As I look over the world, as I look at America, I can see Easter coming in race relations. I can see it coming on every hand. I see it coming in Montgomery.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Easter sermon, 1957
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
The celebration of Easter is familiar to many of us. On Easter Day, we might wear our best clothes to church, anticipate the finest music of the year and look forward to joyous preaching. After church, some of us hustle to a special brunch or quickly head home to prepare Easter dinner. Those of us in more liturgical traditions may be familiar with the Easter Season, also known as Eastertide, the subsequent 50 days from the Resurrection to Pentecost. During this time, we celebrate Jesus’ victory over death, sin and suffering.
But an Easter Life is something else altogether. It is a life based on the implications that Jesus’ real, personal, bodily resurrection is more than dogma or “something you must believe” to get into heaven.
Eugene Peterson says in his book, Practice Resurrection:
When we practice resurrection, we continuously enter into what is more than we are…something we do not originate and cannot anticipate. When we practice resurrection, we keep company with Jesus, alive and present…the practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life…life that is the last word, the Jesus life.
The new life that began at the Resurrection ultimately determines what’s real. When human beings repent, they can find forgiveness in the love and grace of God revealed in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and ascension. The Resurrection invites us to live in a new kind of world. Racism loses. Poverty is defeated. Injustice is snuffed out. The oppressed are freed.
But I believe we’re all asking a similar question: If we are living in a new world, one marked by the resurrection of Jesus, why are things so bad? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., preaching on Easter at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, said we’re not alone in this predicament:
…it looked dark for men centuries ago [at the crucifixion], looked like everything that [that Jesus’ friends] had stood for had gone.
Later in his sermon, King said that after the brutal, unjust killing of Jesus:
The universe to [the disciples], at that time, seemed to have no meaning. The universe was now justifying injustice. The universe was now on the side of godlessness. The universe was on the side of the forces of evil now. We can see Jesus there dying on the cross amid two thieves. The most righteous man that ever entered human history dying a most ignominious death. We look at him there and all that goes with goodness, all that goes with nobility, all that goes with that which is sublime, seems to be crushed now. And that was a dark moment.
But King knew one life-altering fact: Darkness never has the last word. The Resurrection does.
[Easter] says to us sometimes a vicious mob may take possession and crucify the most meaningful and sublime and noble character of human history. It says to us that one day that same Jesus will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C. so that history takes on a new meaning. Easter says to us that the forces of darkness, the forces of evil, the forces of injustice must finally come to the light and must finally come to the forefront. And the forces of darkness and evil must finally pass away. Thank God that truth crushed to earth will rise again.
Even though the universe was diametrically opposed to King’s godly work, the Resurrection provided hope that animated his “I can see Easter coming.” We live in the last era of God’s story. Indeed, some day “the forces of darkness and evil will finally pass away…truth crushed to earth will rise again.”
King wrote in The Trumpet of Conscience:
If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.
When we live with King’s confident hope, we are freed both from our inner critic and the doubters who ridicule our expectation and desire for God to finally have his loving and just way among humanity.
Disappointment inevitably accompanies a commitment to seeking justice. But sorrow is temporary. The new and final Easter reality has sprung up among us. Laboring for the good of others as God’s justice-seekers aligns us with the fulfillment of his purposes. Resurrection also gives us the humble confidence we need to stick with the painful disappointments and setbacks that accompany justice-seeking.
King’s “I can see Easter coming” is a word of hope. It alerts us to the truth that Easter is much more than a day or even a season. Easter invites us to live and move and daily have our being in the resurrected Jesus Christ.
Amen.