My high school emo kid dreams are coming true and I am going to see Dashboard Confessional this summer. In preparation, I have started to re-immerse myself into this world and in my steamy shower sound booth this morning I found myself belting out, “the grave that you refuse to leave, the refuge that you’ve built to flee, the place that you have come to fear the most.” I was really feeling it, y’all, and in true therapist fashion I started to get really curious about why, outside of nostalgia, that was.
It came to me really fast this time. It’s Saturday – the Saturday after Good Friday – the Saturday before Easter Sunday. I thought to myself, maybe this is the one day that I get to rejoin my tribe of origin in grieving the death of Jesus. I had to steady myself a moment. This is the one day in the Christian tradition where Emmanuel, “God with us”….was decidedly not there. I can’t count how many times I have heard the adage that you can’t have Easter without Good Friday – mainly, you can’t enjoy the celebration without the grief. For these moments, for this day, I feel once again connected to a stream that feels so very long ago and far away. Alas, tomorrow will come, sunrise services will commence, and Christians will go back to “normal”… where Jesus is “very much right here with me and on my side.”
I will go back to feeling, once again, feeling like a living exile.
But I have gotten to thinking about it. One of the biggest gifts of letting go of a literal interpretation of the Bible is that the meaning actually gets larger, wider, and more significant – not less. Could it be a historical event? Yes, and…even if it isn’t, there is a deep truth here. There is a truth that Jesus has to die before resurrection can come.
The Jesus, the savior that was expected to be a religious and political leader. The Jesus that was on our side and was going to take care of “those people” once and for all and return us to our “proper place” in the kingdom. The Jesus that would validate our judgments about our enemies and our own sense of righteousness. That Jesus died. It was our vision, our interpretation, our expectation, our projections. It seems, however, that a lot of us are still holding REAL tight to this Jesus. The Jesus we were taught in established institutions, the Jesus that feels deeply embedded in our narratives, the Jesus we’ve always carried with us.
So, like Mary, we hang out in the garden – the familiar place where it “makes sense” to look for Jesus. In our grief, we often cling to “the closest we can get” as an understandable way to mourn the distance between ourselves and the beloved that we have lost. But what about, “he is not here – he is risen?” What about Mary mistaking Jesus for the Gardner – surely one this intimate with him would recognize the person she most dreamed to see…
Sometimes resurrection doesn’t look like we expect. We expect to see Jesus in the garden. We cling to the places where we used to see him, to feel him, to find him. But maybe he is not there – maybe that is not where we will find him now. Maybe he is doing something new.
This is the third year (outside of COVID) that I will not be attending church on Easter. The other two Easters I was in labor. I was fraught with struggle over this decision, but as the water streamed down my back to the tune of 00’s emo this morning, I felt a familiar sense of peace. If I were to go to church this year it would be for one reason and one reason only – so that I don’t disappoint people or let them down. I am learning in this season of life that while those I love have every right to be disappointed and even to grieve that who I am is not who they dreamed that I would be. I also have every right to continue to discover, embody, and share who I actually am – no who I felt I was supposed to be. No, I won’t be in church this Sunday, but I will be celebrating the resurrection and I had to let my old understanding of Jesus, my old identity, my old defenses of people pleasing – I had to let them die to get to Easter morning. And it has been painful, and frightening, and exhilarating, and new. And Jesus is right here in the new with me. You’ll find me tomorrow in my garden, relishing with gratitude some time with people I love, and being brave enough to imagine something new.
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