I’m trying to hold the passion story in one hand and the Easter story in the other and it feels really hard today. It’s honestly probably what you are supposed to do on Holy Saturday. The sting of the cross is still so real. The texts of beatings and nails and blood still sting. The pain of the world is so present and so heavy in my chest.
In my oh so human attempts to keep this story as our primary story in this season, we sat at the table with our brightly colored plastic Resurrection eggs and read stories of horror. I wanted the kids to work on their Bible skills so I bribed them with a Hershey’s kiss for each verse they found on their own without using the index or getting some help from me. Candy and plastic and miniature whips and nails. I’m trying to hold the passion in one hand and Easter in the other and it feels really hard.
We opened the crescent rolls and got out the marshmallows and I remembered the days of leading dozens of preschoolers through the activity of Resurrection rolls. We wrapped up the marshmallows in the dough and I kept thinking about incomplete metaphors and how no children’s activity could ever fully teach the feeling of sacrificial love.
But I pressed on so that they know the story. So that they have it in their tool box, in their well for the days when they are without hope. For the days when Friday is all too real and Sunday feels as though it will never come.
And we wrapped it all up and covered it with butter and cinnamon sugar as if anointing and embalming were ordinary activities. I hope someday they ask why. Why did we do all of these endless crafts and activities and why did we wrap marshmallows covered in butter and cinnamon and bake them on the day before Easter? I hope they ask why.
And then, just like always, the last egg in the set is empty and the band of dough no longer holds a marshmallow and we celebrate for one small minute that there is hope, that the promise is still true, that he is not there as they thought and that Jesus is never as we expect him to be.
As I clean off the counters again I am struck by the “He is Risen” Dollar Store wooden sign set up against a brightly colored Easter egg candle. I’m trying to hold the passion in one hand and Easter in the other and it feels really hard.
Especially in these days. Here we are all snug in our home, working on our own laptops in our own separate rooms. We are healthy and safe and our biggest worries are when the ice cream runs out or we can’t agree on a movie to watch. And outside of these walls the whole world is falling apart.
I force myself to watch the news twice a day. Twice is all I can handle. Every time they go through the roll call of the healthy twenty somethings who have died in under a week or they mention the infant who passed away or they show the pictures of the doctors and nurses and elderly who are all doing their very best in the face of tragedy and death and trauma. Every time I see these things and hear these things I am wrecked again by the pain of the world. Twice a day is all I can handle. When they mention makeshift morgues and mass graves and people dying alone in their New York City apartments, having to be carried down five flights of stairs after they are found. Twice a day is all I can handle.
It feels like it’s all the cross. It feels like it’s only whipping and flogging and betrayal and thorns. It feels like Sunday will never come.
And so I try to remind myself that these are the reasons I pull out these plastic eggs and these are the reasons I keep baking crescent rolls wrapped around marshmallows. Because our children need to hear the stories of hope. They need to know that in their darkest moments, in the moments when they feel forsaken and forgotten and betrayed that there is a God who will rise for them. There is a God who will rescue them and restore them and seek them at all costs. And I hope and I pray that by telling them these stories again and again that someday, by the power of Jesus that they will claim this as their story and know that the empty egg, the empty roll, the empty tomb, the promise of life, full and beautiful and wonderful life is for them.
