Why Eastertide Matters for God’s Mission

Welcome to Eastertide!

We now enter the season of Eastertide—not just one day, but a season of 50 days that leads us through the Ascension of Jesus all the way to Pentecost and the formation of the church.

This is so much more than a quaint springtime story, but rather a fierce, revolutionary story that shapes our identity as Christians and shapes our participation in God’s mission in the world.

Easter is better than egg hunts, ham dinners, candy baskets, and pastel family portraits.

I have this running catalog of images from pop culture that fuel my imagination for what God is doing in Easter.

There’s Gandalf on the Bridge of Khazad-dum shouting at the Balrog of shadow and flame, “You shall not pass!”

There’s Eleven, calm and cool, as she says, “No more!” and then faces down the Demogorgon.

There’s Kendrick defiantly smirking at the camera in the final shot of the video for “Alright.”

There’s Alexandar Hamilton’s revolutionaries victoriously singing “The world’s turned upside down! We won! We won!”

You see, Easter is the greatest story twist ever invented.

Dead people do not come back to life. And the implications of this particular dead person coming back to life could not be bigger.

Easter means that God has decisively done something about everything that’s wrong with the world. Good triumphs over evil.

There’s the great Tolkien line, in the mouth of Samwise Gamgee, “Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” It’s such an appropriate line to utter with awe first thing Easter morning.

This is what we celebrate in the season of Eastertide. This makes us Easter people. How we frame and internalize the Easter story determines how we walk out the Christian life. The way we talk about Easter should have some defiant, resistant bite to it.

Easter is about more than forgiveness

My culture is white American Evangelicalism. To hear the story, as it’s often told, the problem in the narrative to be overcome is my individual guilt and shame. Easter then becomes the means by which I experience forgiveness for my sins and alleviate my own feelings of guilt and shame.

The problem with this is that it’s not the way the writers of the New Testament or the early church writers talk about Easter.

I had a pastor-mentor who would constantly repeat, “If all you get from Jesus is forgiveness of sins, you don’t want it.” He spent a lot of time with people battling addictions, watching them make exciting decisions to follow Jesus and the turn around the next day falling right back into their old mess again.

You don’t want a change in behavior. Dallas Willard calls this “the gospel of sin management.” You want a change of heart.

I attended a presentation at our local neighborhood association addressing the high speeds on the residential streets. The comment was made, “If we need signs to tell people to slow down, we don’t have a driver problem. We have a street-design problem.”

If I continually need to come back to the altar for forgiveness, it’s not because of a flaw in my willpower. There’s a flaw in my design as a human being.

The good news of Easter means that both my sins are forgiven and my design as a human being has been transformed. My personal salvation is part of the story, but the bigger story is God reconciling all of creation back together again.

Easter is about more than going to heaven

Two years ago my mother-in-law died. A half a dozen of us family stood around her hospital bed as the breathing machine was turned off. We cried. We sang. We knew she was entering God’s presence, but we grieved.

Yesterday I attempted explaining Easter and all this to my 4-year-old. Ambitious, I know. To which he shot up from the couch and ran through the house, “Mommy! Mimi’s coming back next Easter!”

I can tell this will be an ongoing conversation. But then again, there may be something he’s seeing that I’m not yet. Maybe he’s on to something—that it’s not about us going there, but about there coming here.

Easter means this world can be different. Let’s resist separating the world into physical and spiritual realms. There is God’s world that God made and God loves. Easter means that God’s creation work is happening all over again. Let’s read Genesis 1 as an opening manifesto about God and not only what God has done, but also what God is currently doing. Life after the resurrection of Jesus is Creation 2.0.

Because of what God has done in Jesus at Easter, we talk about death differently. We talk about heaven and earth differently.

There’s work for us to do here and now. We don’t sit and wait to go to heaven when we die. We work making all the sad things come untrue in this world. Now. On this earth.

Easter shows us what to do with monsters

“There’s no point in triumphing over evil if the evil isn’t scary,” writes sci-fi and fantasy author Neil Gaiman.

I need a faith that acknowledges the monsters, that takes the monsters seriously. I need a faith that acknowledges that monsters are indeed scary. But I also need a faith that triumphs over the monsters. I need a faith that exposes the monsters as toothless, impotent, and incompetent.

In Lent, we take seriously all the monsters in the world—violence, poverty, cancer, abuse, racism, fear, depression, alienation, chemical addictions, mental illness, death, every Evil that mars and scars God’s Image-Bearers.

In Easter, we call all of those monsters frauds. We look them dead in the eye and we talk trash. Because of what God has done in Jesus, they are all put in their place.

Here’s how St. Athanasius puts it,

“Death has become like a tyrant who has been completely conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot as he now is, the passers-by jeer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage, because of the king who has conquered him. So has death been conquered and branded for what it is by the Savior on the cross. It is bound hand and foot, all who are in Christ trample it as they pass and as witnesses to Him deride it, scoffing saying, ‘O Death, where is thy victory? O Grave, where is thy sting?'”

The world is not right. God’s work at Easter puts the world right.

The world needs Easter people. The world is dying. The world yearns for resurrection. My neighborhood yearns for resurrection.

It’s far better for me to invite my neighbor to my dinner table, to make space for them in my life, than it is for me to invite them to a church service. I’m someone’s neighbor, and I know I’m much more responsive to someone who genuinely shows interest in me as a person rather than a commodity to acquire.

It’s dinner tables that capture the imagination of the Biblical writers. Long before John describes the end of everything as a wedding banquet in Revelation, long before Jesus tells parables about the end as a feast, the prophet Isaiah evokes the image:

“In Jerusalem, Yahweh of Heaven’s Armies
     will spread a wonderful feast
     for all the people of the world.
It will be a delicious banquet
     with clear, well-aged wine and choice meat.
There he will remove the cloud of gloom,
     the shadow of death that hangs over the earth.
He will swallow up death forever!
     Sovereign Yahweh will wipe away all tears.
He will remove forever all insults and mockery
     against his land and people.
     Yahweh has spoken!” (Isaiah 25:6–8).

Easter defines for us the gospel. Death is beaten. Dead things come back to life. Reconciliation is not only possible but inevitable. The whole trajectory and momentum of human history has changed.

Easter defines for us God’s mission. Everything dead will be made alive again.

God in Jesus is making all things new.

If you want to go deeper, then you want to check out Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright and The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited by Scot McKnight. And don’t forget John Chrysostom’s Easter sermon.