Easter

Easter is one of my absolute favorite holidays, because of all of the deeply beautiful things it reminds me of. God became human. Our creator took on skin; skin that gets broken and bruised and dry and bloody, and God did all of that for us. God already knew grief and pain and rejection, but we couldn’t see that. We didn’t have the eyes required to understand God’s pain as he watched us hurt ourselves and live in disobedience; and because we couldn’t see, God chose to walk around among us, showing us how to be who we were created to be.

God took on flesh to live love, and lived love to the point of ultimate sacrifice. God took on physical pain, brutal betrayal, and total rejection. In doing that God joined us in our suffering in a way that we could understand, even as his his pain is still even greater than we can understand, and God did so in a way that challenges all of our views on what a savior ought to look like.

 Than after the bloody mess of the cross God showed us what is possible. God showed us redemption in the form of resurrection. God showed us that even the worst pain can be made right, even the worst rejection can be healed, and in all this, God loves, even as we fail to love.

Celebrating Easter reminds me that God not only understands the pain of being human but has chosen to live in that pain and redeem us through it. These simple truths are often easy to forget and nonetheless the basics of faith.

* I originally wrote this for my church newsletter. 

If you would like some additional interesting reading for Easter thoughts, I enjoyed Rachel Held Evens blog posts on the women of the Passion, 1, 2, 3, 4