This Sacred Easter

(I wrote this 9 years ago on the first Easter after our son Asa died. As we anticipate Easter this Sunday, I am reminded how Easter takes on fuller and truer meaning in the shadow of sorrow. Living through the death of my own son introduced me anew to the death of God’s son. It was a moment of conversion for me. It showed me that the ‘good news’ of Easter is fuller and more expansive than I could have imagined; it showed me that, in the words of Nicholas Wolterstorff, “God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers.”)

It was Easter morning.  Darkness engulfed the landscape as we approached the early morning church service.  We gathered to celebrate by standing before a color enriching sky.  Soon the light of the sun sent beams over the lake and farmland.  It pierced the early mist and brightened our faces.  It rose above the horizon, blood red.  

The red-streaked sky reminded us that the Son also rose His Easter morning, removing His shroud, blood red.  The body of Jesus is a body of pain and brokenness and His brokenness is, to us, hope.  When He removed the wrappings of death and walked away from the stone, He made it worth it to be broken.  

It was Easter afternoon when we visited Asa’s stone.  There were a couple more fresh graves around.  Each were just children.  Easter is the day of life and all we could see was stone after stone.  But we remembered Jesus’ stone.  We have hope that Asa is not at the grave we visited.  We know that he is not there.  That dirt still fresh from being piled high, still distinguished from the grass around it, is not his final resting place.  He is not there though the marker reads, “Asa Timothy Hanlon.”  

And yet he’s not in his car seat either… or in his cradle.  He’s not here in our arms.  His touch is far from us.  His hands reach where we cannot coddle.   His infant speech does not fill the hallways.  His crying does not wake us at night.  He’s not coming with us for he has arrived.  His first steps were taken, walking away from his stone, without us.  And so we weep brokenly with hope.

After visiting Asa’s grave, we ate a special lunch.  The meal was memorable, elegant and the service was overwhelming.  I ate fish, rich and flavorful.  And we ate bread and drank wine.  And I remembered that Jesus too took bread and wine and used them to show His body, so broken and his blood, poured out.  I ate the bread, ingesting His brokenness; it has become a part of me.  I drank the wine, tasting the sharpness of his suffering, and sweetly it filled my mouth.  And I ate fish… yes, fish!  Jesus too took the fish and fed his friends a meal.  It was a meal confirming His life and the hope of His friends.  And so I ate this meal and remembered that there is hope in Easter.

On Easter evening we arrived home and went to the backyard.  We dug a hole in the ground… It’s easy to forget the ground.  Even farmers have forgotten the ground.  From the ground life springs and the dead are laid to rest.  We ourselves were born from the ground and live as a vapor quickly returning to meet it again.  Yet we live with hope of higher things and deeper things.  So we dug a hole in that ground and put a small evergreen tree inside:  Asa’s tree, a tree of healing and hope.  Might its evergreen brush remind us that though dear friends and family members and sons may die, life will never pass away.  As its roots push deeper might we remember that God uses pain to deepen us, creating spaces that only He can know.  And as it grows higher, let us recall that Jesus also ascended and He awaits us with Asa to heal our brokenness.

This Easter was sacred.  It was real.  It was deep, enriching, and meaningful… and meaningful doesn’t mean easy.  There is hope in Jesus’ body because He was really broken and also really remade.  He became everything because He gave up everything.  And this is the God-Man we will trust as He leads us, one step at a time, to release the things we have held dear.    

We Thank You, oh God of Suffering, for being broken.  Thank You for having scars on Your wrists.  For they remind us that You understand.  Teach us to reveal our scars and tell their stories.  Teach us to be comfort as You comfort us.  Make us real and new.  Help us to release what we hold dear and allow You to be our everything.  For whom have we in heaven but You; what else is there to desire on Earth?  Might Easter’s life enliven us.  In the name of the risen Jesus, amen.