Eastertide and an Expanding Christ
If Silent Saturday belongs to those grieving the death of the only Jesus they have ever known, Eastertide (the fifty days following Easter) belongs to those who are open to experiencing Jesus differently than they ever have.
Importantly, the risen Christ sets up the season of Eastertide by appearing first to Mary Magdalene, a Silent Saturday mourner who deeply loved and grieved the Jesus she had lost. Driven by that love to his tomb in the early hours of that first Easter, the gospel narrative says she met the resurrected Jesus. However, the record is also clear, Mary’s eyes were so filled with tears, her heart so overcome with grief, she could not recognize him, even mistaking Jesus for the cemetery’s groundskeeper and angrily accusing him of moving her deceased friend’s just buried body.
Mercifully, though, Jesus interrupted Mary’s confusion by tenderly calling her name. Immediately, her eyes and heart cleared, and through her heartache she cried, “Teacher.” As relief flooded her mind and peace filled her heart, Mary wrapped her arms tightly around Jesus. Wordlessly she was saying, “I’ve lost you for the last time. You’re not getting away from me again. I’m never going to let you go.”
Of course she did this. But to her understandable response, Jesus wisely, lovingly whispered perhaps the most counterintuitive words she would ever hear in her life, “Don’t hold onto me, Mary…you have to let me go.” In other words, the risen Christ was saying, “My place, my role in your life will not be accomplished by way of clinging and control.”
And with those words, Jesus imbued Eastertide with both its purpose and its instructions. And in so doing, was establishing that first Eastertide not as a one-time event given for Christ’s first followers, not as a responsibility for them to once-and-for-all clarify and establish the doctrine of a new religion.
No. Instead, Jesus was pointing to an eternal truth, a pattern of life, a way of soulmaking that is timeless…one every human, in every religion and outside of religion, at some point, must give themselves to.
You see, Jesus did not rise from the grave, ascend straight to heaven, and immediately pour out his spirit upon all flesh. No. He allocated a space for those who followed him to adjust and readjust to a new reality, a new relationship not simply with him but with the Divine, with others, the world around them, and maybe especially themselves.
The Christ is still doing this. Has always been doing this. That actually is what the Christ is…not the centerpiece of a fixed doctrine or the namesake of an exclusive religion but the key to an expansive curiosity and the paradigm for an inclusive spirituality.
The truth is, Easter without Eastertide is only half a Gospel, a fixed doctrine to be memorized and memorialized instead of a living truth from which to move and grow.
Christmas and the Incarnation give us foundation and feet.
Easter and the Resurrection give us hope and wings.
But it is Eastertide that teaches us to fly and explore.