, bruised form of a man, hanging on a cross, surrounded by a hate-crazed mob is the grim picture we face during this season. No film or words can adequately express just how bad it really was, because it wasn’t an imaginary act, it was real, a heinous crime committed against a fellow human. It is hard to look at, so we avert our gaze. If the scene itself isn’t bad enough, the really, really hard part is when we realize that at one time or another, every single one of us might have stood in the mob and shouted with the rest, “Crucify Him!”
If we play back the picture of that man on the cross and pause the button right there, we will see things we don’t want to see, but the story doesn’t stop there. It must play forward because it DID play forward. Some friends took the body, put it in a tomb, and grieved, feeling hopeless and afraid that they were next. People back then really weren’t much different than folks today. When you bury someone, you try to wake up and move on without them, you try to face the reality of death, the ultimate end. So did they. So after three days had passed, and news got out that the tomb was empty, his friends thought it would be wonderful if he really wasn’t dead, but any sane person who saw his brutal death would know otherwise. They suppressed their hopes. Still, within hours more rumors started flying around. Then it happened.
Easter lilies are great aren’t they, bursting out in an explosion of white and yellow and green? Who has the patience to sit and watch the ground to see the very first tip of the lily emerge, pushing its way into the air and light? Once it breaks out, it gains momentum in the warm sunlight, growing up higher and higher, spreading out its white beauty. The lily is a little like the ugly duckling. It starts from a bulb that looks more like an onion than a flower, yet what a glorious thing it becomes in time. After an especially hard winter, the Easter lily brings even more joy with its beauty. That’s what the resurrection of Jesus Christ does for us. He takes us at our very worst and transforms us through his resurrection into something better than we could ever be without him. It is joy beyond words, full of awe and wonder.
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