After a 40-day period dedicated to fasting, self-denial, and prayer, Christians begin a new phase in their calendar: a 50-day celebration of Christ’s resurrection, which ends on Pentecost Sunday.
It is deliberate that the celebration of Easter lasts longer than that of Lent. And now, at a time of suffering in which hope is more difficult than usual to maintain, it is a good moment to keep that lesson in mind. For all the pain and loss that the world’s peoples are enduring, a brighter future awaits.
Christians and non-Christians alike can surely appreciate the panic that must have gone through the minds of Christ’s apostles on the days leading up to the first Easter. Their teacher, a man in whom they had placed great hope, and whom they had given up everything to follow, had just been executed in the most brutal manner conceived in the eight centuries since Rome’s founding. Even worse, Christ’s had been a death utterly without dignity. Before being nailed to the cross like a kind of criminal, the Gospels say he was scourged, dressed up like a mock king, jeered at, sucker-punched, beaten, and spat upon. He was not allowed just to die but had to be canceled (as we might put today) before he was killed.
The apostles were still small-minded men at this point. They lacked the vision to understand that there was something to hope for. With just one exception, they hid in fear during and after the crucifixion.
Jesus had even given them warnings. Some were veiled, as when he compared himself to Jonah, the prophet who had been in the belly of the whale for three days. Some of the signs were pretty obvious, as when he told them in so many words that he would be put to death in Jerusalem and rise three days later. And then, the very night before he died, after the Passover supper, Jesus had literally told them he was offering them his body and blood for the forgiveness of sins. What exactly had they expected would happen?
It is human nature to underestimate suffering, pain, and fear, even when one sees them coming. Likewise, in times of suffering, it can be difficult even to imagine what joy is like.
To overcome a great global plague is not nearly as great a feat as to overcome death itself. But the virtue of hope, which the apostles lacked at the time Jesus died, is one that the country must now turn to and build upon.
Last week, we learned that the rates of hospitalization in New York City have plummeted. The net flow of patients into intensive care has turned negative. Deaths continue to add up, yet these may be early signs that the tide of plague is slowing here and will soon recede.
The current situation is trying, as it obstructs the natural, human flow of both social and economic activity. Man was not made to live in this sort of isolation. How much would any one among us, whatever his or her faith tradition, love to walk into a house of worship today to join with friends or neighbors?
Happy Easter. May the United States weather this storm and emerge from it stronger.
