The Easter story is bigger than we imagine, writes Alberta author and theologian Mark Buchanan
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One Easter, when I was four, my mother gave me a blank piece of paper and a box of crayons, sat me down at the kitchen table and, while she baked sugar cookies in the shape of plump bunnies, asked me to draw a picture for her.
An Easter picture, she said.
I was a poor, but eager artist and flew to the work. I drew, in a kind of Picasso-esque jumble of fat lines and skewed proportions, Jesus hanging from a cross. I think I even included nails protruding from His hands and feet, blood spattering His limbs, pooling on the ground.
What the drawing lacked in skill it made up for in graphicness.
My mother – even my four-year-old brain took note of this – was audibly, visibly stunned. We were not a religious family. Not even close. My father, only recently sobered up after years of an insatiable hankering for gin, had a “god of his understanding,” but he was loud and combative in declaring his god was not the God of the Bible or the Church. My mother was right on the cusp of her many years of chasing swamis, looking somewhere, everywhere, for some mystic or guru to give meaning to her powerful, but vague spiritual yearnings (later, when I was 16, she embraced Christ).
I have no memory of any religious sentiments held or spoken by my few preschool friends. There were no relatives close by and none cared a whit about faith even if there were. Me, I was the product of a world that ridiculed Christian faith, but mostly ignored it.
So there’s no clear way of accounting for my childhood artistic sensibilities. Somehow I made the connection that Easter was about Jesus. It surprised my mother terribly. It surprises me all these years on. All I have access to now is the memory of that moment, nothing of what gave rise to it. Yet somehow I knew Jesus and His death on a cross – not bunnies, daffodils or chocolate – was at the heart of Easter.
BRITISH SCHOLAR C. S. Lewis said the death and resurrection of Jesus was the one True Myth, the primal historical event that all the many mystery cults of the first century, with their stories of a dying and rising god, glimpsed through a glass darkly. Those pagan stories, he said, were rumours, intuitions, intimations of a real event, though that event did not come to fruition until Christ. God had prepared, Lewis said, an entire culture – indeed, many cultures – to recognize the real thing when it showed up.
Somehow I knew Jesus and His death on a cross – not bunnies, daffodils or chocolate – was at the heart of Easter.
Religious scholars of Lewis’ era argued this point in the exact opposite direction – that the Christian story, the Easter story, was derivative, an elaborate imitation and a hasty baptizing of pagan mythology. It was, they said, the Church’s marketing ploy – take the dominant religious meme of the day, a dying and rising god, fancy it up and relaunch it as the core tenet of your new faith. Give people a bigger, better, more beautiful resurrection.
I came across Lewis’ argument in my early 20s, soon after my own conversion to Christianity. I found it immediately credible and it remains so. For from a very young age, I carried this rumour, this intuition, the intimation of a real event. I glimpsed the truth that, not only at the heart of Easter, but at the heart of existence, hung a dying man. It took many more years before I saw the thing whole – that this man was God and that this God-man did not stay dead.
Later I became a pastor and remained so for 24 years. Then I became a seminary professor, and have been so for 12 years and counting. It’s been my calling to proclaim the real meaning of Easter – to keep drawing the connection between that season, and the dying and rising God. Mostly though it’s been my calling to believe it, this True Myth.
This has not always been easy. I have days, and sometimes seasons, when I struggle with it. In the past four years, my wife and I have led a ministry called New Story Community. A small group of Indigenous women live together for seven months, and commit to a journey of healing from their trauma and the habits that come out of it. These past four years I’ve heard the personal stories of these women. They trouble my sleep and my waking. The suffering. The loss. The abuse. It’s hard to reckon with.
One prayer especially has become urgent for me. Lord, show the power of your resurrection. Perform your Easter miracle here, now.
It is a slow work and hard. But over and over the risen Christ keeps showing up. Not just for the women, but for my wife and me. He usually comes veiled, in strange disguise, and it’s often only afterward we’re able to see it, to say, as the two disciples on the road to Emmaus said, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). I believe in the True Myth of a dying and rising God more than ever, but in a chastened way, a humbled way.
THE APOSTLE PAUL wrote this:
I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead (Philippians 3:10–11).
Paul aspired to two kinds of knowing, neither of which is mere intellectual knowing, both of which are deep experiential knowing. He wanted to know Jesus in His resurrection power. And he wanted to know Jesus in His suffering and death.
I like the first part of this, not so much the second.
But Paul by this time had figured something out, something that’s taken me many years to even glimpse – the two are joined. There’s no real knowing of the power of the rising God without a real knowing of the suffering of the dying God.
To grasp the fullness of the True Myth, we need to know both.
The women at New Story Community keep teaching me this. They keep showing me there is a fellowship of suffering, and at its most intimate we participate in Christ’s own agony, and abandonment and sorrow. And they keep showing me that resurrection, when it comes and keeps coming, is joy unspeakable and full of glory, but usually first shows up as a burning in our hearts.
LEANNE WAS a member of the church I once pastored. She translated our services into American Sign Language for a small community of deaf people, from opening welcome to closing benediction, and all that lay between. She was particularly good at translating sermons – she clearly improved mine greatly. She was so animated – in her hands mere words became whole scenes, huge pageantry. The congregation, both the deaf and the hearing, were often fixated on her, transfixed by her. I faded to a kind of background noise. I often wished I could speak as eloquently as she signed.
I asked her one day how she learned sign language. I forget what she told me. What I remember is the story she told after that – how her husband Ron became a Christian. Leanne was recruited by her former church to sign for their Easter service. The year was 2000. She herself was a strong Christian. But her friend Ron, later her husband, was something else. He was on a spiritual quest that took him in many directions, but not to Jesus. At least not by his intention.
The church asked Leanne to sign for one of their soloists performing Ray Boltz’s song “Watch the Lamb.” Leanne asked Ron, who also signed, to help her with it. They had dinner together, listened to the song repeatedly as they prepared the dinner, and afterward she practised signing it. To sign well you need to think in imagery, not just words. You need to picture the story, its motions, its colours, its drama. Only then can you find language to render it.
They listened over and over to the song.
Ron couldn’t get it out of his mind. Out of his heart. Out of his bone and muscle. He watched the lamb. He couldn’t turn away.
It’s part ballad, part anthem. It tells the story of Simon of Cyrene and depicts Simon (not named in the song) as a father who’s travelled to Jerusalem with his two small sons for the Passover festival. They get caught up in the events of Christ’s passion and Simon is forced to carry His cross.
Throughout the song the father has one refrain. “Watch the lamb,” he tells his sons. He means it literally – they’ve brought a lamb to sacrifice in the temple for Passover. But in the confusion, in the commotion, when Simon is ordered to carry Christ’s cross, the boys fail in their one duty. They lose the lamb.
The song’s last verse:
“Daddy, daddy, what have we seen here?
There’s so much that we don’t understand.”
So I took them in my arms,
And we turned and faced the cross,
Then I said, “Dear children, watch the lamb.”
Over and over Leanne and Ron listened, envisioning everything, embodying everything – the journey, the lamb, the cross, the suffering.
Ron couldn’t get it out of his mind. Out of his heart. Out of his bone and muscle. He watched the lamb. He couldn’t turn away.
Then came Easter morning. Leanne signed the service. And then she signed the song. Ron watched her bring the story of Christ’s suffering to life. He himself lived each moment.
Not long after, Ron put his entire trust in Jesus. Soon after, Leanne and Ron married.
That was 25 years ago this Easter. They’ve never turned back.
The True Myth of the dying and rising God has a way of doing that. He draws us over and over into the fellowship of His suffering.
And then, again and again, He welcomes us into the power of His resurrection.
Watch the lamb.
Mark Buchanan is an author (his latest work is a trilogy of novels entitled David Rise, David Reign and David Descend, see MarkBuchanan.net/Books) and associate professor of pastoral theology at Ambrose University in Calgary. Photo of lamb from Shutterstock.com.