Entering the Strange, Beautiful World of Easter
A common question I have heard over the years in the Uniting Church, whether in small groups, family, or among colleagues: How are we meant to believe in a literal resurrection? It is a serious question. It is a modern question. And it is often asked sincerely, not cynically.
Many of us have been formed in a world that assumes the only things that are real are the things that can be measured, repeated, tested, and explained. That is not the only way human beings have known truth, but it is one of the dominant habits of modern Western culture. Philosophy of religion has long noted that religious knowing has often worked with a broader account of reality than a narrowly material or empiricist (mathematically measurable) one, including revelation, meaning, testimony, symbol, spirituality, relationality and encounter. At the same time, ancient people were not naive simpletons who thought dead people regularly got up and walked away; the extraordinary encounter of resurrection was as startling in the biblical world as it is now. It was fitting of myths of gods, but for a human, like Jesus, it was so strange that it forged a new way of human divine imagination, of revelation, which has shaped Christianity fundamentally.
So the question is not whether first-century people were just unenlightened and modern people are now enlightened. The question is whether Easter invites us into a deeper, different way of seeing, hearing, and knowing. Holy Week asks us to enter a world in which God is not an idea to be managed, but a living presence encountered in story, symbol, suffering, table fellowship, broken bread, wounded bodies, tears, silence, and astonishment.
To journey through Holy Week is to step, almost unwillingly, into a different moral and spiritual universe. To suspend our mindsets, to encounter something transcendent, something of revelation, something of mystery.
Maundy Thursday begins with intimacy. In John’s Gospel, Jesus does not merely share a final meal; he kneels and washes feet. The one into whose hands the Father has given “all things” takes the place of a servant. In the Synoptic Gospels, the meal is bound to Passover memory: liberation, covenant, deliverance, and the God who hears the cry of an enslaved people. Christian tradition has therefore long heard in the Last Supper both an echo and the liberation of Passover: a meal of remembrance, freedom, and divine faithfulness, now gathered up in Christ’s self-giving love. John’s footwashing intensifies the meaning of the night by showing that true Christlikeness is expressed in humble service of one another, not in domination or subordination.
That matters for the church. Maundy Thursday is not sentimental. It is not “be nice to one another” with a meal. It is the unveiling of a new social order. The body of Christ is formed at the table and on the floor, in hospitality and humility, in the refusal of status or hierarchy, in the commandment to love as Christ has loved. To wash feet is to renounce fantasies of control. It is to refuse the theatre of prestige or personality/idolised leadership. It is to become a people who are not ashamed to serve one another in mutual love and care.
Then comes Good Friday.
We should never rush past the horror of it. Crucifixion was not simply a painful death. It was a public, humiliating, political execution used by empires to terrorise, degrade, and make a humiliating example of for compliance and control. Jesus is not killed in the abstract. He is crushed within the machinery of imperial violence and local political fear. Careful Christian reading must also say clearly that Good Friday must never be turned into anti-Jewish blame, as Jesus was Jewish himself. However, Good Friday focuses us on a Christ who enters the full depth of our (world’s) estrangement, violence, guilt, scapegoating, victimisation, sin and suffering, bearing it in his own body on the cross.
Good Friday, therefore, asks more of us than private gratitude for the forgiveness of personal sins. It asks where Christ is crucified now.
Where bodies are broken by war.
Where people are exploited for profit.
Where communities are displaced.
Where the sick are exhausted and unable to get care.
Where the lonely disappear in plain sight.
Where people sit at bedsides, in emergency rooms, in prisons, in refugee detention, in aged care, in DV shelters, in homes marked by grief.
For Christians, to stand at the cross is to stand so that such suffering is not hidden, but seen and known. It is to refuse denial. It is to stay present with Christ. This is why Holy Week has such depth for chaplaincy and pastoral care. Those who accompany people through illness, decline, trauma, loss, and death know something of Good Friday’s counter-cultural wonder. They know that Christian ministry is often less about fixing and more about faithful presence, being seen and known, resonating with the suffering Christ. The Crucified Christ meets us not floating above suffering but within it. Many liberationist readings of the gospel have therefore insisted that the cross reveals God’s solidarity with the marginalised and oppressed. This justice, liberation and salvation, then, is both deeply personal and for all creation in the face of suffering and sin.
And yet Christians do not stop at Friday.
Easter morning is not the cancellation of suffering, nor a cheerful slogan pasted over grief and suffering. It is not optimism. It is not denial. It is not “everything happens for a reason.” Resurrection is stranger and more demanding than that. It is God’s new future breaking into a world that believed death, violence, empire, domination, and despair had the final word. In the New Testament and in Second Temple Jewish hope more broadly, resurrection is not simply “the mystery of souls living on.” It is bound up with God’s justice, God’s future, and the renewal of life beyond the reach of death made known in this physical creation and world.
This is why Resurrection can feel difficult for modern people. We want to ask, “Did it happen?” That is not the wrong question. Christians do make a claim about God acting in history. But the church also asks another question: What kind of world must this be, if Christ is crucified, if Christ is risen? What if reality is deeper than our habits of explanation? What if grace is not reducible to mechanism? What if the risen Christ is not a problem to solve but a healing, reconciling presence to encounter that transforms us, and all that is unjust?
Holy Week attunes us to that encounter.
It invites us to follow as disciples, almost as if entering an entirely different world. A world where bread becomes revelation. Where a towel becomes theology. Where a cross becomes the exposure of empire’s crushing power. Where a garden becomes the place of bewildered joy. Where tears and terror and wonder mingle. Where the old assumptions no longer hold. Where we begin to see that discipleship is not an “add-on” to ordinary life, and Easter is not simply a long weekend with public holidays attached.
It is the church’s greatest Holy Days of re-enchantment in what it means to be Christian.
Many liturgical traditions know this well. Through palms, table, washing, vigil, darkness, silence, fire, water, alleluia, and dawn, they slow us down enough to inhabit the story rather than merely refer to it. They do not offer spectacle for its own sake. They offer faith formation. They teach the body what the mind alone struggles to grasp: that Christ is leading us all through death into life.
And perhaps we need that now more than ever.
As I write this, I am deeply concerned that the conflict involving Iran is already contributing to wider instability across the Middle East and unsettling global financial markets. Australia is not only affected by this, but could be dragged into yet another war, while analysts warn of inflationary and economic ripple effects if the conflict deepens. At the same time, the pressure of living costs and housing remains acute in Australia, with the ABS reporting ongoing rises in household living costs, including housing-related pressures. We also know that loneliness and social isolation are serious public health concerns, as well as domestic violence, even as our communities become more mediated by screens, social media, and digital habits.
So what does it mean to be an Easter people here?
It means to become communities who resist despair.
Communities who make room at the table.
Communities who notice who is suffering and why.
Communities who practise presence with each other in an age of digital distraction.
Communities who tell the truth about violence.
Communities who refuse to surrender neighbourliness.
Communities who embody worship, witness, and service as signs of the crucified, risen Christ.
Holy Week does not ask us to escape the world. It asks us to enter it more truthfully, with Christ.
To walk with Christ through this week is to let our worldview, how we imagine the world, to be transformed again.
To let our discipleship deepen.
To let our imaginations be renewed in our baptism.
To let wonder return.
To become, by grace, more fully a gospel people for the sake of the world.
That is the strange gift of Easter.
Not certainty without mystery.
Not faith without wounds.
Not hope without Good Friday.
But Christ with us, Christ crucified, Christ risen, and Christ drawing us into the new (and renewed) creation of God. I hope and pray we can all keep a Holy Week in some form this Easter.
Rev. Ben Gilmour, Acting Director of Education, Vital Leadership Team Director Leadership Coach, Vital Leadership Team, Uniting Mission and Education
