Easter Gets Personal
Easter is a big day. Full of color, great music, and celebration. It’s legitimately the highlight of the year for me just as Jesus’ resurrection is the highlight of our faith. But as amazing as Easter Sunday can be, the Monday after Easter always feels strange and awkward. Unlike Christmas, where most of the population has time to linger and lean into an extended holiday period, the days after Easter force us back into business as usual.
On one level this bothers me: shouldn’t Easter change everything?! On the other hand: the real power of Easter lies NOT in spectacular short-term changes, but in the transformation of the ordinary in human life.
It dawned on me some years ago that Jesus’s public ministry ended on the cross. While Jesus had been cheered by crowds on Palm Sunday, jeered by a mob at his trial, and though he had taught huge throngs of people during Passover week in Jerusalem, there were no more large gatherings on the other side of the empty grave. There was no post-resurrection victory tour. No spectacular public speeches or high-profile sermons from the mouth of the Risen One. Jesus’s public ministry concluded with his final breath, “It is finished.”
But in a new Easter season where the public facing ministry ceased, Jesus’s private ministry—tailored to individuals in personal and tender ways—picked up! It all started with Mary Magdalene who was lost in her tears and grief on that first Easter morning. Jesus spoke her name and gave her the massively significant job of being the first message bearer of the Good News of the resurrection. Jesus met her in just the way she needed.
Similarly, Jesus met a man named Saul while he travelled down an ancient highway. Saul hated Jesus, his church, and was on a trip with orders to put some of the first Christians in prison. What could soften the heart of a guy like that?! Jesus knew, and provided that strong-minded, strong-willed man of conviction with just what he needed: a blinding vision, a thunderous voice from heaven, and a case of temporary blindness. Jesus knew he wanted Saul on his Gospel team and gave him the original “Damascus Road” experience!
The same principle applies today. Real Easter living is more likely to appear in divinely customized, personal, even tenderly intimate settings rather than in grand, spectacular, public ones. For mysterious reasons that I cannot explain, this pattern seems to please God and bring him greater glory.
It was so fitting that our church had the opportunity to lean into this Easter reality last week by exercising our muscles during Serve Weekend. Here’s the real secret to Serve Weekend in my opinion: there is spiritual, resurrection power in serving others personally – AND – there is spiritual, resurrection power in serving alongside Christian friends, shoulder-to-shoulder. A few hours of working alongside somebody in Jesus’s name can accomplish more relational connection than a year’s worth of casual, post-church coffee conversations!
The resurrected Jesus meets us personally. It’s amazing when we share that pattern with a sad and lonely world.
– Pastor Gregg