Easter Advent

I love the range of emotions Younger Daughter gives to Jesus — anger, as he clears the Temple (we see the effects — spilled money, freed doves — but not Jesus himself); serene happiness as he shares the Last Supper with his friends; grief as he prays in Gethsemene; and an unreadable, inaccessible expression on the cross. (His eyes are X’s.)

I’m realizing that the lesson for me this Easter is that I need to love the world. Not exactly new, is it? But I’m realizing in a deeper way the subtle rejections that run like tripwires through my personality. It’s an insight provoked by the suffering hawk I saw the other day. I realize there is evil and pain on a far greater scale in the world. But we live and learn in the small-scale events of our own lives, the unavoidable things stuck under our noses, and the sight of this particular instance of gratuitous suffering seemed to reawaken the never-far-from-the-surface distress about all of it. All of it is traceable, ultimately, to the sin we humans brought into being.

“How do you feel about it?” I asked God. “You made the creatures that suffer. You don’t stop it from happening. Yet your word speaks all the time of how precious your creation is to you. I know of some of the explanations people give for why you allow it. But how do you deal with it? Surely it bothers you more.”

“I love,” he replied immediately.

I’ll be a long time wringing out all that this answer means. But I know that it’s what this weekend is about. Jesus descended into the worst pain, the worst consequences of sin, out of love. He didn’t reject suffering. He didn’t wish for a different world, or erase this one and start over, or turn his back and let it spin inevitably into destruction. He entered it fully, embraced his dreadful calling fully, without reservation.  That is what love does. Or maybe, that is the condition for love to come into being. As long as there is some holding back from involvement in the whole bloody mess of a fallen world, as long as there is some waiting for a better option, as long as there is some resentment about the terms of our existence here on this earth, there can’t be true love.

I can’t conjure up such love either. I am not capable. All I can do is ask God to create it in me through his spirit. It’s an incredible prayer, made prayable by Jesus’ triumphal entry into his suffering world.

We have been unwrapping items in our Easter countdown basket. These are the ones we’ve opened so far:

And these are the ones that remain to be unwrapped today and tomorrow.

On our way home from a wonderful Good Friday service last night, as the girls discussed the way candles had figured into both Advent and Good Friday services, Older Daughter said, “Advent in a word that means ‘countdown,’ isn’t it?”

“It’s a word for ‘coming,'” I replied. “At Advent we celebrate Jesus’ coming into the world. At Easter, in a way, we’re celebrating his going — and the Holy Spirit’s coming.”

Both Christmas and Easter are Advents. Maybe I have always seen Easter as marking Jesus’ departure. This year I’m aware in a new way that it marks his arrival.