A new commandment

Every year, we celebrate Easter with shouts of Alleluia, with fresh flowers, colorful clothes, and altogether too much chocolate. (Is there such a thing as too much chocolate?)

I love our Easter traditions. But our celebrations don’t look much like that first Easter Day, the day of Jesus’s resurrection. The ragtag group that followed Jesus during his years of ministry didn’t respond to his resurrection by singing “Hail thee festival day!” and shouting “Alleluia!” They didn’t rush out to buy a bouquet of lilies and a ham. They responded with confusion and terror and questions upon questions.

And who can blame them?

It was a time of great anxiety. Jesus’s friends had just watched him die a painful and humiliating death. They feared they might be next. Some of them had hoped that Jesus would be the solution to all their practical problems, a new king who would kick out the hated Roman occupation. Those hopes had died with Jesus on the cross. Many of Jesus’s disciples had run away, gone into hiding. They were afraid. They were afraid and they were mourning and they were confused, grieving the loss of the teacher they’d left everything to follow.

A group of women went to Jesus’s tomb to finish preparing his body for burial, trying do the next right thing in impossible circumstances. But they found the tomb open, empty. And suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them saying, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” The women told Jesus’s other followers what they’d found, but “it seemed to them an idle tale.”

The Gospel of Luke goes on to describe other experiences of Jesus’s resurrection. Later on that Easter day, disciples walking on the road to Emmaus met a stranger who talked with them as they walked about all the strange events that had just taken place. They invited him to dinner. At the table, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and their eyes were opened. They recognized Jesus. But immediately he vanished from their sight.

The disciples rushed back to Jerusalem to tell their friends what they’d seen. And Jesus appeared again. This time he let them touch him. He showed them his hands and his feet. He ate a piece of broiled fish to prove that he was alive.

It was wonderful. But strange. And it took some time for Jesus’s disciples to come to terms with this new reality. It took time to move from fear to hope and then to joy. This wasn’t how they expected their story to go.

I’ve never been quite so aware as I am in this moment that history isn’t a fairy tale, that the people living through frightening and uncertain times had no way of knowing how their own stories might end.

Of course, in a sense that’s true at every time and in every place. Tragedy, surprise, and the unexpected are part of the human condition. But most of the time we manage to avoid thinking about the risks and dangers that surround us.

Right now, though, it’s a lot harder to forget. Today we know in our bones that life is precarious and precious. We know that we’re in the midst of difficult days, and that there may be even more difficult days to come.

What should we make of Easter in these times? Does this story from two thousand years ago matter here and now?

I think it does. After all, we’re not so different from those first disciples. Wondering. Watching. Afraid. Confused. Unsure of what our next steps should be.

But we can do what they did. We can permit ourselves the possibility of hope. We can remember, as they did, how Jesus taught them to live, how Jesus teaches us to live.

What did Jesus do when confronted with a time of fear, peril, and uncertainty? What did he tell his followers? His friends?

He didn’t assure them that everything would be well. He couldn’t do that. Terrible days were coming, and he knew it.

But what did he do instead?

“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

He washed their feet. He shared a meal. And he gave them a new commandment. “Love one another,” he said.

As simple, and as difficult, as that. Love one another.

And in the light and in the hope of Easter, his followers found the courage to do just that.

It wasn’t easy. It never is.

The love Jesus called them to, the love Jesus calls us to, is a love that loves not counting the cost. It’s a love that focuses not just on those closest to us, but on the most vulnerable people in our world. It’s a love that never turns away from suffering.

Faith in God doesn’t protect us from danger any more than it protected Jesus’s first disciples. What it does do, though, is assure us that in every way that truly matters, we’re safe. It tells us that we can afford to love not counting the cost, because we ourselves are loved.

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus said on the night before he died. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Love one another.

I’ve often thought that the clearest proof of the truth of Jesus’s resurrection is in the things his followers went on to do. Followers of Jesus who hid in terror after his crucifixion went on to proclaim the Gospel to kings and paupers and despots and strangers and neighbors without fear. In the light of Easter, everything was changed.

In the light of Easter, we too can dare to live lives of courage and integrity. Because Christ is risen.

We too can forgive. Because Christ is risen.

We too can love without demanding anything in return. Because Christ is risen.

We too can love as he loved us. Because Christ is risen.

Happy Easter!