To many people, Easter means bunnies, baby chicks in yellow down and candy; ham too, for those who are more “traditionally” minded. Christians, naturally, profess that Easter is more than this, just as Christmas is more than presents under a tree delivered the night before by a fat, jolly old elf. But even in Christian circles, what Easter actually is, is getting lost in the shuffle. Not so much the shuffle of commercialism which has already gotten its grubby hands on Christmas and Halloween but the shuffle of familiarity.
Every Christian confesses that Easter is the Great Feast because Christ rose from the dead, thereby defeating death and winning for us our salvation, which is no more than the truth. But the familiarity of the story has robbed us of the real power of the Easter season. It is very tempting today to see Easter as part of a simple chain of cause and effect: The Last Supper of Holy Thursday leading inevitably to the Passion on Good Friday which leads to the final bout of waiting on Holy Saturday which finally ends with Christ coming out of the tomb on Easter. What this sterile chain has hidden is the fact that Easter itself is a miracle.
When we think of miracles we will, no doubt, think—again—of the familiar ones with which we have grown up. The Bible will give us the examples of the burning bush, Gideon’s tests to God, the bronze serpent, the multiplication of the loaves and fish and the raising from the dead of Lazarus. Christians of other denominations, like Catholics, will include the Dance of the Sun in Fatima, St. Juan Diego’s tunic, and the many examples of Eucharistic miracles and incorruptible saints. But, again, the presence of so many different examples steals from us the real nature of what a miracle is, namely: Something which not only should not happen but cannot happen in the real world. Set a bush on fire and it will inevitably burn due to the nature of wood and fire; it’s cause and effect. Likewise, if the sun did decide on its own volition to race erratically in its orbit before deciding to fly down upon us, not only would the Earth be turned back into its primordial lava but the entire solar system would be destroyed now that its anchorage point had decided to leave its place. These things can only happen when they do because God wills them to happen; He wills the impossible to leave the realm of the impossible and to burst upon the realm of the world. He wills to make the impossible real impossibilities in that they really exist.
It should be noted that this does not mean that God only causes miracles when they occur and the rest of the whole cloth of natural phenomena rolls along mechanically. God, as Pure Actuality, is the ultimate cause of everything that occurs, to pull Aquinas’ cosmological argument into the fray. Miracles though are when God steps outside of the rules and systems He established and manifests Himself directly in the world again, as He did in the Old Testament and in the three years of Christ’s public ministry. And that is the reason why miracles are so terrifying.
If we were face to face with any supposed denizen of the supernatural, whether it was a vampire, a ghost, an elf, fairie, leprechaun, selkie, pooka, goblin, ogre, werewolf or witch, we would be natural and justifiably terrified. The great ability of supposed supernatural things to terrify us comes from the fact that we know that these things do not belong in the world. The dead are supposed to stay dead; they are not supposed to rise from the grave, either in spirit form as a ghost; in physical form only, as a zombie; or as a hybrid of the two as a vampire. And the same is true for the rest. Therefore, when we see them, either in the theater of the imagination, on the screen, or in person, our minds are caught between what our senses are telling us and what our brains continue to shriek at us is an impossibility, giving rise to the terror, or, at the very least, the creepiness that we feel.
Miracles are the same. Confronted with something that we know cannot exist in the real world, we would freeze in terror. Forget the familiarity of the stories and actually put yourself in Moses’ place when he saw the burning bush. Or among the crowd when Lazarus came stumbling out from his tomb after being dead for four days because a rabbi had commanded a dead man to come out. I am fairly certain that we would not take either calmly. And it is important to remember that the people who experienced these miracles first hand were terrified. When the disciples saw Christ calm the sea or be transfigured, their initial reaction was to fall on their faces in fear. It was the same for Tobit and Tobias when Raphael revealed himself as a seraphim; father and son collapsed before his feet and Raphael had to assure them that they would not die, even though he had revealed his real nature to them and, ostensibly, allowed them to see a glimmer of his glory. Today it seems almost blasphemous to say that the God Who is Love could be a source of terror but it is precisely because God is Love that He causes the greatest type of terror within us. In his novel, The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene had his protagonist priest observe:
“God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us – God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”
The majesty and the power of God overwhelms us and sets us to running away from it, like we would run away from a forest fire. And many men have tried to do just that. David Hume tried to make miracles impossible by saying that they couldn’t exist because they were impossible, in a brilliant example of circular thinking (and an ironic one, since Hume also maintained that it could not be stated with certainty that one billiard ball hitting a second billiard ball caused the second ball to start rolling, since cause and effect only existed in the mind). In the same way, the 20th century philosopher, Bertrand Russell, attempted several times to logically prove that God was an impossibility, thereby ensuring that the world was safe from the furnace of His love and power.
We, unfortunately, have played the same sort of game, just in a different octave. Instead of trying to prove the nonexistence of God, many today have tried instead to tame God, to soften Him up. At Crisis Magazine, Professor Anthony Esolen has written several pieces regarding the hymns which are often used in Masses today, noting that these are overly sentimental and often portray Christ as an overly gooey Good Shepherd. The Son of God goes no more to war; instead, He wants to be our homey. Instead of a God Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, we have a God of ‘love’; not as Greene described it but the fuzzy, postmodern version which means “letting people do what they want as long as it makes them happy.” Instead of a God Who commands we make disciples of the whole world, we have a God who just wants us to “be kind.” The vast majority of Western Christianity has essentially recreated the golden calf and just added some of Christ’s features to it. And the primary reason why we have done this is for comfort. We want our faith to be an electric blanket instead of the cross that it is, as Flannery O’Conner observed back in the Fifties. Which is probably why half of American adults, including one third of self-identifying Evangelicals, no longer believe that Christ is the Son of God even though 65% of Americans still claim the title of Christian.
But God is not a tame lion, to paraphrase Lewis. And Easter bursts out of the comfortable facades we have created with all the force with which Christ burst out of the tomb 2000 years ago. Easter in essence is Christ throwing down the gauntlet; the miracle of a dead man alive and glorious booms out to us from across the millennia asking not who we think He is; but how who shall live now that the great miracle is manifested before us again.