The Easter Experience

Monday, April 21, 2025

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Happy Easter and Happy Monday, my friends! Over the last week we’ve experienced the Easter narrative through Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, the washing of the disciples’ feet, the betrayal of Jesus, his arrest and interrogation, Peter denying his association with Jesus, Jesus’ passion, his death, and, as he promised, his resurrection. We know the story well and I imagine few if any of us stopped to think about the range and variety of takes on the common story. Yet there are many interpretations of that story. There’s a traditional and theological narrative which places attention on Christ taking on the sins of the world in order to save humanity from the wrath of God. There’s also a progressive, social Gospel approach which names Jesus’ death as a consequence of standing up to empire and modeling how we too should resist the very real evil of our world. And, of course, almost every Christian tradition has its own nuance on the story from the institution of the Eucharist as the summit of the faith[1] of Catholics, Orthodox, and (some) Anglicans to the penal substitutionary atonement completed by Christ which form the foundation of the Protestant Solas.[2]

Both narratives start at the same place—Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem on what we now call Palm Sunday—and they end at the same place and time, the resurrection, but they view the events in that story from profoundly different perspectives. The traditional theological story begins with Jesus entering Jerusalem knowing that within the week he will be arrested and will die on a cross. Much like his birth, his entrance to Jerusalem is at once royal and simple. Yes, he rides into the city as people cheer and lay their cloaks on his path, but he rides a donkey and the people wave palm fronds. He orders his disciples to prepare for a meal at which he presents bread as his body and wine as his blood. This meal conveys the grace and forgiveness which Christ will impart by his death on the cross. He proceeds to pray where he begs God to “let this cup pass from me, yet not what I want but what you want” (Matthew 26:39). He’s then betrayed by Judas and arrested. He’s interrogated and the Roman governor, having found no guilt in him, is turned over to the crowd who shout for his condemnation. The theological narrative positions the crowd—the same people who welcomed Jesus into their city only days earlier—as humanity both before and after the time of Jesus who, through our sins, place Jesus on the cross and whose sins he died to forgive. He’s led away and tortured by his Roman guards who roundly mock the idea that he’s a king. Eventually he is led to Golgotha—the place of the skull—where, depending on which account you’re reading, he’s crucified between two criminals. He dies relatively quickly, and his body is placed in the tomb of one of his followers. While 2,000 years of art render much of the actual violence and suffering of Roman crucifixion out of the story, Jesus’ death, traditional readings maintain, had to occur. Humanity’s sins could only be redeemed and God’s perfect justice paid by the death of a perfect being. Thus, Jesus came into the world as that being and as a sacrifice.

Chronologically, the progressive, social gospel version of the story is identical to its traditional counterpart. It differs in how it considers and portrays several of the events. First, Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem is not a royal parade or victorious march, but a protest in which a crowd has assembled and calls for a change to the political, social, and religious order of their time. If the religious authorities, who already fear losing their power, are going to act against Jesus and his followers, they have to act now. Though the Romans are foreign occupiers who don’t need the local religious leaders for support and the religious factions would welcome the departure of their imperial overlords, the two groups form an uneasy symbiosis. This radical preacher could destabilize the system and mark the end of toleration which permit the chief priests and the elders to wield some power. Though the Romans either don’t understand the power of his message or they don’t care, Jesus preaches against them as much as he preached against religious corruption. The social gospel approach sees Jesus’ death as capital punishment; a state-sponsored execution as a consequence of standing up to empire and all its colonial evils. Before you argue that Jesus was killed not by the Romans, but his own ethnic and religious community, religion making bed with politics and defiling its most deeply held ideals was neither new in Jesus’ time nor is it in 2025.

No matter how traditional or progressive your reading of the events of Holy Week and Easter, the resurrection confounds our ideas and interpretations of those events as much now as they did when Mary Magdelene wept outside the tomb thinking someone had stolen Jesus’ body. The idea that anyone, even God, could defeat death and could return to life is simply extraordinary. And for that reason, the resurrection remains both a mystery and a stumbling block for Christians. Should we believe that Jesus really did return from the dead or perhaps his body was moved and hidden? Is his resurrection an allegory for killing people, but not being able to kill an idea? Is it something more mundane or maybe, just maybe, even more miraculous? Whatever the truth of the resurrection and of the celebration of Easter, we have entered a time of hope when even the machinations of state-induced chaos and fear cannot make us see the shimmer of new days ahead and hear the still small voice of love.

How do you look at the events of Holy Week and of Easter? For what are you hoping?

Let us pray: God, you gave us your son to model the moral courage of resisting empire and, when necessary, offering his own body and his life in service to those you created. Grant us the strength and grace to follow his example even when it’s dangerous for us to do like Jesus did. We ask this in the name of Jesus, our liberator. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Faithfully,

Ben

[1] Inasmuch as the Eucharist conveys the sacrifice of Jesus and through which the faithful participate in his death and resurrection.

[2] sola scriptura, solus Christus, sola fide, sola gratia, and soli Deo gloria (Scripture alone, Christ alone, faith alone, grace alone, and glory to God alone)