I know it sometimes feels like it, but Easter doesn’t just appear as if by magic and then just as quickly disappear. Nor is it primarily driven by a commercial imperative with its own timetable - Christmas decorations down, then valentine’s cards and treats, and then all of a sudden chocolate eggs appear, to be followed by rabbits of assorted sizes and constitutions. These are all distractions apt to convince the unaware and unthinking that there is nothing of importance going on, beyond obtaining an early spring sugar-rush. But there is more to Easter than eggs. And there is a then as well as a now.
The “then” I have in mind is of course some time around 30AD. As with all ancient history, some of the detail has probably been lost in the mists of time. But not being able to know everything with certainty is not the same as not being able to know some things with a fair degree of confidence. Real, 100%, cast-iron, completely proven certainty only ever exists within the confines of logic and mathematics, and is never likely to be available in the much messier world populated and shaped by fallen, fallible men and women like us. But, in tracing the events that led to what we now call Easter, we are well served by what is found in the Bible. This is not the place to rehearse why after thousands of years of critical scrutiny (and deliberately destructive scrutiny in the case of the Western academic tradition of the last couple of hundred years) the Biblical narrative still carries authority. It’s not difficult to track down accounts of why and how this should be, from the technical, through the polemical to the popular. But as a starting assumption, let us take the Biblical accounts of what we now refer to as Easter to be coherent and accurate, albeit they are neither journalistic or written in the linear way that modern academic history is written. Actually, if we consider only the Gospels, the writers are clear with us as readers that they are selecting their material and assembling it to present Jesus and His claims as they perceived Him to be making them. In other words they are more transparent about their methods and motives than your average podcaster or Tick-tock influencer.
What is clear from the Gospel accounts is that there is much about that first Easter that should have come as no surprise at all. But things being said and things being heard are two very different things. What comes across is that the person at the centre of it all, and the person driving events (rather than being driven by them) is Jesus Himself. Now, again, this is no surprise if Jesus is who He claims to be. A straightforward reading of the Gospels shows that Jesus did things that only God could do, expecting observers to draw the obvious conclusion. Just have a read of the account of His healing of the paralysed man let down through the roof into the middle of a room where He was speaking. He did things that were amazing but that also reminded his original Jewish audience of things God had done in the past, like when He fed thousands of people with bread in a wilderness area. Remind you of anything? Think Exodus, think 5000. He accepted things that only God should rightly accept, as when Thomas declares Him to be Lord and God and in so doing offers worship (although admittedly this comes at the end of the story). And He claimed, in terms, to be identical to God. It seems odd that this is disputed. Actually, this is sometimes a bit obscured in the English translation. In the Greek in which the Gospels are written, it leaps out from the text more than once. Of course there were those in His original audience who heard exactly what He was saying and were outraged by all. All of which gradually builds an expectation of some sort of climax. Either He must be exposed as an enormous fraud or…..
But to their credit, the Gospel writers (or at least Matthew and John who were with Jesus from near the beginning of His public ministry) make clear that there is another reason why the events of Easter should have been no surprise. Jesus laid out precisely what was going to happen in considerable detail, and did so repeatedly. He talked about location, rejection, crucifixion and resurrection all before they happened. Hours before the critical events He even explained why he was being so forthcoming. He was letting them know so that they would know that He knew! Consider why this matters. Jesus was neither simply following events as they unfolded, nor a hapless victim of miscalculation. If he didn’t intend what happened to happen he had ample opportunity to plot a different course. But from very early on, well before anything was apparently inevitable, He is very clear about both the purpose and shape of those first Easter events. Arguably, of course, well before Jesus arrived on the scene at all, it had all been first hinted at (as early as Genesis Ch3!), and then described in some detail (Isaiah Ch53). Those who heard Him speak might have had cause to feel somewhat embarrassed that they didn’t get it. But we know much more now than they did at the time, and do we get it? There is a greater purpose unfolding in the events of Easter, greater in a sense that the events themselves, although dependant upon them actually happening. What happened matters. But that should not distract from what it means.
So it turns out that the first Easter (not that it was called that) did not just appear. It had been long promised, and long prepared. And this Easter does not just appear either. The life, death, resurrection, ascension and return of Jesus is not just for one part of the year. All of these are rooted in history and yet in the person they concern have a daily relevance. He, through who He is and what He has done, restores, shapes, motivates and provides daily (even momentary) hope for life and living. Christmas, Easter, birth, death resurrection, return; these are not just disconnected ideas to be dissected and argued over. It all fits together in one big picture.
Not to be missed.
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