All a matter of perspective
Article content
By Rev. Bill Ward
St. John’s Anglican Church
There was a Sunday school teacher who wanted to help her class learn about the gift of new life that Christians celebrate at Easter with a different kind of Easter egg hunt.
She gave each child an empty plastic egg and told the class to go outside and look for a symbol of new life to put in the eggs. After the search they came back together and one by one took turns opening their eggs and talking about what they found. Just as the teacher had expected the children had filled the eggs with flowers, worms or leaves and even a caterpillar. Then one child opened her egg and it was completely empty. The class wasn’t sure how to react to the empty egg and the teacher asked the girl if she had trouble finding something to share with the class? The girl’s response surprised the teacher and class as she said: “I didn’t have trouble at all. I just remembered the story we heard about the tomb that was empty on Easter morning and thought this was a good way to show the symbol of new life.”
The empty tomb is the very first hint that we get in the Easter story that something has changed. The empty tomb is the very first detail that points us toward the possibility of resurrection and new life. But it is easy for us to miss this symbol of hope and life if we are not looking for it.
In the Easter story Mary Magdelene wasn’t looking for a symbol of hope. When she discovered the empty tomb on that first Easter morning, she thought that things had gone from bad to worse. Mary thought that someone had come and stolen Jesus’ body and didn’t even entertain the possibility that the empty tomb might actually mean that Jesus had indeed been raised to new life. When she went and told Peter and the other disciples about the empty tomb they reacted in a different way.
They took off running toward the tomb as fast as they could because they had to see it with their own eyes. When they got there and went in and saw the empty tomb they saw the hope - they believed. Two very different reactions to the same empty tomb. One sees despair while another sees hope. It all depends on what you are looking for in your life. Or to put it another way it all depends on where you choose to live your life.
A colleague of mine once shared a story about the time his daughter, while on an exchange program in Switzerland, went skiing with her host family over the Easter weekend. At the end of the day, after she had spent the entire afternoon skiing at the top of the mountain, awed by powdery snow, cliffs, and glaciers, she returned to the chalet in the valley below.
She exclaimed to her host mother, who had decided to spend the day inside by the fire, “Wasn’t that an absolutely gorgeous day for skiing. It was so beautiful I even got a sunburn.” She said that her host mother looked at her strangely and said “what are you talking about dear, it’s been cloudy and foggy all day. I haven’t seen the sun once.” That’s when the girl realized that she had been skiing above the clouds all day.
That story resonated with me as a good metaphor for our lives. We can choose whether we want to live above the clouds in the glorious sunshine and hope of Easter. We can choose to live with hope and expectation that God’s love is constantly at work transforming this world or we can settle for life in the valley of cloudiness and fear where we convince ourselves that the sun of God’s love will never break through the clouds.
In a downtown office building in London there hangs this wonderful poster. The sunshine is beaming through the thick trees giving brilliance to the flowers and ferns on the forest floor. Underneath there is the caption “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.”
That is my Easter prayer for all Christians - that we become a people who keep our faces to the sunshine in all that we experience in our lives as we become a people who constantly look for the resurrection and find hope in the empty tomb.