I wrote this article for our local newspapers, but I don’t think it’s going to be published until after Easter. So here it is - a web-preview for the internet-savvy:
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I helped put up two billboards out the front of our church last Friday. One has a picture of a chocolate egg, with the question over the top, “Is this what Easter is really all about?” They were trashed on Saturday night.
At first I rolled my eyes and thought that this was just some random hooliganism, but the vandals had methodically sheared off forty or fifty pop-rivets before they were finally able to bash the sheet metal off the frame of the sign. I hadn’t realised chocolate was so important to some people.
So on Sunday morning, as people arrived for worship, they were struck by the image of two broken billboards hanging from their frames by a few lonely rivets. Such violence done. Who would do such a thing to a simple message? Luckily, the vandals hadn’t finished what they started — perhaps they were interrupted. A couple of our fellas were able to take the signs down and be creative. A bit of panel-beating experience brought our signs back to order, if not perfection. They were raised again that afternoon.
Part of me had wanted to leave them as they’d been found — trashed and pitiful — and write a note of protest to accompany them. I wanted to make some sort of symbolic Easter connection between the destruction visited on these signs, and the destruction visited on Jesus — and many other prisoners of conscience down through the ages — by the powers of violence and domination.
But it would have been a hollow symbol. After all, metal can be repaired, paint can be touched up. It’s fully within human power to bring this message back ‘good as new’. But a living body? Flesh and bone and beating heart?
Perhaps a generation raised on video-games and action films can believe it’s easy to spring back to life after your enemy knocks you off. I’ve worked in cancer wards. There’s no getting around it — death is final.
No, if what the church has claimed down through the ages is true, Jesus didn’t just swoon, or pretend to die and get up again in order to be home for dinner. He was killed by an efficient political regime that knew how to make ‘examples’ of troublemakers.
Likewise, if what the church claims is true, through Jesus’ death God entered into the fullness of our human experience — mortality. Not only was God born among us, God died; something that gods just aren’t meant to do.
The Easter message of hope, if what the church continues to claim is true, is that death has been overcome. Somehow Jesus was raised by God to new life, not the same mortal life as before; a new eternal life. It’s almost too much to hope for — a troubling claim — particularly when it’s then extended to all of us. How can we accept this hope in the face of all the death in the world? Is it enough? Does it cover all the death we experience?
The easy church answer is yes, it does. Sometimes I wonder. In the world we live in, I desperately want to know that death has been overcome. That violence and domination are not the final answer. That they threw everything they had at Jesus, and in the end God brought life out of this death. That’s what I desperately hope for.
It’s a hope beyond reason in some ways. A trust in the quietly powerful goodness of God. A challenge to me each day to live with the expectation of seeing life emerge from death because that is God’s nature — life-bringing.
As Desmond Tutu once put it, “We give thanks to God that goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness and life is stronger than death — that victory is ours through Jesus Christ.”
A couple of bent metal signs will never properly symbolise that.
