The Horror of Easter

Twilight, HBO’s True Blood, Anne Rice’s Lestat character; we are obsessed with vampires and those who come back from the dead.  Although seldom mentioned, we Christians have the best “vampire” story of all, except in our tale, in a typical Jesus plot twist, the guy does not come back from the dead to drink our blood.  Instead, we drink his. Easter is scary, although I did not always realize it.

When I was growing up, Easter was my favorite religious holiday. For me, Easter was the only Sunday on which I heard a remotely cheerful hymn, Christ the Lord is Risen Today.  It was a day of sunshine, rabbits, white suits and fresh air.  I loved when it came late in the year.  In particular I remember Easter 1976, not so much for the zany days of Gerald Ford, my 45 of Bohemian Rhapsody or a can of Pepsi Lite, but for a week in April when temperatures in New Jersey climbed to an unseasonable ninety degrees.  It was a brief preview of my favorite summer of all time.  For me, it cemented the image of Easter as a happy and upbeat day on the church calendar.

That was also the year I was at the height of my born-againess.  Although only an eighth grader, I had figured out everything about Christianity a couple of summers before at an altar call. I had finished reading the entire Bible in a year.  I kept lists of friends and family members that needed saving. It was all so simple, straightforward and sunny like Easter.

Little did I know I was just a few weeks away from meeting a cool kid from LA on the Asbury Park boardwalk, my first beer, an obsession with Corvettes, and a fascination with newly top-heavy girls with Farrah Fawcett-like hair flips.  The list of friends to save would have to wait.

Within a couple of years, Easter fell in early March on a cold and rainy Sunday.   My friends and I spent the afternoon standing in a driveway, kicking pebbles.  The sunny-ness of Easter was gone.  Perhaps that too was a preview.

Lately, I have been thinking, Easter is not sunny and happy.  Easter is a little creepy and frankly, weird.  It is a day when we celebrate a body coming out of a grave. I saw Poltergeist. I don’t want any dead person bursting through my kitchen floor, not even Jesus. Coming back from the grave is generally not a good thing.  Yet we Christians claim that it is.

I am not a big fan of death.  I know, who is?  Some people look to death with a sort of metaphysical sadness. What if our lives end in meaninglessness and nothingness?  The idea of death being nothingness is not frightening at all to me. Not existing anymore, I am OK with.  Frankly, I could use the rest. Instead, it is the physicality of death that scares me.  I worry about being mistakenly buried alive or feeling the flames of my cremation. When I think of people I love who have died or will die someday, I certainly mourn their loss.  However, the thought of their burial and subsequent bodily decay is the ultimate horror for me.

My fears are not that unusual. Everyone from psychologists to film theorists say this primal fear is the reason for our obsession with horror stories.  By facing the horrific in fiction, we are able to deal with it in reality.  I suppose I could dismiss the Resurrection Narratives as merely one more example of this principle. Yet I cannot.

We rarely deal with Jesus’ death.  We say we do, but we really do not.  When we speak of Jesus’ death, we are usually referring to him just before death, his arrest, trial and crucifixion.   Although we refer to this Nightmare on Via Dolorosa as his death, it is really part of his life.  Jesus’ death does not even begin at “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”  His death begins after.  It extends from then, through the hastily told stories of his burial, and through a Saturday for which we have no stories at all.  That is Jesus’ death.  A real death with rigor mortis, foul odors and all the biological decay processes described by Greta Van Susteren’s coroner guests.

It is this death that is the very thing that you and I fear.  From this rotting death springs all our horror movie imagery.  Yet it is from this death, we say Jesus arose, although we sanitize it in the formaldehyde of Easter pleasantries.  Each year, like many preachers, I struggle to come up with a new twist on resurrection, only in the end to suspect that all my twists are merely spin.  A New Day.  New Beginnings.  He is Risen Indeed.  Lilies, spring, and butterflies.  It’s all good.  It’s all beautiful.   There’s no real death in sight.

The physicality of death scares me but so too does the physicality of the Resurrection. I am familiar with all the contradictions and symbolism within the Easter narratives.  I know they mean to describe more than just a resuscitated corpse. Even so, I am still haunted by that body.  As if to keep me from making the Resurrection too beautiful, the Gospel writers and creed formulators insist on a resurrection of the body.  Like Stephen King, they tap into my deepest fears.

Easter is scary. For some people, despite all their bible thumping, and all their flamboyant certainty, deep down they are afraid it isn’t true.  For others, like me, despite all my doubts, I am afraid that it is.  I am afraid this seemingly other-worldly tale changes everything in my real word.  If the Resurrection is true then the poor really are blessed. If the Resurrection is true the last will be first and the first will be last. If the Resurrection is true then you cannot serve both God and money. If the Resurrection is true then only those without sin can cast the first stone. If the Resurrection is true then we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. If the Resurrection is true we are to welcome the outsider. If the Resurrection is true we are to cross the road to love our enemies. If the Resurrection is true, then God has reconciled us and all of Creation back to God’s self. 

In other words, if the Resurrection is true then everything we know and have been told by our culture for our whole lives is wrong.  Nothing is scarier than that.  Worst of all, I am afraid that my deepest fear may just be the path to a more complex version of the joy of my favorite spring.  I had to spend a wintry Easter kicking stones in the driveway to fully appreciate a summery one.  The joy of Easter resides not only in its own springtime optimism, but in the horror it continually overcomes.

Don Heatley is a video producer and pastor of Vision Community Church in Warwick, NY.  

Comments

[Paul VanderKlay]

Nice post Don. pvk

[Don Heatley]

Thanks Paul. If a CRC guy likes it, I know it can't be too out there :-)

[Lisa Schoelles]

Don, another winning blog post. I too remember that 1976 Easter - though I was a junior in HS then. And, I totally agree with the fears, especially in the last two paragraphs. A struggle indeed.

[Don Heatley]

Thanks Lisa.