NEW IS MESSY

Easter Sunday 2025 at Aldersgate was special with beautiful music, a message of hope, wonderful decorations, flowers, and everyone dressed up in their Sunday best.  This type of celebration seems to be what is expected by popular church culture in America on Easter Sunday.  And don’t misunderstand me, I love the Easter celebrations. But in reality, the actual gospel story is practically the opposite of how we celebrate the most important event in history.  It is not a story of Easter bunnies, chocolate, singing, flowers, or fancy clothes.  In fact, the Easter story is downright messy.  It is a story about flesh and blood, dirt, pain and most critically, it is about how God brought redemption to a world in a way no one expected.

As I was reading the resurrection story on Easter, I was thinking about the first person at the tomb on Sunday morning, and wondering what Mary Magdalene expected to find when she arrived?  And then I wondered why she didn’t recognize Jesus when they came face to face in the garden?  Was it because her life experience told her that it couldn’t be Jesus, because she had watched him die on Friday?  Or was it because Mary didn’t see a Jesus dressed for Easter Sunday service but instead was looking at a Jesus that had been whipped and then beaten, crucified, and buried for several days?

One of the first times I came to grips with what Jesus suffered was when I saw Mel Gibson’s movie the Passion.  The true horror of the whipping, the beatings and the crucifixion struck home, and it was clear the cleaned-up versions we see in modern churches bear little resemblance to what really occurred.  And what really occurred was that the Creator God, who was tired of being limited by our interpretation of his nature, decided to enter this world in the least impressive manner possible, in a filthy stable.  Then later, after he gathered a group of followers, several of whom were sketchy characters at best, he started travelling the countryside, turning water into wine, eating with the wrong people, angering the financial and religious establishment, and generally proclaiming a whole new way of thinking and living.  He touched the unclean, used spit and dirt to heal the blind, and made statements that subverted the status quo, like “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” and “sell all your have and give it to the poor.”

And maybe the thing that really upset people, especially the religious institutions, wasn’t the question, “Is Jesus like God?”  Maybe the question that upset them was, “What if God is like Jesus?”  What if the best way to understand God is not through religion, not through a sin and punishment program, but through an actual person who did it right?  What if the best way to know God is to look at how God revealed himself through Jesus?  Because that seems to change everything.  If what we see in Jesus is God’s true nature revealed, then what we are dealing with is a God who is unafraid to change the entire dialogue (no swords or chariots, tanks, or jets) and write a whole new story, not in a pretty clean version, but a story like real life, a story written in flesh and blood.  A story where God gets his hands dirty for us, a story where God rises to new life with dirt still under his fingernails and is mistaken for a gardener.

 So, while in 2025 we may try and clean up the Easter story so that visitors will be impressed on Sunday, the God of Easter, the God who brings life out of death, just doesn’t seem to care about appearances.  May be the true God is not satisfied with making you look good, or appear nicer, because that’s not what resurrection really looks like.  Because the gospels just don’t seem to describe to me a God who is concerned about appearances.  The gospel story describes a God who is concerned about making you new, making you a new creation.  And in my experience new doesn’t always look perfect, new usually involves work and pain, because like the resurrection story, new can be messy.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen! Christ is risen Indeed!

Brad