Author Archives: Dave

I didn’t know what to write yesterday. I guess I didn’t want to write anything normal, traditional, or flippant. And, honestly, I was trying to unpack the significance of it for me this year.

So, I was meditating on the Spring bloom around us. Curtailed as it has been by “winter’s last blast,” you have to appreciate the beauty in it. In the south, everything is pastels right now. Not really my color choice, but, still, you have to appreciate the beauty in it. The birds singing, everything coming into bloom.

And for the first time, I appreciated the reason we celebrate Easter during the Spring. I mean, I always knew it was to associate the resurrection of the Christ with new life, but I just really appreciated it for the first time. The whole takeaway from Easter is a redemptive one, a new life that is available to us. That is what makes Easter the core of the Christian faith, the culmination of the divine plan: new life. Easter is about the ultimate apologetical argument for the Christian faith: no body has ever been produced. People were and are willing to die for the name of Christ, and that’s not something you do if you hold doubts. There is no body because of the new life that Christ initiated for us.

And this morning, the day after Easter, as I was looking out the window, I couldn’t even really pray. I could just mouth the words “thank you.”

Happy Easter.

Two verses today. Jesus had been buried, people had prepared burial spices, and nothing further was done today, because Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath.

I was trying to contemplate the silence that must have been present today. I read a poem last night by Garret Keizer called “The Errand.” It’s written from the hypothetical point of view of the person who took the borrowed colt on which Jesus had ridden back to the owner. It hyposthesizes what the owner must of been like…interesting.

It gives this feeling about the absence of noise and commotion, though, I have to imagine that today all those centuries ago must have been just that. Grieving and crying enough to go around, I’m sure. But if you went to Golgotha on that day, for example, I bet you would have encountered horrible, pervasive silence.

I wonder if there’s a significance to that? Why Jesus didn’t rise until after the Sabbath? I wonder why the pause? Was it to allow those who had observed the events of the previous day to allow it to have an impact on them?

Interesting, don’t you think? The world had just shifted, and there was only silence.

I’ve wondered often why we call this “Good Friday.” I mean, I’ve never researched the background for the title, but its the psychology behind it that I have difficulty grasping. Good, I suppose, in that what He chose to endure that day would have salvific repurcussions for all Believers. I guess it just seems a little too happy for as black a day as it was, as traumatic as Scripture records it.

I didn’t read this part of Scripture today, I listened to it as an audiobook instead. I’m not really into audiobooks, but this was cool in a radio theatre sort of way. The part that really stayed with me was the emotion in the voice of the actor who portrayed Jesus. He was crying often during the reading, and, at the end, when Christ claimed “it is finished” at the time of His death, the actor screamed. An anguished scream, truly in pain.

I imagine Jesus screamed and cried a lot during that 24 hour period. I guess I get wrapped up in His divinity so much that I forget His humanity. He hurt, He suffered, He experienced an actual death. The translation that the actors read for the audiobook phrased Jesus’ words as saying that He gave Himself for the salvation of many (I’m not quoting, I don’t remember it verbatum). All that pain He went through was for one purpose.

So, I guess, knowing the ultimate outcome of all this, I can see calling it Good Friday, because the result for me and many others and any others who choose to accept it is that we’ve been liberated.

So, yeah…it’s good.

Happy Good Friday.

Today was when Jesus initiated what would become known as Communion, giving the bread and wine in commemoration of His upcoming sacrifice. His disciples were unable to accept that their friend and Teacher was about to die. Jesus even asked God if there could be any other way. I think that, in His mortal body, He was afraid.

I drove past a church today with a sign in front that proudly proclaimed an Easter egg hunt. Throughout the country this weekend, there will be traditional “sunrise services” and breakfasts and egg hunts and (I think I’m going to vomit when I write this word) “egg-stravaganzas.”

We’ve turned this whole thing into a joke. Easter is a joke to us. It’s a sickeningly sanitized, wannabe holiday observance of something that shook the fabric of the universe.

Do we honestly think that Jesus gives a crap about our egg hunts and chocolates and Easter bunnies? American church is so fake.

I found this article a few minutes ago. The scientist’s statement is as interesting to read as are the comments that follow. What do you think?