The Easter season - an unmerited celebration

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

How are you planning to celebrate Easter? It’s a question that might leave us scratching our heads because we have all probably already had our standard combination of mass, chocolate, and a roast for dinner. For many of us, the celebration is already over for another year.

But however much we may forget it, the fact remains that Easter lasts not for one day, or even an octave, but for 50. I have to admit that in previous years, after stuffing myself with chocolate for a couple of days, I’ve let the Easter season slip my mind altogether until I get to mass each week – not exactly a fitting response to the resurrection, God’s great declaration that death has no power over us anymore. Curiously though, I never forget Lent. I may forget or omit my Lenten promises, but I never forget that it’s happening. 

For some reason, we never seem to put as much energy into celebrating Easter as we do into suffering through Lent. It’s a funny thing because, in theory, Easter sounds more attractive than Lent. If any of us were asked to choose between the joy of the resurrection and a season of fasting, penance, and abstinence, you would expect us all to opt for the former. But while we like the sound of eternal gladness and consummate delight, these things are outside our experience. What we are used to is the concept of striving for a goal rather than obtaining it, of becoming better rather than being happy and, crucially, controlling rather than surrendering. Lent may not be comfortable, but it does seem like something we can manage through our own efforts – not that we ever do “manage” or “succeed” at Lent, but we like the idea that we can. In fact, I’m pretty sure that, if left to my own devices, I would simply continue Lent indefinitely, constantly telling myself that if I could have just one more week, I would get it right this time. 

With Easter, however, we find ourselves obtaining a goal that is beyond our control. We don’t even get to decide where the finish line is: We have 6.5 weeks to struggle and then our suffering time’s up. Then ready or not, the season of joy and completion is here, the fullness of all time and the wiping away of every tear. I believe we all struggle with this, because perfect happiness just doesn’t happen in this life. In every perfect moment, there’s always something still lacking still, some need still unfulfilled, and no matter what we achieve, we perfectionist human creatures are never satisfied with ourselves. It’s an inevitable fact of living in a broken world that our own hearts will always accuse us, secretly demanding a perpetual, Easterless Lent.

But one of the most beautiful aspects of God’s loving fatherhood is that he wants better things for us than we want for ourselves. In Easter, he puts a halt to our miserable cycle of self-accusation. Like the rainbow after the flood, he says “Stop, I’ve had enough now”, and steps in to save us himself, with the enormous sacrifice of the Crucifixion. Have we earned it? Absolutely not. I certainly haven’t. My Lent has been, well, slipshod and it’s hard to say if I’ve grown at all. But that’s not the point. There comes a certain moment when the prodigal son’s long journey is over, and even though he hasn’t fixed any of the damage he did, the father is overjoyed and throws the party to end all parties. Likewise, God wants us to join in the celebrations of Easter anyway, even though we haven’t and can’t really merit them on our own terms. We hate that, we hate to be beggars receiving charity instead of independent citizens earning our keep. We want to be grownups, and yet we are children who the Father saves and rewards out of his merciful love. That’s the difficult thing about Easter – we don’t win grace, we simply receive it. 

To be fair, while these are all beautiful ideas, it’s still hard to translate them into a concrete means of celebration. After all, we can’t really plan for something that is totally beyond our control. But what we can do is simply remind ourselves often that God is waiting to shower us with graces this Easter. We can try to dismiss self-recrimination and self-pity and focus instead on being receptive, attentive and grateful: asking God for favours, watching out for them and thanking him constantly for the things he has done for us. We can think of ourselves as the prodigal son arrived home, suddenly fed after weeks of starvation, wearing a robe and a ring after weeks of rags and surrounded by friends after weeks of lonely wandering. It does us good to think like this, to really sink into the knowledge that, thanks to Christ’s obedience and self-sacrifice (he is not the bitter elder brother of the parable), God is now our Father.  And even though we still have miles to go in this earthly life before we reach our heavenly home, we can take this time to sharpen not only our hope and longing for it, but also our confidence. If God is our Father, then he will make paradise possible for us.