Do you remember all the Christmas specials on television during the weeks and days leading up to December 25? Now, have you noticed the Easter programming? If not, that’s probably because it is virtually nonexistent. I’ve perused our local paper’s program guide for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, and found scarcely any prime time shows even vaguely related to Easter. From the more than 50 channels:
- - Holy Thursday: none
- - Good Friday: on Univision, a movie entitled, “La Vida de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo.”
- - Holy Saturday: on the History Channel, “St. Peter: The Rock” and “The Apostle Paul: The Man Who Turned the World Upside Down”; and on the Travel Channel, “Where Easter Began”
- - Easter Sunday: on the Discovery Channel, “Jesus: The Complete Story” (complete?); and on our ABC affiliate, Charlton Heston in “The Ten Commandments”
I’m not complaining, especially when I consider the quality of some of those Christmas shows. But I do ask myself the reasons for the difference. This is what I have come up with, although I am sure there are other reasons as well: Christmas is to a certain degree a more accessible mystery. Everyone loves a story about a baby. Add animals and angels and an evil king who kills babies and three wise men bearing gifts and it becomes even more attractive. Besides, most of us accept the virtue of giving and the concept of peace on earth, at least on an abstract level.
Easter, however, is another matter. We can grasp the notion of resuscitation (by CPR, for example). We can perhaps just begin to wrap our understanding around the thought of a near-death experience during which it appears that one takes a step into the next life, only to be sent back with no further fear of death. But resurrection — being raised after bodily death to a new, transformed life in God and never having to die again — is beyond our human ability to comprehend.
According to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, some of the early Christians also had problems with it. Paul himself had difficulty trying to explain it to them. Using the image of seeds, he says, “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.” The oxymoron “spiritual body” serves only to emphasize how incomprehensible is this mystery to our human minds.
Resurrection of this sort, as opposed to near-death or resuscitation or the revival of corpses in a horror movie, is not something commercial television can deal with profitably — and if truth be told, not something we know how to deal with ourselves. Nevertheless, this same disconcerting mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus is what lets us know that we are not abandoned, assures us of forgiveness, and promises us a future of joy and hope — a future with the Beloved, a future which is Christ.
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. (1 Corinthians 15:42-44)