What Kind of Easter Is This?

“THEY WERE AFRAID.” Those are the last words of the earliest manuscripts of Mark’s gospel (16:8)—the oldest of the four gospels. Mark ends his story about Jesus with Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome at the empty tomb. Terror seizes them. They flee in shocked silence. The end. What kind of Easter is this?

Scribes and theologians thought the same, so a couple centuries later they added different endings to Mark—easier endings, with Jesus coming back to offer further teachings. In Mark’s original Easter account, however, there is no resolution to the story. Instead, we read about three women at a tomb, bewildered. Here, resurrection doesn’t resolve anything. Instead, the event unsettles. The absence of a corpse provokes questions and invites a hope in the promise of unimaginable possibility. “Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee,” a strange messenger in the empty tomb tells them, “there you will see him.”

Easter is an ending without a conclusion, a story without finality. The end returns us back to the beginning—to Galilee, where Jesus was born, where he was baptized, where he gathered disciples, where he healed the sick, fed the hungry, and preached good news. Resurrection means that nothing, not even death, will prevent Jesus’ invitation for us—who are weak and fearful, bewildered by a world we can’t control—to follow messengers who guide into the mysteries of Christ in the here and now.

April 4

Grandmother’s Table

“THE LORD OF hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food,” Isaiah proclaims (25:6). He prophesies a heavenly banquet: chairs crowded around a table, plates and bowls piled high with food, with God as a host. God’s like mi abuelita (my grandmother), who would always have an olla on the stove, boiling chicken for her arroz con pollo. I’d show up in the afternoon with my sister, and my grandma would spoon hefty portions of arroz con pollo into bowls for us. I’d show up in the evening with my cousins, and she’d serve us arroz con pollo before we went out for the night. At her house, when visitors stopped by, she would insist that they sit down for a feast. Her table belonged to her family, and to all the guests who became family.

Her kitchen was a glimpse of “the kin-dom of God,” as mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz puts it. She describes la comunidad de fe as la familia de Dios—the community of faith as the family of God—where we are all kin. “For us Latinas,” Isasi-Díaz explains, “salvation refers to having a relationship with God, a relationship that does not exist if we do not love our neighbor.” God’s salvation looks like my grandmother’s house, where there’s always room around the table for another neighbor, another stranger, another guest, as God expands our vision of who are our kin. At God’s table we learn how to belong to one another, we learn how to love each other, we experience the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy: “The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food ... let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation” (verse 6, 9). Salvation is a meal, an unending communion feast. God is like mi abuelita, who has already prepared a place for you at her table.

April 11

Easter Economics

OMNIA SUNT COMMUNIA (all things in common). That was the rallying cry of Anabaptist communities throughout Europe in the early part of the 16th century. They took the slogan from the Latin translation of Acts 4:32, where we read about the first congregations organizing themselves as proto-communist communities: “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.”

The book of Acts documents how the gospel changes the way people understand their property. Jesus’ resurrection instigates new economic relations. When the early Anabaptists lived into this Easter call, they were persecuted. Swiss authorities condemned their lives of faith with threats of punishment. A suppression decree from Zurich in 1527 stated, “[Anabaptists] hold and say that no Christian may either give or receive interest or income on capital, and that all temporal goods are free and common and everyone can have full property rights to them.” Their economic practices were deemed heretical. In 1571, the Church of England denounced Anabaptists for their Christian economics. “The riches and goods of Christians are not common,” the Book of Common Prayer still holds, “as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.”

This Anabaptist economic tradition has evolved into Mennonite commitments to mutual aid, where congregations such as mine set aside a line in our budgets for the redistribution of funds—“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs,” as Karl Marx wrote. These verses from Acts describe the economic effects of resurrection. Easter faith was a communal life dependent on the abundance of God, the same God who provided manna in the wilderness, where each gathered according to their need (Exodus 16:16-21).

April 18

Enfleshed Peace

GHOSTS HAUNT THE living to avenge those who’ve been wronged. They represent the unfinished business of the dead. As the writer of Luke’s gospel alludes: “They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost” (24:37). The disciples are convinced that this figure of Jesus in their midst is a phantom, there to settle the score, because they are guilty. Only a few days earlier, they’d abandoned Jesus. They had deserted their friend in his time of need—even denying that they knew him. On that first Easter, at dusk, in the city where Jesus was killed, within walking distance from his grave, the disciples find themselves with a presence. And they are terrified.

“At first they saw Jesus as a manifestation of death,” Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe preached on this resurrection account. “They have to learn that he is a manifestation of life.” Jesus tries to calm his friends with a reassurance that he hasn’t come with a grudge. “Jesus stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you’” (verse 36). The friends need evidence, so Jesus first shows them his wounds; then he has them watch him eat—all as proof of his bodiliness, his aliveness. “For a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (verse 39).

Jesus does all that he can to convince his friends that he is not a ghost on a mission of vengeance. “Repentance and forgiveness,” he says, for all the nations, beginning in Jerusalem, the city where he was killed, where the crowds turned on him and his disciples deserted him (verse 47). Jesus returns to the site of his betrayal, to the people who renounced him, in order to announce forgiveness. He won’t let the forces of alienation and death govern his life. Instead, Jesus surprises the guilty with an offer of peace.

April 25

Human Scapegoats

PETER CONFRONTS THE leaders of his people with a truth about themselves and their society: You killed Jesus, who was “the stone that was rejected by you, the builders” (Acts 4:11). The authorities, these builders of society, turned Jesus into a scapegoat in their attempt to maintain power. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, literary philosopher René Girard describes the scapegoat mechanism as a ritual “to transfer onto an animal everything likely to poison relations between members of the community.” Girard continues, “The effectiveness of the ritual was the idea that the sins were expelled with the goat and then the community was rid of them.” The sacrifice attempts to restore order and reinvest administrators of the law with control over an unruly population.

That world is our world. We too organize our lives according to systems of governance that banish members of our communities to prisons—their punishment as a ritual of expiation to redeem our social body from crime. “Criminal justice” is another name for the scapegoat mechanism. Lawmakers and enforcers reassure us that they’ll preserve the common good, if we will stand aside while they snatch and incarcerate our neighbors.

The death penalty pushes the scapegoat function of our punitive society to the extreme, which exposes the violent impulse at the heart of U.S. domestic power. “Congress has expressly authorized the death penalty,” said then-Attorney General William Barr as he announced his desire to resume executions during the Trump administration. “The Justice Department upholds the rule of law.”

The execution of Jesus puts us all on notice. The law is lawless. The rulers are unruly. Societies demand bloodletting. We have grown comfortable with systems of punishment that promise us safety if only we’re willing to make some sacrifices.