What Difference Does Easter Make?
So what if the Easter Bunny wins the hearts of children everywhere?
So why not strike "Easter Vacation" from the vocabulary of our schools and substitute "Spring Break"? What difference does Easter make anyway?
It makes a lot of difference to those who are in touch enough with reality to take life and death seriously. It made a lot of difference to a very real woman named Mary. Let me tell you her story.
Mary had the heart wrenching honor of washing the dried blood from Jesus' lifeless body as two other followers prepared the tomb, cut into Jerusalem's cold limestone. Mary wept as she washed, wept and remembered...
She had been born to luxury, heiress to a textile fortune, a native of Magdala, ....a town along the coast of Galilee. "Little good it did me," she mused. Money had brought her the opposite of happiness. She looked back at her teen years as a blur of painful, compulsive acting out. Her parents had thrown up their hands in despair, she recalled. She remembered the gnawing fear, the self-loathing the ate at her very core. She could remember the caring boldness in Jesus' penetrating eyes as he had confronted the demons that tormented her, and commanded them to be gone forever. That had been the last of the frantic, distraught Mary. A gentle, peacefilled Mary had taken her place. Until today.
Today she had seen her Lord die an excruciating death, his weight suspended from a cross, like a common criminal. Her heart caught in her throat as she remembered, and washed away the caked blood with her tears. She wept, too, as she watched the men lift Jesus' corpse onto the tomb's carved ledge. Then a massive stone was rolled across the entrance. Was all her hope for nothing? What of the thousands of diseased bodies he had healed? The broken lives he had restored? The promise of the Kingdom of God?
But early Sunday morning she was back at the tomb to finish anointing his body. When she arrived, the tomb stood open. The stone was pushed to the side. The Roman guard's campfire was still smoldering. "How can they be so cruel?", she cried, as she ran to tell the diciples.
But it wasn't cruelty that had rolled away the stone that first Easter morning. It was the powerful hand of God! And Jesus stepped forth brimming with Life! Mary saw him, at first mistaking him for the gardener. But there was no mistaking his familiar voice...."Mary," She fell at his feet, tears of grief melting into tears of joy. "Rabboni", she said, as she looked into his face. "Teacher".
Yes, Easter bunnies still capture the hearts of children, and schools talk about Spring Break, but you and I know what really happened on Easter...in a instant history changed forever, because where once the human mortality rate had held steady at 100%, now it skipped a beat, as Jesus, Saviour of all mankind, stepped out of the dead statistic into life. Death is not the last word for Jesus' followers, Life is.
"Believe in Bhudda", some insist, "Confucius", say the Chinese. "Mohammed," cry the Muslims. And on it goes. "Jesus", says Mary, "He changed my life". And millions around the globe would echo, "Mine too!" For while religious leaders have come and gone, the fact remains: Only One stepped forth from the tomb. Only One has risen from the dead. Only one offers the promise of eternal life to all who will follow Him. "I am the resurrection and the life," Jesus said, "He who belives in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die."
So why do Jesus' followers gather in churches on Easter morning? To show off their Easter finery? God forbid. Rather, to celebrate the victory of life over death; to help their children and grandchildren share their faith that Jesus is alive, and to declare that Jesus is Lord indeed!
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