Easter Spirituality

The Church of Jesus Christ is in the season of Easter. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, Easter is a season. It is not just a day. In fact, Easter is a point of view. It is a perspective, a way of life, a spirituality unto itself.

The Spirituality of Easter is all-too-often taken for granted. While it has stood as a hallmark of Spring, an omen that portends the end of the school year, the coming of warmer weather and a return to outdoor living, Easter is actually much more inclusive and encompassing than we have often imagined. Easter is new life. It cannot be had unless it comes from a dying, the closing of a door, moving on from what had been and moving toward that which shall be.

Easter is an opportunity to move toward a healthier version of what it means to be fully human, fully spiritual, fully incarnational.

Let's see if I can articulate this in an understandable manner. Jesus was Crucified. His lifeless body was placed in a borrowed tomb. On the third day following his death, women (or a woman) of the community around Jesus go to the tomb in order to: 1. Be certain that Jesus is really quite sincerely dead instead of being just merely dead; 2. Treat his body with caustic spices that are meant to hasten the decomposition process; 3. Wrap his corpse in linen cloths that, together with the spices, allow the entire process to take place in the length of one calendar year. Shock of all shocks, Jesus' body is not there. The angels declare that he has been raised from the dead. The women share the news and the disciples finally receive affirmation, in a series of post-resurrection appearances.

If this completes our telling of the story, we miss its power, however. Jesus' body is a vessel in which the animating spirit of God dwells, at least as human life was understood in the Middle Platonism of Jesus' day. The corporeal, physical flesh was little more than a vehicle for the animating spirit. It was an opportunity for that which lives to articulate the heavenly virtues in which the spirit existed apart from animating the flesh. The core of Jesus' life was therefore spiritual. It was in the Spirit that Jesus defined himself, understood himself, determined his behavior and shaped his life. It is in and from the Spirit that Jesus ministered and served.

To be fully human in Jesus' understanding meant to be fully spiritual. The point to which Jesus represented that spiritual reality of his humanness set him apart from those who live only in corporeal, physical, carnal reality. To put it bluntly, spiritual reality lives in order to makes the lives of others healthier, happier and more productive while the physical reality seeks to make one's self healthier, happier and more productive.

Easter Spirituality suggests that the new life of Christ is incarnational only insofar as we live as the body of Christ. It matters only insofar as we live spiritually, as empowered, enabled, called and sent ones, who dedicate our lives to the practice of those same heavenly virtues that Jesus so faithfully demonstrated. In this spirituality, we can cease our search for the body of Jesus Christ. In the spirituality of Easter, we are the lost body of Christ. His Spirit dwells in us, each of us and all of us. We represent him when we live in that spirituality.

We can be Easter together, then, in the incarnational reality that Jesus so vitally expressed. We are the body of Christ!