When Easter is an Afterthought

but our humanity is a divine invitation

I have given very little thought to Easter this year. Life just keeps happening, and not all of it is hard. But everyday seems to have one thing stacked up upon another, sweet and salty sandwiched together with very little room in between. I’m struggling to find my breath.

Here in my tired bones and my tired brain and my tired feelings, I wonder if I should have done Easter differently. Perhaps with a little more forethought or planning, I could have infused a little more sacredness into these days and weeks. Perhaps then my heart would have been ready. Maybe then our boys would anticipate Easter for more than Reese’s eggs and Starburst jelly beans. Maybe.

But here we are on Good Friday, and Lent lingers like an afterthought—a song I hear dimly and want to sing, but I just cannot seem to find my voice. All I have is silence. A thick silence I cannot seem to shake.

While folding laundry this morning, the thought occurred to me: Maybe I don’t have to.

Growing up, I had a strange hesitation when it came to Jesus. It was the height of I Kissed Dating Goodbye culture, and Jesus was often talked about more as a substitute boyfriend than man of substance. More saccharine Savior than comforting friend. There was something about Jesus that felt mildly suspect or perhaps over-simplistic, so I kept him at arm’s length. I thanked him for the past and handed him my future, but had very little context for how to encounter him in the present.

About a year ago, my friend Lori wrote on Instagram about her own hesitation conversing with Jesus, how for most of her life she was more comfortable relating with God as Father or Holy Spirit, but Jesus she struggled to get near or comprehend. And I related. I related hard.

As I contemplated her words, an unspoken ache rose within me. I did not want a sugar-coated Jesus. I wanted a Jesus who sits down with us in the dirt.

I want to know—beyond my theoretical brain—the Jesus who is both fully God and fully human. I want to imagine the way he moved among the people. I want to picture his tired feet covered in Capernaum soil, the smile that spread across his face as he brought that first sip of miracle wine to his lips, or the deep exhale that escaped his chest when he finally found a few moments alone. I want to relate to Jesus not as some cheap imitation or far-off deity, but as a person familiar with the finitude of skin, “fully human in every way” (Heb. 2:17). And I want to know not only the historical Jesus, but also the Jesus who is with us still, whose presence I’m still learning to recognize in word and wind and ways of knowing that cannot easily be explained.

And perhaps silence is exactly what we need to see our humanity as an invitation. Because even though these holy days feel like a fog, disorienting and full of questions and flailing, it is here in the dirt of our lives we become truly acquainted with Jesus, who spread his arms wide open in the fullness of divine mystery and familiarity with mankind. It is here that our humanity is not a limitation, but a place for Jesus to find us—a sacred space for him to inhabit, to expand, and to dwell.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve placed my Target order for Starburst jelly beans and Cadbury eggs, and I’ll pick them up later today along with a few new packs of socks. But this Easter, instead of trying to manufacture some sort of sacredness, I am going to putter into Sunday, sit down in the dirt, and simply wait for Jesus to come near.