There was a time when Easter Sunday meant something special to the faithful.
Women donned a new outfit or a special hat for the services. Guys who never wore ties the rest of the year showed up wearing a suit generally only worn at weddings and funerals.
Somehow over time, to many regular church-goers, it’s become ordinary. We tend to treat it like any of the other 51 Sundays each year, fulfilling our weekly obligation to hear the word of God.
In fact, it might even be a bit of an annoyance, with the longer service and the abundance of new faces who show up for Easter and Christmas. The room crowds with children who don’t know how they’re supposed to act.
To these gruff souls, here’s a suggestion: Enjoy the celebration of Easter.
Easter is unlike any other week on the church calendar. It celebrates the most remarkable act in the course of human history, God’s only son, Jesus Christ, sacrificing his life for your sins. It recalls the mystery and amazement that this same man rose from the dead three days later, fulfilling his promise.
There is nothing ordinary about any of that. If you saw a plot twist like that in a movie, you’d tell everyone you knew. If you witnessed it in person, you’d be bubbling over with joy and devote your life to telling it.
Yet here we are, in a church together, witnessing it all over again, and our natural tendency is to look at a watch and compare how much longer it is than a regular service.
I’m a bit of a zealot when it comes to Easter. The more I contemplate its message, the more awe I feel. The more I place myself in the sandals of an early believer, the more I wonder if I could believe as easily as they did.
Easter means a lot in my family. I almost never spent it in my home church when growing up. Instead, we spent the weekend at my grandmother’s house outside Chicago. We attended her church on Sunday morning, with the beautiful blare of trumpets and the sounds of my grandmother’s choir belting out a heavenly tune.
I always felt riveted by it, seeing the minor differences between my grandmother’s church’s traditions and ours. Mostly, I reveled in how triumphant it sounded and felt, welcoming Jesus back from death.
My grandmother is gone now, as is that annual family get-together at her house with the great foods afterward. That part of the tradition shifted to my own home, so we take some pride in welcoming my family and whoever else needs to be part of our family each year. Everyone’s close enough to our house where no one feels the need to stay for the weekend or attend Mass with us in the morning, celebrating at their home churches instead.
Perhaps that’s what makes it feel so ordinary, that it matches with so much of the routine of any other Sunday. But look at those extra people filling the seats today, and consider what drew them there.
They’re there because, deep in their hearts, they know Easter is a special day. It’s up to the rest of us to remember that too, giving it the celebrating it truly deserves.
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