As I was planning around the church calendar this year and specifically thinking about Easter, I came across this quote from NT Wright's Surprised by Hope.
I regard it as absurd and unjustifiable that we should spend forty days keeping Lent, pondering what it means, preaching about self denial, being at least a little gloomy, and then bringing it all to a peak with a single day of celebration.
We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind.
This is our greatest festival.
Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity.
If Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again!
Christian holiness was never meant to be merely negative. Of course you have to weed the garden from time to time; that’s Lent for you. But you don’t want simply to turn the garden back into a neat bed of blank earth. Easter is the time to sow new seeds.
If Calvary means putting to death things in your life that need killing off… then Easter should mean planting, watering, and training up things in your life that ought to be blossoming, filling the garden with color and perfume, and in due course bearing fruit.
The forty days of the Easter season ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up, some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving.
How will you celebrate Easter this year? What new thing could you or your church plant?
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