Finding Our Way to Easter Faith

Perhaps the most truthful claim any of us can ever make, especially on Easter morning, is “I believe; help my unbelief.”

I wonder if Easter morning isn’t harder for people who are questioning their faith than Christmas Eve? Everybody knows about birth. Even if you aren’t sure who Jesus’ daddy is, you can still sing those carols in December and celebrate silent and holy nights and that beautiful child. I’m not saying that is all that Christmas means; just that there is an access point.

But Easter remains a great mystery: what does it really mean to say that someone died and was raised again? What does it mean to say that this man’s living and dying frees us to be alive to God? I think that Easter faith begins not by offering easy answers to such questions but to love the questions enough to allow them to lead us to a deeper truth. Perhaps the best place to begin is by being honest that there is not a cookie-cutter path offered in the Bible to Easter faith; no single formula for embracing the Paschal mystery. For me it is helpful to notice that the gospels give us a variety of narratives and not one simple formula. In fact, John’s Gospel gives us no less than five different Easter encounters, the first two at the empty tomb itself.

(1) The story of the Beloved Disciple running into the empty tomb: the narrator tells us that “when he went in, he saw, and believed.”

(2) The story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with a man she believes at first to be the gardener, until he speaks her name and she knows it is him.

On the heels of these two stories, we’ll hear next weekend about good old “doubting” Thomas, whom I’d rather call “seeing-is-believing” Thomas or “me-too” Thomas. He just wants the same chance to see and touch and experience the risen Christ first- hand that the others got. Then there will be the disciples back on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, who experience Christ by a charcoal fire at breakfast. And of course Peter, who later that same morning is asked three times: “Peter, do you love me?” Three times because...well that part is pretty obvious. John’s Gospel ends by saying something along these lines:

There are so many other stories I could tell you, the world itself could not contain all the books that would be written if I did: but hopefully these are enough so that you might find and be found by God.

Beyond John, there are additional stories in the synoptic gospels. My personal favorite is found in the Gospel of Luke, on the road to Emmaus. The disciples experience Christ “in the breaking of the bread”—which suggests to me that they must have been Episcopalians.

My point is simply that each of the disciples had to discover the meaning of Easter in their own time, and the gospels seem to be making the point that there is not one right way to Easter faith. The two vignettes that we get today may or may not speak to us where we are; but since Easter takes fifty days to unpack and not just one, stay tuned! There is lots more to come as the journey toward Pentecost continues. It takes time to find our way to Easter faith, and even longer to become an Easter people.