Easter: he is risen

Read this at the start of the Easter season, if your household keeps the year. It belongs to the Year view only.

He is risen. This is the day everything turns on, the center of the whole faith, and it deserves the loudest joy of the year.

Everything the world had accepted as final, death, the wall none of us gets past, was broken open on a Sunday morning, and the tomb was empty. If that is true, and we stake everything on the fact that it is, then nothing you were resigned to is as settled as you thought. Death did not win. It does not get the last word over anyone you love, or over you.

And notice how the risen Jesus came back: not in a blaze of vengeance on the people who killed him, but gently, personally, to the ones who had failed him. He said a weeping woman's name in a garden. He walked unrecognized beside two heartbroken travelers and was known to them in the breaking of the bread. He met his friends' doubt not with a rebuke but with his own wounds. He made breakfast on a beach for the men who had abandoned him. This is the same Jesus, risen: still humble, still tending to the least, still known by his love and not by his power.

Easter is not one day; the church keeps it as a whole season, seven weeks of resurrection joy. So do not let it collapse back into ordinary life by Monday. A household might:

Keep feasting, at least through the first week. The fast of Lent is over; this is the season of gladness.

Read the appearances one by one across the weeks, and let each one work on you: the empty tomb, the garden, the road to Emmaus, the wounds shown to Thomas, the breakfast, the peace.

And carry the resurrection into how you treat people, especially the ones who have failed you, because that is exactly what the risen Jesus did.

The breaking of the bread at Emmaus is worth holding onto all year, because it is the heart of our own practice. Two heartbroken people did not recognize the risen Lord in the argument, or even in their burning hearts, but only when he broke the bread at the table. That is why we gather at a table, over bread, expecting to know him. Easter tells us where he is found. Stay at the table, and keep your eyes open.