Easter Sunday

Today is a peculiar day. It's a day whose religious implications pass by us almost unnoticed: Even if we're aware of what the holiday celebrates, I don't think we stop to reflect on what it really means.

Today is Easter Sunday, the day when Jesus conquered Death. By now, it's a story that's been re-told, re-imagined, re-arranged so many times that we hardly even think about what it's trying to say. This story is getting old. It's getting too old for us. It doesn't seem to mean very much, not anymore, not to us. But we're not the people whom this story is for. We're not the target audience.

The story of Easter was meant for people to whom Death is not a distant threat, not someone who waits at the threshold of old age, not a snarky skeleton with a scythe or a woman in black robes. The story of Easter was written for those to whom Death is an enemy; for those who live in constant fear of plague and famine and bullets. Because death may be a natural thing, and it may be something that we can accept and talk about and understand, but ultimately, it is destructive. Death ends things. We can wax poetical about it, but at the end of the day, death hurts – not so much its victims as it hurts those who are left behind. But we can't hope to understand this. I don't understand it. I have never seen the ugly face of death up close – the random, pointless, indiscriminately cruel face of death – and I pray I never will.

The story of Easter is written for those who have seen that face. It is written for those who have seen people crucified by the Romans, slaughtered in the World Wars, burned by napalm, taken by the Black Plague. Those people are not us.

But if there's one thing we should take away from the story of Easter, it's that those people are still out there, and to them, this story is still meaningful. It doesn't matter that Jesus came back; that's not the important part. What matters is that things got better, that things will get better.

And so, the true meaning of the story is this: If we work hard, if we live our lives with grace and virtue and compassion, then there may come a day when nobody needs to hear it.