Easter Is For Losers

This past Easter was not that happy chocolate-strewn joyfest it usually is. For openers, our youngest was down with the flu for most of the week preceding Easter, and that same virus proceeded in our home from host to host, not satisfied merely to take out only one of us. Before it was over, almost all of us had received our share of the misery.

All part of the pallor of this glorious resurrection week.

But all of this was just backdrop to the greater shadow hanging over my Easter week. In a recent blog, I touched on a Christmas-gift injury: a ruptured thumb tendon. Well, that should have been healed by March, but as one doctor put it recently, "Congratulations! You won the lottery!"

Hardy-har-har. He was referring to the fact that I re-ruptured it in mid-March. Re-ruptures that many weeks after surgery place me among the unlucky 1% that the other 99% do not envy.

So on Easter Sunday, I was awaiting a doctor's appointment on Tuesday to get a second opinion on whether and how we might try to restore some functionality to my right thumb. But here's the strange thing....

All these bodily ailments made Easter all the more special.

Yes, strange to say, this miserable Easter Sunday stands above the rest. This Easter I celebrated what we're supposed to be celebrating all along:

A final victory that is yet to come. A victory for losers.

I've come to appreciate the practice of giving something up Lent. Doing so doesn't make me holy, but it does remind me of loss and helps me to await the arrival of Easter with greater vigilance. But these lenten denials are just 2D imitations of 3D suffering, because after Easter has passed we joyfully resume consumption of that which we had temporarily denied ourselves.

My thumb injury, however, didn't go away on Easter morning, and it served as a poignant reminder that Easter is for permanent losers. The significance of Easter will grow for us in an intimate way when we face death as a more present reality.

This is not to play down the blessings we experience here on Earth as disciples of Christ. They are real. But the great victory Christ has won for us is over death. And, for now, we're alive.

Yes, my thumb injury introduced me to permanent loss and to hints of my mortality. But in the grand scheme of things, it's a minor setback.

It's been a different story, however, for a dear friend of mine. I received news yesterday that his wife had drowned in a tragic accident. On an Easter vacation.

A husband bereaved. Three children, the youngest still just a toddler, now without a mother. Can anyone understand the darkness he faces? Not me.

But Jesus does. Jesus faced death. Met it. And overcame it. For us.

For my friend I pray in the midst of this all-consuming darkness that a glimmer of light will shine, giving him Easter's hope for a day yet to come.

He will see his wife again. His children will see their mother again.

1 Corinthians 15:54
When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

Now more than ever, I am keenly aware of that first word: When.