Confessions of a Bad Christian - Faith and Values column for Richmond Times Dispatch 4/21/12

I am glad Easter’s over.

There, I’ve said it. I am fully aware that this makes me a Bad Christian, but there it is. Christmas, I love. Easter? Meh.  Christmas gives you greens and golds, deep reds, 2-3 months of gift giving and parties. Easter? Pastel yellows, plastic eggs and giving up diet Coke for 40 days. Not that I actually give up diet Coke for Lent, but just being surrounded by other Christians who do is enough to turn the whole run up to Easter into a reminder of what a lackluster Christian I am. But it’s not the lead up that gets me as much as the day itself. Christmas day is easy - anyone can believe in the birth of baby Jesus. Babies get born all the time – not such a stretch. Resurrection, though? Now there’s something you don’t see every day. But there you are on Easter morning, with 2000 years of Christian doctrine nudging you hard in the ribs, whispering “Is it true? Do you believe it?” So of course you act as if you saw Jesus in the garden just that morning, all the while wondering if it really went down the way Matthew, Luke and John said it did. You wonder whether there were really any joyful reunions in the graveyard and whether Jesus just popped up in the middle of a locked room later that day. These things do go through your mind between the “Hosannas”, and you breathe a sigh of relief when Easter’s over for another year. At least this is what Bad Christians do.

Which is why we have the Gospel of Mark – the gospel to the Bad Christians. Mark understands the wafflers like me, the ones who kind of wish resurrections and people elevating into the clouds were a little more common and therefore, more believable. Mark understands this need for proof, the desire for a sighting. He understands, but doesn’t encourage it. This, at least, is what I get from Mark’s shorter (probably original) ending. As his gospel ends at 16:8, with an empty tomb, a messenger in white and 3 terrified followers, there is no sudden, triumphant appearance of Jesus in the garden, no walk along the road to Emmaus, no reconciliation between Jesus and his followers, just an empty tomb with these instructions – “gather with the other believers and find Jesus in Galilee.” The gospel of Mark leaves you hanging, and maybe this is why – Mark doesn’t show you Jesus, because you’re supposed to show him Jesus.

In all the other gospels, Jesus comes to you. In this one, you have to go find him. This really used to bug me. Mark, though, has become more important to me as I’ve wrestled with my Bad Christian tendencies because it reassures me that not everyone sees Jesus on Easter morning. Sometimes we have to leave the miracle behind, get together with other believers and get ourselves to Galilee – where Jesus healed the sick and fed the hungry, loved the outcast, forgave the sinner, broke the rules and changed the world.

So when the Bad Christians like me read the gospel of Mark, or have it preached to us by brave preachers, we stop waiting for the spotlight to turn on and for Jesus to step out of the shadows. We realize that we’ll see Jesus more so in the days, weeks and years that follow Easter Sunday rather than on Sunday itself. We start seeing Jesus in the ones who are doing those Galilean things that Jesus did. No matter how it played out that first Easter morning, I realize that Jesus is alive today in the peacemaking and the feeding and sheltering and loving we do. And through that ancient, first Easter story written by a believer who offers no easy proof, I learn that faith in a risen Jesus is hard fought and found on the road that leads away from easy answers and sudden miracles, away from the tombs and the temples and into the land of the living and the doing.