Pastor Matt Fitzgerald once
wrote about the year his daughter was in kindergarten. She and all her
classmates in Sunday School, were given plastic Easter eggs. Inside each egg the teacher had placed a
little slip of paper with the basic Easter message.
At the time Fitzgerald's daughter was
just learning to read--and so she struggled a bit with the sentence on the
paper. "He," she paused. "He is . . ." But then she got stuck. She tried to figure it out. Finally she proudly announced "He is raisins!"
Fitzgerald writes: "'He is raisins' is illogical. 'He is risen!' is merely incomprehensible." Some things make no sense--they are
illogical. Others we just can't
understand--they are incomprehensible.
As Fitzgerald writes, "[O]n Easter God has done the
incomprehensible." ("Thunderous
Yes", The Christian Century, 4-2-14, 10)
For many of us, that is extremely
frustrating. We want to make sense out
of everything--especially something as important as life after death! We want the columns to add up. We want to be able to explain it all in words
and numbers that we can understand. We want
to be able to poke it and probe it and discover what makes it work.
Don't get me wrong. Exploring the hows and wherefores of eternal
life, examining the inner workings of resurrection is a perfectly acceptable
activity. I mean, I've taught courses
that do just that. But ultimately the
resurrection of Jesus, the central event of Easter and of my faith, is
incomprehensible--especially when examined with the tools of reason. And in the end, the story pushes me to
belief. Not belief in the sense of intellectual
assent. But rather belief in the sense
of trust. The Easter story invites me
and others to trust that God does love us.
The resurrection of Jesus invites me and other Christians to trust that
God will take care of all people not only in the here and now, but in the great
beyond as well. Whatever that
means--whatever it looks like!
Have a blessed Holy Week and a joyous Easter!
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