Somehow we have gotten to Easter Sunday on 12 April 2020. Technically it’s still Saturday the 11th as this goes to post, and it’s probably best not to count the chicken before it’s hatched.
But that’s one of the big points of Easter. In human life there are numerous pre-hatched chickens that go uncounted, a vicissitudinal host having swept them aside in their shells. But even if 12 April 2020 doesn’t turn out for us – and who doesn’t suspect at this point that that’s a possibility? – Easter and its message are assured. Calvary is an immutable pillar of eternity, a mountain summit in sunlight where darkness will never fall.
Easter couldn’t come at a better time in 2020. The entire year so far it has seemed that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse were charging us: sword, famine, wild beasts, plague, as the prophet Ezekiel had them. Who knew the wild beasts would be bats and locusts? Or how neatly their effects would intertwine?
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Yet it has also seemed as if 2020 needs an updated list of horsemen. Lies, perhaps, and insanity, terrors, and illusions. There are real, material problems, right enough. But how much have we done to ourselves by believing lies and chasing hallucinations?
An uneasy sense lurks that humans are being lashed into a kinetic fury over things that may not be what they seem. We can only trust the senses we have, but in recent days we have seen laid out for us in Technicolor how our confidence in indirect knowledge can be manipulated. We watch astounded as actors – politicians, news reporters, pundits, celebrities – strut and fret, trying to make us believe what our own eyes tell us is not true. Members of our species concoct models to explain reality to us, and we are upset not that decisions are made based on what the models tell us, but only that the models are often wrong.
Our younger generations are at a threshold where they can’t process life unless it appears before them on a screen. The reality all around us is, for them, more of a waiting room than it is the arena where things happen. Show them a chicken hatching on a screen and they’re ready to start counting, regardless of what’s happening within eye-shot.
The framework of this dual reality evokes the iconic pairing from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four: “We have always been at war with Eastasia; we have never been at war with Eastasia.” In the waiting room, there is one reality. On the screen, another. How odd that even when the novel was published in 1949, at the dawn of the broadcast TV era, we already understood intuitively the possibilities of that dual “reality.”
But Easter has a different message. Easter is not about doubt and death, the stalking beasts that entered with Adam and Eve. Easter is about certainty and life. Is there a man who could never be deceived or confused by the dual reality of the waiting room and the screen? Yes. There is one.
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:16 that “we have the mind of Christ.” This available gift has a number of attributes; for me, the most important one is that such a mind is always in communication with God the Father. Whatever may be on the screen, whether faithful or manipulated, that mind can’t be led astray.
In the year 2020, we need this certainty. And we have it. In Matthew 24:35, Jesus said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Both the waiting room and the screen are of the earth, and they will pass away.
But the work of Calvary, planted eternally on the summit in sunlight, will never be lost to us. We are tethered to it outside of time itself, by bonds that cannot be broken.
Welcome, happy morning, age to age – all ages yet to come and ages still unforeseen – shall say.
Happy Easter from Liberty Unyielding.
