How to Experience Easter while Wrestling a Hard
Celebrations and hards do not mingle well. Yet, just ahead, Resurrection Sunday, the greatest celebration of the redeemed. How do we consider Jesus’ difficult journey during Holy Week when we’re buried in our own? How do we celebrate Sunday when difficulty has stalled our hearts in Saturday? Perhaps we need a changed perspective of what it means to contemplate and celebrate.
Contemplation doesn’t mean completely pushing our own experiences aside to examine another’s. To ponder the hard things our Lord walked through that Holy Week is to examine our own hards: betrayal, rejection, abandonment, anger, false accusation, ridicule, fear, torment of the soul, suffering, death. Our experiences over a lifetime crashed over Jesus in a week. The hard we experience He experienced at an intensity beyond our imagination. Yet, we understand a semblance of what He felt. And contemplating His suffering keeps ours in perspective.
What about the aspect of celebration of the resurrection? How do we drag ourselves onto that bandwagon?
Celebration covers an array of experience. Yes, it can include jovial hoopla; good food, bright color, and laughter. Happiness. The very things we cannot share in our hard.
But perhaps the deepest celebration we partake, felt at the very core of our soul, happens when the weight of our hard lays us out at the foot of the cross. There we empty our burdens and our sorrows. Our fears and our pain. Til we are spent.
When we look up and we see, just beyond the cross, the empty tomb, a truth transports us to the throne room of God. For indeed, He is risen. There our hearts swell and spill over with a depth of gratitude words cannot begin to express for what our Savior accomplished for us. While we quietly wait on the Lord, the continuous holy worship carries us into the celebration of the Lamb who was slain.
In our hards, we hold tightly both the cross where Christ crushed the chains and effects of sin, and the resurrection where death was defeated, opening the hope of eternity, where all wrongs are made right, all tears are wiped away, and healing on every level is complete. This revelation allows us, even in our deepest hard, to experience unspeakable joy. And indeed joy is at the heart of true celebration.
So, my friend, during your hard, if needed, allow yourself to pull back from the traditions surrounding this week. Not to wallow in the muck and mire. But, to take time to look to eternal things. A prompting popped onto my screen tucked in a writing:
“Let this Holy Week dismantle everything
that isn’t about eternal things.” – Ann Voscamp
Our reeling reality responds that because everything in our world was dismantled by our difficulty, we’re one step ahead. To not just look to eternal things, but cling to them. To recognize that what we battle, He has battled. And what He has accomplished, draws us into a deep celebration of the soul so that, as He cradles our hard in His nail-scarred hands, we worship:
O Thou, in Whose presence my soul takes delight
On Whom in affliction I callMy comfort by day, and my song in the nightMy hope, my salvation, my all…
He looks, and ten thousands of angels rejoiceAnd myriads wait for His wordHe speaks and eternity, filled with His voiceRe-echoes the praise of the Lord
