Hope and fear coexist in pandemic-year Easter, just like the first Easter
Easter 2020 is unlike any other. There are no full sanctuaries, no choirs processing down the aisle singing ‘”Jesus Christ is Risen today, Alleluia!”, no after-church Easter egg hunts or big family dinners.
Instead, Easter is being celebrated via online services and perhaps with moments of quiet refection.
Easter is different in this season of pandemic, isolation and social distancing. Yet within the Christian household, the message of Easter is constant and perhaps never more relevant.
No matter if you understand the story literally or metaphorically, at its heart is an affirmation of hope: Jesus lives.
The way of Jesus, a way of love, compassion and justice, could not be shut up in a tomb. There is hope, not in a denial of harsh realities but in the face of them.
Hope is not immediately apparent when reading the Easter stories. Each account is a bit different, but the emotional tone of the “third day” is the same.
Brave women, faithful to religious tradition, go to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ crucified body while the men huddled, afraid, in the upper room.
The women find the tomb empty and the body gone. The text tells us they were confused, anxious, amazed, grief-filled and trembling. The Gospel accounts of the first Easter do not try to erase these very human emotions.
The women who went to the tomb had faith and confidence in their God; if not, they wouldn’t be heading into a hostile world to engage in religious ritual. They had faith and the hope that faith brings, yet they were still afraid. Their hope and faith lived alongside their fear and confusion.
Easter 2020 is also understandably a time of fear, confusion and for some deep grief, as it is celebrated in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. The women in the Easter story remind us those emotions are not the opposite of faith and hope.
The Easter story does not deny that fear and anxiety, hope and fear, are all held together.
One definition of hope is, “A desire with an expectation of fulfillment’. The hope in the Easter story isn’t based on the women at the tomb having optimistic or positive feelings. It is grounded in their confidence and trust in God, which allowed them to be honest with what they felt and to not deny their fear.
In spring 2020, having hope in a time of pandemic does not mean being positive, looking for the good things or having an optimistic outlook. Indeed, it is foolish to deny that these are hard times we live in. Indeed, it is dangerous to deny the facts and science that cause us to be afraid.
It is a painful time: People are dying, people are emotionally struggling. Like the women in the story, our hope as a community comes not from denial but by having confidence.
Confidence in our medical professionals and scientists, in leaders who deserve our trust, in our neighbors and those who love us. And, for people of faith or for those who are spiritual but not religious, hope comes from confidence in that which is beyond us, which some call God.
This spring, hope in Tacoma or in our state or nation does not ask that we deny the hard things; it asks that we be honest about them alongside our trust and confidence in those who can heal, love and make a difference.
Rev. Dave Brown is the creator/host of Blues Vespers, one of the PNW Interfaith Amigos and the former pastor of Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Tacoma. He’s an occasional op-ed contributor for The News Tribune.