Day: March 27, 2016

So our journey to Easter begins with a reminder of our mortality and takes us our own dusty end to what is truly stark in the Gospel narrative, the insistence, even in resurrection joy, that Jesus himself suffered as brutal and painful death at others’ hands as the worst we read in the news. And there’s flesh all along the journey until we come to Lazarus’ corpse stinking in his tomb and the woman washing Jesus’ feet.

It’s complicated, and even though I think we give our children far less credit than they deserve for digesting complicated concepts, I can’t fault them for their confusion or ambivalence about Easter. I just want them to learn to share my excitement about it. It’s a Big Deal, in the Biggest Deal kind of way, and I don’t want it to take a back seat to Christmas at our house.