More than one Sunday

The early Christians didn’t believe that Easter was just one day. Easter was an entire season of feasting, a season that lasted for fifty days. It was supposed to trump Lent in length and intensity. We were supposed to celebrate the resurrection for that long.

But today, we observe Lent. We do our disciplines. Then we celebrate Easter on Sunday. We hunt for chocolate eggs and dress up. But by Monday morning, life goes back to normal.

Why don’t we observe the Great Fifty Days? I don’t think it’s because we don’t like parties, or we refuse to celebrate. I think we can’t celebrate for that long because we have forgotten how to sustain joy. We simply don’t know how.

Jesus did not appear just once after he died. He appeared over and over again, in different ways, over a period of forty days. On the fortieth day, his body was physically lifted up into heaven in front of the disciples. And on the fiftieth day, Jesus gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit to inspire us so that we could continue to do God’s work in the world.

Resurrection is the heart and soul of Christianity. It is the reason we exist, the reason why a peasant who walked and taught along the shore of Galilee for three years and died on a cross might still be remembered today. Because he came back to us. He lives still.

The early Christians called the event of the resurrection the Mysterium Tremendum. The great mystery. It cannot be rationalized or broken down into sound bites. Our minds will never understand what happened. It can only be glimpsed through the stories that the disciples and others told about how Jesus returned and what he said to them.

~Excerpted from the Introduction to Resurrecting Easter: Meditations for the Great 50 Days by Kate Moorehead (Morehouse Publishing, 2013)