My church’s Easter Sunday celebration included prayer for the hundreds of victims who died in the terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka just a few hours earlier.
Thinking about men, women and children blown to bits while sitting in an Easter service just as I did that moment was not how I expected Easter worship to begin. But I was glad it did.
As one who planned and led Easter worship for four decades, I know that “positive and uplifting” is always in tension with “authentic and real.” I felt the temptation to keep everyone’s mood upbeat, keep the hard questions in check and deliver what many had come for: a “nice experience,” especially the Christmas and Easter crowd.
Easter Sundays can hover in a serene spiritual cloud far removed from the gritty real world. Why let grim thoughts of terrorism and death dampen the mood?
And yet, it was the most honest of all ways to begin celebrating Jesus’ resurrection. Death is always a prelude to Easter. Jesus’ crucifixion on Good Friday means nothing without Jesus’ physical resurrection on Easter Sunday.
Just the day before Easter this year, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times offered another of his periodic Easter interviews of Christian leaders: this time Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, the flagship institution of liberal Protestantism.
In response to Jones’ discounting the importance of a physical resurrection, Kristof asks:
Kristof: But without a physical resurrection, isn’t there a risk that we are left with just the crucifixion?
Jones: Crucifixion is not something that God is orchestrating from upstairs. The pervasive idea of an abusive God-father who sends his own kid to the cross so God could forgive people is nuts. For me, the cross is an enactment of our human hatred. But what happens on Easter is the triumph of love in the midst of suffering.
At the cross Jones does not see a divine act of atonement and forgiveness for the sins of the world. Neither does she see the resurrection as a demonstration of God’s power confirming that the cross actually accomplished something; it is, rather, a triumph of love, whatever that means.
Here’s my point: the cross and resurrection as only symbols into which we can pour whatever we choose is not nearly enough.
Instead, we need a cross that plumbs the deepest human depravity imaginable and still offers forgiveness. We need a resurrection that offers hope for new life in the greatest possible reversal imaginable: real death to real life (as witnessed by gospel story reactions to the historical resurrected Jesus.)
Nothing clarifies this need for a deep cross and a glorious resurrection more than what happened early Easter morning in Sri Lanka—Christians facing persecution, even unto death.
Jesus said, “Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.” John 15:20
I have seen firsthand evidence of persecution and personally known Christians persecuted for their faith.
- When the California church I served established a sister-church relationship with an East German congregation only months after the Berlin Wall came down, over the next 20 years of partnership I heard many harrowing stories from my German brothers and sisters of how they suffered at the hands of a totalitarian state led the Stasi secret police.
- When I taught theology at the only Protestant graduate school in Ethiopia, my older students told stories of worshipping secretly in the woods and being imprisoned for their faith during the communist Dergue regime (1974-1991). Some offered to take off their shirts and show me the marks of torture still there decades later.
- In Cairo I visited ancient Coptic churches that were bombed on Christian holidays, sometimes with the damage still visible years later.
White Christians in America claiming (as some do) that they are now a “persecuted minority” must ring hollow for those still mourning and burying their loved ones in Sri Lanka.
Let no one trivialize the meaning of Christian persecution, as suffered by our brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka and many other parts of the world. We denigrate something precious when we permit white nationalists to co-opt Christian persecution into their grievance narratives.
Even worse, when we see persecution of Christians through the lens of “us versus them,” we discount the only hope available to those who are persecuted.
This hope is not politics. The notion that any human political party or movement might encompass all His teaching and stand as the “protector” of His Kingdom would have been anathema to Jesus!
No, the only hope for the persecuted is the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Even facing persecution in extremis, death itself, we can know Jesus has already won the battle with death for us. Even death cannot harm us.
The true response of Jesus’ followers to persecution is to do what he told us to do and did himself on the cross: love our enemies. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34
Politics does not empower us to love our enemies. In fact, politics today gains traction by encouraging us to identify more enemies we can hate.
Only God’s power can help us love those who persecute us. Only the resurrection offers the power of amazing grace.
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
Thought-provoking observations on the true meaning of our celebration of Easter. I was also struck by your acknowledging mixed feelings about keeping holiday celebrations upbeat while recognizing the impact of Christ’s sacrifice for us. I imagine this is a continual challenge for most pastors whose faith intersects with the need to maintain members and balance budgets. Thank you so much for sharing your faith and experiences Rich.