As Easter is celebrated around the world — with chocolate, egg hunts and an annual visit to a local church by many — I wonder what Jesus’s story of death and resurrection means for me this year.
If I am to put it in one line, it’s a call for renewal: We must die in order be born again.
Dying goes beyond physical death. It’s about letting go the old way of living. Perhaps a self-centered life to seek only satisfaction for our own desires. Perhaps a life gripped with anger, fear, and jealousy. Perhaps that deep sense of despair that nothing has meaning, purpose, or hope.
Renewal requires a change of heart. So what are we called to convert to?
Jesus’s life offers some clues.
While many might expect the manifestation of God to be bathed in glory, Jesus was born in a measly manger. He lived a humble life with his father, a carpenter, doing ordinary things. Imagine him like a kid in your neighborhood.
When he began his public ministry at the age of 30, he attended to the sick, the blind, and the deaf. He walked with the marginalized — the tax collector, the prostitute, and the divorced woman — despite the social taboo. He shed tears when people suffered.
Jesus denounced those in power — the high priests, the scribes and the Pharisees — for their hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and wickedness. His challenge of the authority and the status quo eventually led him to his crucifixion. People didn’t like what he had to say.
The story of his suffering — the Passion — was gruesome. As he took up his own cross, he was spat at and mocked by the crowd. He was nailed to a wood beam, stripped almost naked. A soldier “pierced His side with a spear, and immediately there came out blood and water.”
Can you think of a more ghastly and dehumanizing death? All in public?
Yet, Jesus accepted his life and death with courage. He understood his calling of sacrifice, and answered it fully with conviction. Why did he do all of this?
He set an example that we need not be overcome by physical and spiritual death. That life is worth living even though it’s hard. That we must recognize that we are connected as brothers and sisters. That we must love another, even when others do not reciprocate that love. Because we are all called to.
The concept of death and resurrection can feel foreign. But we experience it every day. Every night when we sleep, we die — just a little. None of us has any actual idea what happens when we are asleep. We have no control or consciousness.
Yet in the morning, we are unconditionally gifted with a brand new day without asking for it. It doesn’t matter what happened in the thousands of days before this one. Today is another renewed beginning.
How will I choose to live today? Will I love more than I did yesterday?