Spring

I’m not sure if the moon was technically full Friday night or last night, but it was an awesome sight, especially as it rose so huge and bright in the early evening sky. It is the time of year to be particularly mindful of full moons. Many farmers and gardeners and those in tune with the earth will be looking to the next full moon in May as the herald of planting time. That full moon will shine with the assurance that spring is giving way to summer and the danger of frost is certainly passed.

And speaking of full moons, it was the last one in March that gave us such an early Easter this year. The date of Easter is set as the Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox. The spring equinox is March 21. This year the next full moon was March 28, and so we tumbled into Easter just a few days later on March 31.

Easter is inextricably tied to spring time. The historical events of Jesus’ death and resurrection took place at the time of Passover, in the spring, the date of Passover being reckoned according to the Hebrew lunar calendar. Even those in the Southern Hemisphere who now celebrate Easter in the fall must surely bear in mind the images of spring that are associated with this holy day. It is hard to imagine Easter unaccompanied by the images of spring.

And for us, right now, those images of spring are everywhere around us. Even with that dash of snow we got Friday morning, trees are beginning to bud and flower. Bulbs are up; daffodils are blooming. Just within the last week lawns gave up their winter blahs and overnight turned green and growing. All those plants and animals and hopes and ideas that have been dormant through the winter are awakening, coming to life.

Spring. But not yet summer. Easter does not come in summer.  Summer certainly has wonderful qualities. But think of how we often describe summer. The lazy days of summer. The images of summer are of rest, inactivity, satiated with sunshine. Summer is a time of fullness. Spring is a time of transition, growth, movement. Spring is that time when we are still very much aware of what we’re leaving behind (as it may snow again today) just as we see signs of the future that lies ahead. Spring is about renewal, the process of renewal.

We also often use the image of dawn to talk about Easter. Not the full shining brightness of daylight, but dawn. In many places Easter sunrise services are very popular. It is that moment of dawning, of sunrise, which captures some deep essence of Easter. Easter is about darkness turning into light. About winter giving way to spring and summer. Easter is about movement, about change, about the coming of something new.

Surely that is the sort of Easter we need. These images of dawn and spring speak to us because we know darkness, we know winter in our own lives. We don’t just need summer or the brightness of noon day. We need the means to get from winter to summer, from darkness to light. If our hearts are gripped by the cold and dark of winter, and somebody over there is talking about Easter as though it were the full and complete brightness and richness of summer… well, we might be tempted to say, "you can’t get the-ah from he-ah." We know the winter darkness. We yearn for the shining light. We need the pathway. We need the transition. We need the means to move from here to there. We need an Easter that begins in winter and moves through spring. We need an Easter that is born in darkness, but dawns into day. We need renewal from death into life.

We need to know that bulbs that have lain dormant for a very long time can sprout and then bloom again; trees that are stark and bare can put forth buds, then leaves and new growth; hummingbirds that left months ago will return one by one and dance before us again.

And yet. As powerful as these images are… As compelling as they are… there is a problem, a big problem, if we rely upon the images of dawn or spring to tell the whole story of Easter. For who among us watching the dawn’s sunrise does not know with absolute certainty that the sun will follow its course through the sky, inevitably to set again, leaving the world once again shrouded in darkness. And who among us in experiencing the rush of green and bursting forth of color in the spring does not feel some sense of poignancy in knowing that without fail these flowers will wither and fade, and in time, fall will come again and life’s vigor will recede. These are the relentless cycles of nature.

If Easter is no more than a dawn or spring, it is a hollow promise. If Easter offers us no more than an ephemeral glimpse of glory, we might wonder why we are being taunted. Have we been offered spring’s renewal only to know that it will be snatched away, and we will inevitably feel life drain away from us again?

Much in our lives is cyclical. We are affected by nature’s cycle of day and night and the ever-revolving seasons. So often the feelings of our hearts, the creative vigor of our psyches, the richness of our relationships seem also to be governed by a cyclical pattern. A continual ebb and flow. Like the tides.  An inevitable cycle.

The naturalist Loren Eiseley, among others, has noted that this cyclical impression of life and of time is common, especially in times and in cultures closely linked to the natural world. In Eiseley’s words, life is governed by the maxim: What has been, is, passes, and will be. The past is the future and will return again and again and again. Spring will always follow winter, but winter will always come again. The inevitable cycle of nature.  But Eiseley also points out that roughly two thousand years ago lies an "irredeemable break." A break in the repetitive cycle. With the agony in the garden in Gethsemane the past was separated from the future. The cycle became an arrow moving from a past that would never be the same again to a future that had never been possible before. Eiseley writes: "A solitary individual… had spoken before the Pharisees, ‘I know whence I have come and whither I am going." No one had said such a thing before and none would do so after him… At the place Golgotha they say the earth shook."  The cycle was broken.

"I am the way," Jesus says in this morning’s gospel from John. "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." I am the way. The way from darkness to light. The way from despair to hope. The way from a frozen heart to a warm one. The way from dormancy and drabness to creativity and color. The way from death to life. "I am the way," Jesus says. 

Christ was crucified once and for all. Once and for all time. Unlike the pagan nature gods, he does not die every winter to be reborn every spring in a never-ending cycle. Christ was crucified once and for all. And having died, he was raised to new life once and for all. He forged a pathway that can never now be lost.  He passed from this, our limited, messed-up, human life, through death, to full and resplendent life united with the eternal God.  "I am the way," Jesus says.

The early Christians were sometimes called the people of the way. Jesus is the way from wherever you are to new life that will never fade away. If you follow the way of Christ, you can get there from here.

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