Easter Isn’t Over (And Yes, You Read That Right)

If you walked into St. Francis the Sunday after Easter and said, “Wow, that was nice last week, see y’all at Christmas”, you wouldn’t be the first. And honestly, I get it.

In our culture, Easter is one Sunday. Lilies in the morning. Ham on the table by 2 p.m. A photo on the front porch where one kid is squinting and the other one is mid blink. By Monday, the chocolate is half priced at Publix and we’re all back to normal.

Except, and stay with me here, because this is one of the secret superpowers of the church calendar, Easter is not one day.

Easter is fifty days.

Yes, fifty. Five zero. Longer than Lent. Longer than Christmas. Longer than the average attention span of a 8 year old at the dinner table.

This year, Easter Day was April 5. Easter season runs all the way to Pentecost on May 24. So if your math is right (and let’s be honest, mine usually isn’t), we are smack in the middle of it.

Why It Matters

Now, why does that matter? And why am I writing about it on a random Wednesday in April?

Because I think most of us, including most of us in the church, never actually let ourselves stay in the joy.

We’re great at Lent. We can fast, give up coffee, repent, journal, and feel appropriately bad for forty days. We are professional self-reflectors. Type A penitents.

But fifty days of joy? Fifty days of resurrection?

That feels, almost, embarrassing.

Like we’re going to be found out.

Like we’re going to overdo it.

Like the world is too dark, too broken, too tired for fifty days of “Alleluia.”

But the Church, in her wisdom, has been quietly insisting on this for two thousand years: the resurrection is not a single news bulletin. It’s a season. It’s a way of being. It’s a long, slow re training of the human heart, which is far more comfortable with sorrow than it is with joy.

A Word from the 4th Century

Here’s a line from St. John Chrysostom’s Easter homily, preached sometime in the late 4th century, which we still read in many Orthodox churches at Pascha:

“Let no one fear death; the Savior’s death has set us free… He hath despoiled Hades, He that descended into Hades. Hell took a body, and discovered God.”

That’s not “Christ is risen, see you at Christmas.”

That’s “Christ is risen, and the gates of fear have been kicked off the hinges. Now hand me a chair, I’m staying a while.”

If You’re Not a Church Person

For my non church friends, and I know some of you read this blog, and I’m grateful for that, here’s how I would describe Easter season in the simplest possible terms:

It is fifty days where the people who follow Jesus deliberately practice noticing the goodness around them.

That’s it.

We sing a little louder. We eat a little better. We tell each other “Alleluia” in greeting. We let the babies be loud during prayers and we mean it. We light candles and we don’t apologize. We refuse, as much as we are able, to let cynicism have the last word.

Because something happened on a Sunday morning a long time ago in a garden, and the people who were there came home different.

And every spring, we try to remember.

Three Practices for the Rest of Easter

Here are three small, very doable practices for the rest of Easter season, whether you’ve been to church a thousand times or never:

1. Pick one beautiful thing per day and notice it.

Could be the sunlight on the marsh on the way to work. Could be the way your kid laughed at something stupid on TV. Could be the smell of someone else’s dinner cooking through the screen door.

Just notice. Don’t post it. Don’t optimize it. Don’t try to make it mean something. Easter joy is not curated. It’s received.

2. Tell somebody something good.

A real compliment. A specific gratitude. A memory that made you smile. Easter is a gospel, which means “good news”, and good news doesn’t stay shut up in our chests where it can rot.

3. Refuse, just for one day, to be cynical.

This one’s hard for me. I’m a priest, and I am also a southerner with opinions (Bless their heart…), and I love a good wry remark.

But cynicism is a cheap religion. Easter asks for something more expensive: hope.

Try one day this week of refusing to take the easy snarky route. See what happens to your insides.

“Cynicism is a cheap religion. Easter asks for something more expensive: hope.”

If This Is a Hard Season

Finally, a word for those of you who are reading this from a hard season.

I know that not every day is “Alleluia.” I know some of you are walking through grief, or illness, or a quiet kind of sadness that isn’t easy to explain. I know fifty days of joy can feel like an insult when one day of joy feels impossible.

The good news is, Easter doesn’t ask you to manufacture anything.

It just asks you to keep showing up. To eat. To breathe. To let other people sing the Alleluia for you when you can’t yet sing it yourself.

The empty tomb wasn’t an instruction. It was a gift.

You don’t have to earn it.

You just have to not look away.

So, happy still Easter, friends.

The lilies might be wilting on your porch.

But the season is just getting started.

And the One who walked out of the tomb on April 5 is still walking, through Ponte Vedra, through Nocatee, through your kitchen, through the carpool line, toward you.

Open the door.

Or don’t.

He’ll knock again tomorrow.

Citations & Further Reading

•         The Book of Common Prayer (1979), Collects for the Sundays of Easter, pp. 222–225.

•         St. John Chrysostom, “Paschal Homily” (4th century), tr. as found in The Festal Menaion (St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press).

•         Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (HarperOne, rev. ed. 1993), entry on “Joy.”

•         N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008), esp. ch. 16, “Resurrection and the Renewal of Creation.”