Easter Hope

Easter Day at St. Paul’s was magnificent. Full church, brass, timpani, organ and choir, children hunting for eggs, a beautiful spring day and shouts of “The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!” reverberating through the church. Everyone I greeted seemed excited and full of energy.

But, of course, that can’t be accurate. With several hundred people attending worship in person and via the livestream there surely were some who didn’t feel excited. We can’t all be in the mood to shout enthusiastically when the rector cues us to do so in his sermon. For some the exuberance of Easter feels disconnected from the reality of their lives.

Esau McCaulley, an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, is one of those people. As he wrote in a column this past weekend in The New York Times, “Easter has never been my favorite church service. Shouting ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen!’ requires an emotional crescendo my melancholy temperament can’t easily manage.”

McCaulley writes that he has “never been a big fan of hope. It’s a demanding emotion that insists on changing you. … Isn’t it easier to believe that everyone who loves us has some secret agenda? That racism will forever block the creation of what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community? That the gun lobby will always overwhelm every attempt at reform? That poverty is a fact of human existence? Despair allows us to give up our resistance and rest awhile.”

We need look no further than this past Monday to empathize with McCaulley’s point. Less than 24 hours after our Easter worship ended, I heard the news of the mass shooting at Old National Bank in downtown Louisville. According to the Mass Shooting Tracker this was the 173rd mass shooting in the United States in 2023. How can we legitimately shout for joy on Easter when we’re averaging 1.7 mass shootings per day? Why put any energy into hoping for a more just and safer world when the resurrection of Jesus didn’t put a stop to suffering?

But Easter insists on hope. Easter promises us that even in the worst of circumstances, even when suffering seems as if it will never end, even when all seems lost, God still has the final word. Easter proclaims that the power of darkness will ultimately be as empty as the tomb was on that first Easter Day. We shout on Easter Day not because all of God’s promises have been fulfilled but because our hope will not be vanquished.

“That indestructibility of hope,” McCaulley writes, “might be the central and most radical claim of Easter — that on the third day after Jesus was killed, he returned to his disciples physically and that made all the difference. Easter, then, is a not metaphor for new beginnings; it is about encountering the person who, despite every disappointment we experience with ourselves and with the world, gives us a reason to carry on.”