At the Foot of the Cross

Holy Week! Every year at this time, I’m struck by the otherness of “church.” Lent and Easter are ours alone, marking us as strange from that first smudge of ash on Ash Wednesday.

This week, we are immersed in the rich worship of Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion and then the liturgies of the Great Three Days. But outside our doors, Easter barely registers. There’s a trace in some packages of Easter dye next to the cartons of eggs in the grocery store, and a small “seasonal display” of jelly beans, marshmallow chickens, and chocolate bunnies. Maybe the meat section offers a special on hams. But people who aren’t usually in church can easily miss the day altogether. Every year, someone asks me, “So when is Easter?”

Of course Easter moves around the calendar, and that partly accounts for the confusion…the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, got it? But I think it’s more than that. Our story is strange, even scandalous. We worship a God born in a feeding trough, a God who befriended outcasts, told stories, healed the sick, and raised the dead—but who then died a disgraceful death himself. We gather around the cross, an instrument of torture that we revere as the source of salvation; a defeat that we call triumph; a death that we proclaim has defeated death. There’s just no obvious way to turn this into a story that will sell iPhones or SUVs or soft drinks.

And so we are a counter-cultural community. We gather around a story that resists the distraction and false promises around us; a story that proclaims that love is stronger than death. And thanks be to God, we have something amazing to share—the hope we have in Christ for a world that stands in desperate need of wholeness and healing.

Peace,

Pastor Barbara