Missing Easter

[Have a look at some of my thoughts on our prayers for our country during this Coronavirus time in Praying for a hungry and thirsting nation]

If you're a Christian then I expect you feel a little like you're missing Easter this year in both senses. Despite the live-streamed services, despite the Easter themed Bible readings and even perhaps despite the efforts to make Easter special for your children, it feels like somehow we're not  really doing Easter this year, we're missing it just this once, and you miss that, it's created a gap and a longing.

I suspect if you're a church leader, then it's an even more surreal experience. However you're "creating content," as they say, for your people and I imagine you're working hard at it, there will be that sense of loss. You're missing Easter somehow.

I find myself missing Easter especially this year. Having left a ministry post in December and not, as yet, having got going with a new one, for the first time in a decade I've not been preparing sermons and thinking of evangelistic talks and strategies around Easter. As I've read over the Easter message with my family, I've felt this incredible sadness at not being able to really talk to anybody else about it.

More or less I've been doing what most of the country has been doing. Looking after the children, going for my daily walk, doing P.E. with Joe and (it hurts less now) and in my case, supporting the NHS keyworker in the house. But that isn't enough - not for me and not for anyone.

What I've realised is that this is not what I was made for. If there's anything that a lockdown does, it gives you time to feel your situation. For me personally it's the realisation that God made me to preach the gospel, to teach sound doctrine and to disciple people. My situation has changed, but my plans for the future must not. I felt that already, but being socially distanced from church, at Easter, has made it even more uncomfortable.

Now I know that in one sense the Bible doesn't command Holy Week celebrations and I don't, like some people, feel the pain of not being in a particular building. I really do think the church is not the building but the people and my theology of sacred space extends from the OT temple through the NT people of God, to the new creation, without running through a particular present day geography. However, the feeling of missing Easter does, despite that, come down to missing church.

On the Thursday before he died Jesus told us to remember him in what became known as the Lord's Supper (e.g. Mark 14:22-24). At Easter, we especially think of this - Jesus' body broken and his blood shed for our salvation, so we could be part of God's new covenant people. This remembering is a communal thing - we need a church to do it. So Paul writes:

"The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." (1 Corinthians 10:16-17)

For me, part of my longing in missing Easter is that I miss my calling or vocation or whatever word you want to call it. I miss being what I think God has made me to be. But there is something deeper than that. We are all missing Easter if we're Christians because we're missing the body. We are one body and when we're not together and we're not able to take the Lord's Supper with each other we sense the stretching of the bonds of our one body. That is a good longing in a sad and broken situation, a little like your longing for heaven in a broken and sinful world.

If you feel like you are missing Easter, maybe it's a good thing, because you are missing what should, in normal circumstances, be there. You are, despite the best efforts of our churches, missing something important about being the one body of Christ. The physical reality of that body feels more distant. So if you're missing Easter this year, I think it's OK. You should be feeling it.

But as always with the gospel, sadness is turned to joy. There will be a time, not only when we meet again in church, but when we meet Jesus, in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:17), when we will be created anew and when all this sickness and sadness and suffering will have faded away (Revelation 21:1-8).

We may miss Easter this year, but I pray that the longing that puts in our hearts will drive us to proclaim and live the Eatser message until he comes.