I'll elaborate. At Christmas, what are we celebrating? The birth of a baby in Bethlehem. In a manger. But that's a thing that celebrates something new, something that hadn't been there before. At Christmas, the wise men show up, to offer gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, this is all stuff that happens, and so it makes sense that we celebrate Christmas with gifts, with parties, with celebrations of new thing, new and exciting things. But Easter doesn't work like that at all.
If you have ever given something up for Lent (which maybe you haven't. It's not scriptural, so don't worry if you have or haven't), you will have noticed that one of the best things about Easter is not the arrival of anything new, but rather the return of the things that you used to enjoy, but had given up. And that's a different feeling altogether. For those of you who have given something up, if you've given up something that you are relatively attached to, something you enjoy, something that has, for a large part, been working as a crutch, that you feel very much like you can't or won't do without. When you've gone without something for a while (alcohol, meat, sweets, dessert, chocolate, tv, the internet, facebook, whatever), returning to it is a distinct reminder of how great your life, as it has been for a long long time. Returning to that, to your life as it had always been is a wonderful, semi-ecstatic experience.
It always reminds me of some guys that they had to come in and talk to us in Junior High school (which Saskies don't have) all about why we should stay off of drugs. And something that he said stuck with me for a long time, a long time until now. He spoke to us about his drug use, his heavy drug habit, and how he'd been taken away and locked up behind bars. Now, as you know, you can't get drugs behind bars, but depending on what you've been using, you can't just stop using drugs without some serious side effects. Withdrawal is a real thing that will hurt and affect you, and will damage you from the inside out. It's a matter of potential dangerous injury, because your body has taken on a dependence to a substance that you have all of a sudden ripped away. And that dependence will make itself felt as soon as you withdraw the substance. He couldn't get the drugs that he was accustomed to using while in jail, and so he had to tough out withdrawal, and all the difficulties that came along with it. But the withdrawal wasn't a permanent thing. It didn't nor was it ever going to last forever. And the day that the withdrawal lifted, the observation that this guy had was that for the first time in years, he was 'high on feeling normal.' Feeling normal, feeling regular, was such a wonderful feeling that he couldn't get over it.
Most of us will never go through that level of withdrawal, we will never experience the nature of drugs leaving our systems, we will never have that buildup or that addiction, nor will have to overcome it. That's a far cry from most of us in our experience, but you know what is fairly regular, and fairly commonplace? Recovering from a cold.
You know what having a cold is like, where you are suffering, runny nose, aching joints, sore throat, all that stuff. You can't sleep, you can't taste anything ,you don't feel like eating, it's all that all the time. And while you're in the throes of the cold situation, you start to long for feeling normal. Feeling like you do everyday is exactly what you want, what you crave, and when you finally get there, it's an amazing feeling. That morning when you wake up, and you can breathe through both nostrils, when the fever is gone, and you feel overall really really good, that's what you want, it's what you crave, and it's all about feeling normal, back to the way things should be.
Now, I'm talking about this so much because of the nature of the resurrection, of the glorified body, of the defeat of death, all that. And when I talk about this, I'm talking about the resurrection of Christ as so thoroughly mundane. The most alarming, most exciting thing about the resurrection of Christ is how easygoing, how dull it all is. When Jesus appears to his disciples, when he is seen by them, he's not showing up with thunder and lightning, nor with lights and sound. He is showing up, and says to his disciples 'greetings.' That's it. In his other resurrection appearances, he shows up and walks with disciples on the road to Emmaus, he shows up to his disciples and asks them for breakfast, it's a fantastic thing, an amazing story that Jesus is so absolutely commonplace about his resurrection, and how mundane and ordinary it is.
And that's because it is. The thing about the resurrection, the glorified body, life everlasting, all that, is that it's a return to the way things should always have been, not the addition of anything unusual or out of the ordinary. It is a return to the way things always should have been, and to the way we all know they all should have been.
On first glance, you may not believe me, but if you're a Christian, you will know that we as human beings were designed for eternity. When we were formed out of the dust of the ground, it was with the idea that we were forever people, that we would be eternal, with no interruptions. It was the idea built into us that we were going to last for all time, that we were going to be forever people. When Adam and Eve sinned, and were cast out of the garden, part of the punishment that was leveled on them was that they were dust, and to dust they would return. Something had gone wrong, death had entered into the world, and we would, from that time on, be stung by it and tormented by it. And you know what a sting is, right? It's something that hurts because it's bad, because it's not intended for you to have it happen to you. Death stings in that way too. Whether you're religious or not, you feel the sting of death when it happens to you, to someone you love. That sting of death that tells you that something has gone wrong, desperately badly wrong, that things are not going in the way they were supposed to. Nobody has children really honestly expecting them to die. Nobody is ever really truly ready to lose someone from their lives. Nobody is genuinely prepared for death, especially when it happens to someone else. To that end, the work of Christ Jesus our Lord is the work that tells us that he has come not to do anything new, not to do anything absolutely shocking or different, but to return us to where things were always supposed to be.
That's what makes his greetings to his disciples post-resurrection so fun, is that they're so mundane, that they're so easygoing. What does he say to his disciples? Greetings! Hello! What's new? Do you have any breakfast? Can I have a snack? Peace be unto you. Do not be afraid.
All of his reactions, his greetings, his statements to his disciples are so thoroughly mundane as to be laughable, if they weren't so fascinating in their nature as being commonplace. Because that's the end goal of the Christian faith, to have resurrection, glorification, reunion with God be completely commonplace. It's the nature and goal of the Christian belief that glory, through Christ, would come to common people like you and me, that Jesus would bestow his grace on the most ordinary people, the most mundane people you see every day. The majesty in the 12 disciples is that they weren't majestic. They were just guys. A great deal of criticism leveled against the work of Christ was that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, that he wasn't spending his time with the most majestic, most outwardly religious, most well thought of people in the world, and that criticism was absolutely true. It was accurate, and on point, and that's what makes the work that he does so wonderful and so compelling. Christ's work, his resurrection work, his work of making all things new, is what applies to all of us, you and me, people who aren't perhaps the most majestic, most well though of, most spiritually well assured. The great gift of the Gospel is that when God looks at us, he sees Christ, and therefore even the mundane is robed in glory everlasting.
So commonplace, but what was always intended is what is actually good.
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