I’m not sure how to celebrate Easter Sunday on social media. ‘Happy Easter’ combined with bunny rabbits and Easter eggs doesn’t quite cut it, but neither does the stock Christian meme of a blonde bearded Jesus emerging from a cave dressed in a white nightie with the kind of graphics that wouldn’t disgrace the bargain bin at Clinton’s Cards: see above, for example.
There’s also the kind of post that is geared at your fellow Christian, replete with words and phrases that only they can understand, but by posting it you’ve done your bit.
Sometimes some of the messages seem a mite passive aggressive: ‘I don’t know what to say, so I’m going to say it loudly and I feel a bit uncomfortable witnessing to this, but don’t worry: I’ll post cat memes later’.
I confess that I’ve fallen into all three traps and it is now, when most of the people I associate with have no identification with Christian faith that I realise that what I thought of as ‘witnessing’ was often only signalling my virtue to other Christians. For those reasons I struggle as well: it’s easier to say nothing and plus, like any mention of politics, justice, posts about faith get fewer likes than the aforementioned cat memes – besides, I want to be liked.
I’m leading an Easter Sunday service today: I rarely do this now- often I’m drained at the end of a day’s work and the sheer existential energy involved in preparation, facing doubts, and giving real and not pretend witness to Light and Hope is sometimes too hard. It’s relatively easy to stand up and spout about anything for 10-15 minutes: so much harder to preach for the same amount of time and be honest.
Today’s reading is Mark 16:1-8- if you’ve never read it, Google it. It’s taken me around 2 months of looking at it when I’ve had space. I’ve had to ‘live’ with it to get to a point where I’m confident to say something that isn’t cliched: it may in fact end up cliched- preachers generally aren’t good at self knowledge.
The passage is strange though: Jesus doesn’t appear, there is shock and the passage ends up in people running away in terror and what they’ll do about it is not certain. The uneasiness and the unsettling nature of the passage has got to me &and I’ve regretted the times over the years I’ve taken something profound and difficult and smoothed it down to make it ‘nice’.
The thing that’s grabbed me this year is that the people in the passage are told to go and look and find out: they won’t be presented with a simple appearance. I’ve used a line from the Spanish poet Antonio Machedo. Translations vary, but this is the one I’m intent on:-
‘There is no road. The road is made by walking’
I think that’s the way I’d want to celebrate Easter Sunday and beyond: not with a certainty that can sometimes verge on the aggressive, but with humility, buoyed up by often fragile Hope, even as I say ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen!’
It’s a Hope, if done well, is found when we (actually, I...) leave a place of security to find Resurrection and a wild and unpredictable God in unlikely places. I think I’ll be the main audience when I’m saying that: I like my security, certainty and sticking to what I know.
Maybe the white Jesus meme is more succinct though….
Happy Easter!
Wearily Hopeful 