The Resurrection and Cheering out of Season
One of my favorite sports stories is about a baseball game on a cold spring day at the stadium in Montreal where the hapless Expos played for 35 years before becoming the Washington Nationals. There were just a few hundred people in the stands that day and not much was happening down on the field when suddenly a cheer went up all around the stadium. The players looked up wondering what had just happened.
It turned out that the Canadiens, Montreal’s hockey team, which dominated the NHL for decades, had just won the Stanley Cup and the people in the stands had been listening to the hockey game on portable radios while attending the baseball game.
I suspect that’s the way our Easter celebration will sound this year to the world’s ears. In the Northern hemisphere, people “get” Easter as a kind of celebration of spring. It’s all about flowers and eggs and baby bunnies and new life. Even the name we call it in the English-speaking world, “Easter” is derived from “Eostre”, a nature goddess whose feast was celebrated in April.
This year, however, on the earliest Easter we’ll ever see, I suspect that we won’t be seeing many signs of spring in Northeast Ohio. Even last year, when Easter was on April 8, we had more than a foot of snow. So, our singing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” will sound like those cheers in a Montreal baseball stadium when nothing is happening on the field.
That’s because we aren’t cheering for the meteorological miracle of spring, but theological miracle of the Christ’s resurrection. The fact that it doesn’t coincide with the emergence of tulips and violets underlines the reality that, although spring is a powerful metaphor for resurrection, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for our understanding the meaning of Peter’s words, “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day” (Acts 2:39-40)
The alleluias of Easter are not for baby chicks emerging from eggs or a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis or for daffodils emerging from shriveled bulbs. We sing “alleluia” because hope emerges from despair, life emerges from death, and God’s justice emerges from man’s injustice. It’s not about the triumph of the sun, but the triumph of the Son.
So even if, as I suspect, we will be singing our alleluias on a cold March day underneath a gray sky surrounded by brown earth, we will be praising the Power that makes not only spring, but life itself, possible – even when life is impossible. And those who are playing some other game will look up and wonder what in heaven’s name is going on.
