April is typically a dismal month, often dark and rainy, snaps of the cold still hanging on.
Easter is a bit like April, offering something dark and something bright. Our Good Fridays fill us with mourning and lament, a fresh reminder of the evil that Satan brought to bear on the world 2,000 years ago. Imagine the agony of the disciples who had experienced both the triumphant words of Jesus’ new kingdom and the stunning arrest and crucifixion of their long-promised Messiah.
And, yet, those same disciples — scared, fearful, scattered — gathered in a room and on a mountain top and saw, improbably, their same Messiah. He was apparently alive. They touched Him. They ate fish with Him. They saw His footsteps in the sand. A new day was indeed coming. The kingdom He promised was here.
We live in both a Good Friday world and an Easter world. Our God isn’t dead, but the vestiges of death still hang over the cosmos.
But, like April, there would be both darkness and light in this new era of the church. They’d preach a message of repentance and hope, of a kingdom here and yet not fully here. They’d endure persecution and scorn but could look through the raindrops of peril and see the bright rays of heaven.
This is what the church has been doing ever since. We live in both a Good Friday world and an Easter world. Our God isn’t dead, but the vestiges of death still hang over the cosmos. Sickness, disease, famine still strike. Evils of racism, poverty, and violence turn image-bearers of God against each other. Is there hope? people wonder aloud. And every Easter, we turn our eyes toward a naked figure on a cross and an empty hole in a middle-Eastern hillside.
We say on Easter that there is another story about the world. A story that both encompasses the deep grief of a twisted world and the deep longing of hearts that yearn for a new world to come. That new world is both here in the people God is calling to Himself in Christ, and it’s coming in the fully consummated kingdom to come.
So as Christians, we look past the sorrow and pain of the present world because we know that, in Christ, a better world is both here and is to come. We mourn death on Good Friday and celebrate the death of death on Easter. We point a confusing world to a better story than the one they’re telling themselves.
Every raindrop of sorrow, every storm of evil, every flood of disappointment is only a temporary experience. One day the skies will open and the heavens will flood the earth with the joy of the Lord.
Daniel Darling is the vice president for communications for the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. This article first appeared in HomeLife, a publication of LifeWay Christian Resources. Learn more at LifeWay.com/magazines.
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