If like me you’re feeling all-too-human, you’ll understand the inner wrestling between the broken and the divine, the lows and highs of Easter.
It’s Easter morning, and I slip into my chair, coffee in hand.
Competing with my desire to kneel in wonder this morning is that of calling out in need to my Savior who washes our sins away. I am in need of both—a good scrubbing (and the understanding and repentance and forgiveness that goes with it) and an awe-filled hallelujah.
My own brokenness: I can’t let it steal my Hallelujah this Easter Sunday.
Maybe your early morning was glorious, but if some of you had cross words getting your children dressed for church or are feeling lonely today or are bracing for Aunt Matilda’s too-strong perfume, if like me you’re feeling all-too-human, you’ll understand the inner wrestling between the broken and the divine, the lows and highs of Easter.
A hymn pops triumphantly into my head, and insists on being heard, treasured, and lived out, despite my inner crankiness. And suddenly I am maybe six years old, wearing my Sunday dress with the skirt gathered at the waist and my bobby socks and Sunday shoes. My sweater is buttoned beneath my ample chin.
The air, in my vague and rusty memory, was crisp and the sun gleaming as bright as it is on this Easter morning. How it always knows to push the clouds back on Easter, I don’t know, but it always seems to. The world is awake and full of hallelujahs. Like even the rocks might cry out.
My parents, in my dusty memory, are wearing their Sunday best, my Mom in her 1960’s cat-eye glasses with her purse in gloved hands, my dad in his nicely-creased slacks with the cuffs ironed up. The four of us children follow close like ducklings, each of us scrubbed and gleaming, as we slip into the pews. And after the necessary preliminaries, which sound a lot like “blah blah blah” to my 6-year-old brain, we are told to turn in the hymnals to hymn number such-and-such.
I always loved flipping the pages of the hymnal to see what surprise awaited, reading the title, the subtitle, the names and dates at the top. I loved those mysterious lines with graceful dots and flags bouncing on them, and would later learn to follow the bouncing dots with my voice and respect the stems and flags for the way they counted the time.
I didn’t quite recognize the title this day: Christ Arose. But when the piano or organ played the last bar to remind us how the tune went before we opened our mouths to sing, my heart gave a little leap of joy. It was my favorite! The one I thought of as "Lo in the Gravy Lay."
I knew to begin this one quiet and somber, but I also knew that triumph would come:
Low in the grave He lay—Jesus, my Savior.
Waiting the coming day—Jesus my Lord.
There the somber tone would disappear and the chill of the thrill, where suddenly everyone sang in a powerful unison and the music went from soft to bold, enthralled me:
Up from the grave He arose!
When I was much younger, like maybe five, I thought "He a rose." But I was big now, and knew "arose" meant coming back to life and right out of the grave that he lay low in.
The notes themselves rose from low to high in pitch as if they, too, were coming back to life. My Dad’s strong tenor dug deep to reach that low C, then climbed manfully the ladder of notes right out of the grave. And after that, everyone split off into their glorious harmonies and echoes and delighted affirmations, singing loudly and bravely:
Up from the grave He arose! (He arose!)
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes! (He arose!)
He arose a Victor from the dark domain,
And He lives forever…
(And here you had to slow down and follow the leader's waving hands carefully, drawing the word "reign" to just the right length...)
…with his saints to reign!
We need to sustain the "reign" with stalwart courage, because that set up the next crescendo of goodness, which we belted out even louder, the basses echoing the refrain:
He arose! (He arose!)
He arooooooose! (He arose!)
My wonder arose as my mother's clear soprano dutifully followed the leader's waving hands and her eyebrows, too, arose magnificently to new heights. The veins stood out on all our necks.
And then we would triumphantly blast out The Whole Point of Everything:
Hallelujah! Christ arose!
I hold the memory close this morning with a smile on my lips--the echo of the old hallelujah.
I also hold delight in one hand and shabby humanness in the other.
These are the words my heart needs to hear. Nothing—not death, not a stone rolled over the entrance, not my stumbling and floundering as I want so deeply to follow perfectly and fall so far short—can keep the joy from bursting out of the grave.
And so I remind my older self:
Vainly they watch His bed—Jesus my Savior.
Vainly they seal the dead—Jesus my Lord.
…and…
Death cannot keep his prey—Jesus my Savior!
He tore the bars away—Jesus my Lord!
Up from the grave He arose!
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes!
He arose a Victor from the dark domain,
And He lives forever with His saints to reign.
He arose! HE AROSE!
Hallelujah! Christ arose!
Today as the somber meets the triumph, my heart soars once again. Christ came for this. This journey through the slough of humanness, this step by step pilgrimage through the grace of Jesus Christ, back out of the darkness and into the light.
John Mark Comer reminded me in a podcast recently that the way to life always involves a cross. There is no triumph without first an ending. And then comes the miracle only God can bring: the resurrection. New life.
It’s where my hope lies today on this Easter. And it’s where my hope lies on a Monday morning, too.
I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me
will live, even though he dies.
John 11:25
We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father,
we too may walk in newness of life.
Romans 6:4
Happy Easter, sinners!
Gravy, anyone?