Easter evening can be a disappointment.
The ham pan is clean. The kids have passed out from a sugar crash. A couple of eggs were overlooked in the hunt. (They’ll be found in July, rotting and covered with ants.) The pastels are packed away and the church staff is looking forward to a day off.
It feels like the elephant in the room on Easter night is the letdown.
What was all that hype about? The pastor said, “This changes everything.” We sang the words, “The greatest day in history!”
If all this is true, then why does it feel like so many of us have moved on by that evening or the next morning?
N.T. Wright would say we’ve not fully understood Easter. The renowned New Testament scholar describes Easter like this. “(Easter) is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins.”
Paul did set Easter (or more appropriately, the Resurrection) as the linchpin on which all our hopes hang. In 1 Corinthians 15:13-19, he goes further than Wright.
“But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins…If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
This is why many have said, “As goes the Resurrection, so goes Christianity.”
If Dr. Wright and the Apostle Paul are correct, then I think we’ve made some big mistakes with our approach to this day.
5 Biggest Mistakes Christians Make When Celebrating the Resurrection
1. We don’t prepare for Easter nearly as well as we do Christmas.
In America, Christmas far eclipses Easter, culturally and often in the church. Christmas feels bigger than Easter because we spend 4-6 weeks preparing for it - it’s in our face wherever we go. Even if many of those encounters are consumeristic and cultural, we’re thinking about Christmas for well over a month! For many Christians, especially those who don’t observe Lent, Easter preparation is often a few days at best.
2. We don’t celebrate the Resurrection much after Easter Sunday.
If Resurrection Sunday is the most significant event of our faith, shouldn’t we keep celebrating for more than a day? As an evangelical pastor, this is where I must tip my hat to my high-church brothers and sisters who bask in the Resurrection until Ascension Sunday (40 days after Easter). I’m not urging everyone move to following the liturgical calendar, but if the Resurrection party is short-lived, is it any wonder some think our hype is overblown?
3. On Easter, we often focus entirely on the cross.
I received an invitation to an Easter service recently which was dark and brooding in theme, with red and black colors. I mean, none of us wear empty tombs around our necks - we all wear crosses. How rarely do you see an empty tomb in a church logo? It’s almost always a cross. We struggle with what to do with the Resurrection, so we gravitate back to our familiarity with the cross. I’m not looking to pit the cross versus the empty tomb, but if there were a pendulum of focus, we’ve definitely swung hard in one direction.
4. We treat Easter as merely a one-time event or just impacting our eternity.
While Easter Sunday is the celebration of the event of Jesus’ resurrection, it’s so much more than that! A high point of many Easter services will be the sermon. But, what kind of sermon will that be? How will the message represent the meaning of the Resurrection today? Without Resurrection going beyond our “trip to heaven one day,” our hope is impotent, unable to speak to the deep places of need and brokenness in our world. The Resurrection of Jesus isn’t just a past event; it’s a prototype previewing all the ways Jesus is now at work today. The Resurrection isn’t just the source of our eternal hope; it’s the lens through which we see everything today.
5. We turn Easter into ethereal platitudes.
On social media, we post Easter memes which read “From suffering, good can come” or “Easter is proof that Death doesn’t win.” But, we need more than clichés. The Resurrection offers a vision of the future, which empowers us to face a broken world today. If we’re going to tell people “this changes everything”, we need to practically dig into how it does.
Our Opportunity Today
True Resurrection hope doesn’t deny reality; our hope defies reality. The Resurrection of Jesus filled His disciples with a defiant hope that faced down the most powerful empire on earth. Refusing to deny that the Resurrected Jesus was Lord, they were burned, stabbed, fed to lions, and crucified upside down. When Bubonic plague sent a city’s citizens fleeing, Resurrection people ran towards the danger. In less than 3 centuries, without modern technology to broadcast the message, faith in the Resurrection of Jesus spread from 120 people in an upper room to become the most pervasive belief in the Roman Empire.
As goes the Resurrection, so goes the Church. I think the world wonders if we truly believe the hype we’re selling. The days after Easter offer us our chance to answer the challenge.
Scott Savage is a pastor and a writer. He leads Cornerstone Church in Prescott, Arizona. Scott is married to Dani and they are the parents of three “little savages.” He is the creator of the Free to Forgive course and you can read more of his writing at scottsavagelive.com.
