Easter Joy

Easter is a season of joy. It dawns with brightness – with spring sunshine, laughter, lilies blooming furiously, hymns of celebration. Children in bright clothing stick their heads in bushes and tumble over each other on the hunt for Easter eggs. All of this. All this delight, joy, and downright fun. 

But as we continue into Eastertide, we realize the joy we are called to practice is an odd one. For the resurrected body of Christ still bears his wounds. In John 20:24-26, St. Thomas tells the disciples he will not believe in the risen Christ, “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side.” Jesus – beautifully, tenderly, patiently – appears eight days later, revealing the wounds he still bears and inviting St. Thomas to do just that: “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.”

Just as we must walk through Lent and Good Friday if we will reach Easter, so we cannot forget Lent or Good Friday as we practice our Easter celebration. Christ’s resurrection – his decisive, eternal victory over death – cannot be remembered without his choice to die. The wounds that remain on his body necessitate this: we cannot know the resurrected Christ without knowing and receiving the body he has chosen to inhabit, eternally, on our behalf.

I am reminded of Isaiah 49, when God tells a desolate Israel he cannot possibly forget her. “Yet I will not forget you,” he says. “See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.” In Easter we celebrate the fact that we are not and cannot ever be forgotten by the God that loves us, for he has quite literally written that love into the flesh of his hands.

In Joy, Christian Wiman writes that “joy can . . . compromise, even obliterate, happiness.” He continues:

“It can reveal a happiness to be so hopelessly tenuous and shallow that, on the other side of the rupture, you can find yourself with no tenable – or at least no honorable – way back. Or it can disclose a spiritual existence the full realization of which will require some sacrifice – of a very real happiness, say.”

As children of Easter, we are a people who have had joy like this – joy that has the capacity to obliterate happiness, because it is so much more – given to us. As it is given to us, we are called to receive and practice it.

This joy is startling, ravishing. It sees and celebrates the radical expanse of Christ’s love in its furthest reaches (willing death, and triumphant resurrection). Our practice of this joy brings us to the edges of ourselves, though in a manner altogether sweeter than the rigors of our Lenten fast.

As we gaze on the wounds that mark the resurrected body of Christ – wounds he stretches out his hands to present to us, as he did for St. Thomas, as evidence of his love – we realize this is where our celebration belongs. It is a celebration that holds space for the wound of grief and our longing for our own resurrection. It is a celebration that takes seriously the fact that, though we have yet to inhabit our own resurrected bodies, we have truly been given new life, and we inhabit it now. It is a celebration marked by gratitude, hope, and the wild depths of God-given joy more than it will ever make us “happy.”

It is Easter, friends. 

Let us celebrate our Lord.