Dear brothers and sisters in Christ:
Is celebration tiring?
The Sunday after Easter — more accurately, the second Sunday of Easter — was once called White Sunday, “because those who had been baptized at Easter wore their white robes all week as a sign of their new life” (Phillip H. Pfatteicher, Commentary on the Lutheran Book of Worship, 291). It’s also been called Low Sunday, possibly because “the spirit of the Sunday is ‘low’ compared to the high festivity of Easter Day” (Pfatteicher, Journey into the Heart of God: Living the Liturgical Year, 245). For many churches, including ours, that’s certainly the appropriate description — “low” — of typical attendance at worship on that day.
The intensity of Lent and Holy Week, 46 days from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday, is absorbing and draining even before it all gets turned inside-out and blown sky-high (so to speak) by the triumph of the Resurrection. It’s not surprising that the week following would be regarded as a time to lie “low,” to catch one’s breath, and to be temporarily occupied with other things. I myself disappeared with Beth for a few days immediately after Easter Sunday, and I know that something like that has been a long and proper pastoral tradition at Holy Trinity.
The full season of Easter goes even longer than Lent and Holy Week, though: 50 days, from the Day of Resurrection (April 20 this year) to the Day of Pentecost (June 8 this year). And that it goes so long makes sense.
Easter is to be understood as one long and great Sunday, a week of weeks, comprising the fifty days of rejoicing. … Throughout these days of Easter the Church itself struggles with the fact and the meaning of the raising of Jesus from the dead and encourages all those who, like Thomas, struggle to believe the impossible. (Pfatteicher, Journey into the Heart of God, 244– 245)
Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don’t throw our hats in the air? Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don’t do it exuberantly in our liturgies? Is it any wonder the world doesn’t take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simply the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom? (N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, 256)
Although we might not, as Wright exhorts, serve champagne at morning prayer during the fifty days, we will continue to sing Easter hymns, and to hear Easter stories, and to say to one another: “Alleluia! Christ is risen!” “He is risen indeed! Alleluia!” Easter, after all, is not centrally about bunnies, eggs, chocolate, or flowers, and most assuredly it is not centrally about us.
Easter is the greatest opportunity in all the year for the church to point (like John the Baptist) away from itself and toward the feast to come, because the host of the feast, our Lord Jesus Christ, is risen from the dead. There can be no getting tired celebrating that.
Following the lead of angels and archangels, Pastor Maurice
