What Easter Means
spring redbud. translucent!
Ever since I found out what sin was, Good Friday has meant more to me than Easter Sunday. I knew that I was bad, bad enough that the world’s best person had to die for me. But not just die, die a long and tortured death. For all I don’t know about how Jesus lived, I know a remarkable swath of detail regarding his death. Whipped 39 times by leather, glass, and bone. A crown of thorns beat into his skull. A blood-soaked robe ripped from his flayed body. Abandoned by friends, betrayed by his people, spat on while breathing his last. On Friday, these are the facts. Then, just a day later, I don a newly pastelled shirt and sing with feigned joy that “precious is the flow [of blood] that makes me white as snow.”
Forgive my uncomfort, but Friday is seeping through. Maybe it’s because I’m allegedly distant kin to Edgar Allen Poe that the macabre feels so enfleshed, while the Sunday communion tastes like wax. But then, BRUNCH. A what a brunch it is! By the time it’s over and I slip into a couch coma, I’ve sold the whole weekend down the river, promising to do better this year blah blah… “oooh, golf is on TV!”
But does it float away, this half-baked bargain? I feel guilt in my Sunday heart. I feel shame pile on like whipped cream on brunch waffles. I repeat my deal: I’ll be better. I’ll sin less. I’ll be less deserving of such eternal damnation that Jesus will stop dying on the horrid cross again and again. And I do try. As whacked out theologically as that deal is, I do try. I’ve been 10 years trying to crucify myself so Jesus wouldn’t have to. I’ve become my own judge, jury and executioner. I’ve said things like “I hate myself” with complete righteousness in my heart.
This year, I think Jesus is inviting me to play a different game. I think he’s telling me not to judge myself. I sit here on this Easter morning with a new sun rising and hear him ask me, “Who told you that I wanted you to hate yourself?”
Judgement feels good. It feels like progress. It’s easy to tell where I (and others) stand. But though it’s become my modus operandi, I think this morning I’m invited to let it go. I’ve given it my best shot, 10 years of trying. But what has it accomplished but further show the depths to which I am deserving of death. STOP. This is the rocking chair of judgement and shame I’ve been too long in leaving behind.
I attend a church here on the East side of Austin named Vox Veniae. They sow seeds of a new way of doing things. In mid January, a teacher named Gideon led the congregation in an exercise to explore how God feels about us. Here it is:
First, he had us imagine the tastiest food we’ve eaten. (La BBQ on a sunny Friday in the Fall for me). Then say from the gut, “Mmmmmm…. So good.” Then he led us to picture in our minds a nature scape we find exceptionally beautiful and again say aloud, “Mmmmmmm. So good.” Finally he had us take out our phones and open the selfie camera. Looking directly into the lens, not the screen, he had us take a photo of ourselves, then look at our faces and say again, as God does of us, “Mmmmmm… So good.”
I’m really hard on myself. It’s led me to some hellish places. This morning, I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant to come from his death. I think forgiveness was the point. To the kangaroo court that convicted him, Jesus is silent. To the criminal crucified beside him, he promises life. To the soldiers who have his literal blood on their hands as they gamble for his tunic, what does he say? “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
He says the same to me today. I am lovable and I am loved right where I am. It is not my bargains or striving that make me worth loving. It is his love. This is a life worth living. This is a song worth singing on Sunday.
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P.S. I write with this level of candor because I know what it feels like to live in hellish mental unhealth. It’s not comfortable to talk about. If you have made a deal with a higher power that is causing self-hate and want to talk about it, I’d like to do that with you.
Here is the sermon from which I pulled the exercise of how God sees us. Skip to 8 mins for that.
my selfie from Vox on Jan. 12th