Is it Easter Again?

Spring has returned from her hibernation. 

The yellow-frothed daffodils declare it.

The bumbling bees distill her sweetness.

The warm sunshine embodies her return.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but for some reason I am.  I’m in the midst of my twenty-fourth  sun-dappled spring, and I still stare with beauty-hungry eyes at the indescribable thrill of Winter peeling away and Spring emerging.  It’s as if I stumbled upon a Monarch emerging from her cocoon.

Why should I be surprised, though, when God promised that “While the earth remains,

seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease”? {Genesis 8:22}

God promised, and the birth of spring this year is as if He is saying to me: “I am a living God, and I am worthy of the trust of your heart.”  The very sunrise and moonrise that I think so inevitably routine is really the height of His exhilarating faithfulness to me and to each one of you! 

And look—here it is the Passover time again.  It is the week in which each step Christ took was a step nearer the cross.  It is nearing the Sunday on which we recollect His resurrection, sing songs in that section of the hymnal we otherwise ignore, celebrate a feast day, and dress up in our very prim-and-proper best. 

And yes, for the twenty-fourth time I’ll be celebrating Easter this Sunday. 

But that celebration is anything but inevitable.

It is anything but routine, and it should be anything but glib. 

For on that day, two thousand years ago, the inevitable Winter of death was vanquished forever. 

On that day, the Autumn routine of hazy rituals and symbolic sacrifices was proven to be all a preparation: for the Spring of Christ!

On that Spring Sunday, a day of death turned into a day of resurrection, a day of mourning into a day of giddy joy.  And that was only the prequel to what the blinding light of the Summer reign of King Jesus will be!

Glance at any calendar, and the first day of spring will be calculated out.  “Easter Sunday” will be noted for all to see.  But the beauty of spring coming each and every year is not that God lacks the creativity to invent a new season, but that each winter I forget that spring exists. 

And the grace of Easter coming each and every spring is not that God has nothing He can do to top that climax of the Gospel so He has us watch reruns every year.  The grace of Easter coming every spring is that in moments of anguish, I would otherwise forget that the miracle of Resurrection Sunday even exists.  

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“Say You Will,” © 2009 Brian Wolfe, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.
“the winds of skagit,” © 2010 Ryan Heaney, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.