Easter and Alleluia’s go together like peanut butter and jam - - -or do they?
We have been pondering throughout Holy Week and Easter Sunday the problem of Easter. Perhaps one challenge is that we expect Easter to provide an uncomplicated joy that comes with very little cost to ourselves. Then we are puzzled when it does not.
Perhaps because many of us are protected from death-dealing experiences such as hunger, war, drought: we cannot quite believe that new life will come from despair. We are much more at home with a giant Easter bunny, handing out chocolate eggs!
I take courage from the mood of the gospel resurrection narratives, which surprisingly have more to say about shock, fear and a bemused lack of recognition, than of immediate delight. It is clear, for all their good intentions, that the first disciples, found it hard to even see, let alone understand, the earth-shaking change that this “good news” implies.
Unlike myself, I have met people in Central America, who have faced death. People who have endured the cost of Holy Week and are ready to hear the message of resurrection and claim it as their truth. When we speak of new life through death, we are often speaking metaphorically. Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit priest from El Salvador, when reflecting on the assassination of his entire community household, he startlingly calls it “good news”. He says this because in this instance the church was actually sharing in the dangers and suffering of the poor. So when the church in Central America speak of “the blood of our martyrs”, they mean real blood, spilt in our modern time; not a scene depicted on a stain-glass window.
There are so many people around the world that are right now confronting the power of oppression, particularly in the middle East. We see it in our city of Toronto this week, through the upcoming court case of Jaggi Singh, a G20 protester, charged with civil disobedience.
Julia Esquivel. a poet from Guatemala, says that it is only when we confront the powers of evil and move beyond the fear of death, that we “come to a place of inexplicable freedom and life”.
Resurrection is not something that happened to someone else, an event to be viewed from the safety of 2011. If it is to make any sense we have to live “new life” in whatever way brings freedom for ourselves and for others.
Blessings for the journey, Karen
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