The Name of the Place is Joy

Easter Monday musings + links

The tulips at Longwood Gardens are apparently at their peak this week so I snagged a last-minute reservation for early afternoon of Easter Monday.

I thought maybe both of my college students would like to go with me before their evening drive back to campus. When my daughter said she had laundry to do, my son and I ventured out alone. These days when we go out together, he drives, he chooses the music, and I always buy him some food.

“Will you push me in my wheelchair to see the tulips when I’m old?” I asked him while we moved in a slow crowd through the glory of Longwood’s famous flower walk.

“Of course,” he said, and he even sounded cheerful about it.

This is the time of year for thinking of death. Growing up in the church, I struggled to understand why we still had to die if Jesus had defeated death on the cross. Mine wasn’t a tradition that observed Holy Week or Good Friday. The story we believed and the calendar we kept intersected only briefly on Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. Birth and resurrection I thought I understood. They sounded like good news. Like April showers, May flowers, and an empty tomb. But dying? Picking up my own cross?

When Jesus said follow, I thought he meant “live like me.” I never imagined he meant “die like me and you will live.”

I’m pretty sure I had never seen a garden tulip until I moved to Virginia in my 20s. I grew up in Texas where spring was a lovely but brief affair. It offered a temporary reprieve from winter chill and summer heat. Country roads would blaze with the glory of bluebonnets and other wildflowers, but it would all pass away so quickly. My first spring after moving from Texas to the northeast was an unanticipated gift. Because I had always lived down south, I had not known that the prize for enduring a real winter, with its occasional wonderland days and its regular misery days, was an awakening so astonishing it felt as if I was learning what the word spring meant for the first time in my life. Spring wasn’t simply a pleasant interlude; it wasn’t merely the chance to catch my breath between the frost and the heat wave. It was a fulfillment. It was a promise kept, though I had not even realized a promise had been made. 

I can remember experiencing my first northern springtimes in a kind of frenzy almost. The sudden eruption of life seemed too good to be true, and I ran around trying, almost desperately, to soak up every last beautiful detail of pink magnolia, purple redbud, and white dogwood blossom. It was as if I couldn’t quite believe that such beauty was reliable, and that it would return. All these years later, I greet spring with more steadiness. “Oh, it’s you again,” I say with a deep sigh of gladness. Year after year, winter erupts into spring. And year after year, Lent’s bright sorrow leads to Easter’s rush of joy, until I greet Easter, not with astonishment, not in a frenzy, but like an old, much-loved friend. I wonder if that’s how it’s meant to be? It feels as if Easter has settled into my bones. I still ache for life during seasons when death seems to gain the upper hand. I still long for fruitfulness when everything feels barren and dry-as-dust, but when Easter finally returns, it now seems to me as if it never really left.

The gospel of Luke gives us one of the earliest accounts of the life of Jesus. Luke was a doctor who traveled with the apostle Paul, and he was motivated by a desire to offer an orderly account of “the things that have been fulfilled among us.” For Luke, the life of Jesus was a promise kept, and we find this theme in a story only Luke would record. Not long after the resurrection, Cleopas and a companion meet Jesus on the road to Emmaus but fail to recognize their beloved teacher. These two are downcast, blanketed by sorrow, but I imagine it was with a gentle voice that Jesus said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” Then Jesus “explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:25-27). Strangely, they still do not recognize their Lord. Instead, it is only when Jesus, having joined them for a meal, takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it back to them, that their eyes are opened and they recognize the one who gives them food.

The church has followed this pattern in her worship ever since.

As we read in Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, the first Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42). In the ancient liturgy of Christian worship, each Sunday gathering of the community begins with Bible readings and preaching. Then, we come to God’s table, where our clergy take, bless, break, and give the gifts of God to the people of God just as Jesus did with loaves and fishes and with bread and wine. For Cleopas and his friend, the road to Emmaus became the road to joy. It carried them from downcast despair to astonishment and glory. It’s as if they walked a road from deepest winter to freshest spring, and you can almost see clouds parting, trees budding, brown soil greening, and birds beginning to sing. Nothing would ever be the same, for them or for us.

Their first encounter with the risen Christ must have felt like an earthquake. They knew God had made a promise to rescue his people from slavery to evil powers and from death, and now they were witnesses of its fulfillment. I wonder if they ran around sharing the good news as if they couldn’t quite believe it themselves? But I imagine over time, as they regularly prayed, and read the prophets, and recalled Jesus’s teaching, and broke bread together in remembrance of him, that the joy of it all simply settled into their bones. And when winter returned, as winter inevitably does, when the trees dropped their leaves again or they felt the chill of harsh words exchanged with a friend or they were shaken by the death—the “falling asleep”—of someone they loved, then they discovered that even winter was not the same. Even winter had in its depths a seed of green hope. For they had watched Jesus die and then met him fully alive on the other side of suffering.

The joy of the Lord is our true home, and we begin to settle in even now.

In the parable of the talents, Jesus invites us to imagine a servant who takes what his lord gives, and then blesses it, breaks it, and returns it in greater abundance only to hear these words: “Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord” (Matthew 25:21). We have not yet fully entered that joy, and yet we draw near to the gates of that place every Sunday when we draw near to one another and to the table of our God. Having received the bread of heaven, we are sent back out to live like seeds cracked open and growing, and to be, in ourselves, blessed and broken and given. In this way, the resurrection power of the living Christ settles into our bones, and steadies our feet, and fills our hearts with gladness.

It looks just like dying. Sometimes, it feels like it, too. But don’t be fooled. Our bodies are seeds, and we are planted in good soil. If we follow the Way of Christ, that self-emptying, cross-carrying Way, then we will live. Today, we will live. Tomorrow, we will live. And we will go on living all the way into our resurrected bodies, just as Jesus did.

Christ our Passover Pascha nostrum
1 Corinthians 5:7-8; Romans 6:9-11; 1 Corinthians 15:20-22

Alleluia.
Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; *
therefore let us keep the feast,
Not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, *
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Alleluia.

Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; *
death no longer has dominion over him.
The death that he died, he died to sin, once for all; *
but the life he lives, he lives to God.
So also consider yourselves dead to sin, *
and alive to God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Alleluia.

Christ has been raised from the dead, *
the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
For since by a man came death, *
by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, *
so also in Christ shall all be made alive. Alleluia.

(Book of Common Prayer, p. 83)

For my subscribers, read on for links to a few things I’ve been reading, listening to, and appreciating as Lent turns to Eastertide.