What We're Actually Celebrating

Easter Sunday is the highest-attendance Sunday of the year in almost every church I've ever been part of. Which means it's also the Sunday with the most pressure, the most rehearsal, the most production. I've spent a lot of Easter mornings backstage — or the worship leader equivalent of backstage — going over transitions, checking click tracks, making sure the key change into the final chorus is clean.

I remember one Easter in particular. Everything went well. The lights, the music, the crowd. People were genuinely moved. And I drove home afterward feeling — not empty exactly, but something close to it. Like I'd run a race I'd been training for, crossed the finish line, and then found myself standing in the parking lot wondering what just happened.

It took me a while to figure out what was bothering me.

I think what I'd been doing, all those years, was treating Easter like a very important commemoration. The day we remember that Jesus rose from the dead. Which is true. But it's not all that's true. And the difference matters more than I understood for a long time.

An anniversary looks backward. It honors something that happened — marks the date, keeps the memory alive. There's nothing wrong with any of that.

But Paul doesn't write about the resurrection like it's an event in the past. He writes like it's the ground underneath everything happening right now. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile (1 Cor 15:17). Not: the story falls apart. Your faith — present tense — is standing on nothing. The resurrection isn't the founding event that got the movement started. It's what the whole thing is still resting on, today, while you're reading this.

I'd spent years producing Easter Sundays. I'm not sure I'd spent many of them actually asking: what does it mean that he is alive right now?

There's an old name for Easter — some traditions called it the Queen of Feasts. Not Christmas. Easter. The center of the whole year. And the season doesn't last one Sunday. It lasts fifty days, all the way through to Pentecost — the day the church marks the Spirit's arrival, fifty days later. The church kept insisting, for those fifty days, that resurrection isn't a moment to process and move on from. It's a reality to inhabit.

I didn't grow up with any of that. Easter was a Sunday. A significant Sunday, but a Sunday. The Monday after was just Monday.

The first time I paid attention to the fifty-day season, something nagged at me. Why does resurrection need that kind of room?

But I think I know now. Resurrection is not a fact you absorb in a morning. It's too large. If Jesus actually rose — as actual event, actual body, actual history — then almost nothing about ordinary life stays the same. What you do with death changes. What you do with suffering changes. What you think you're doing when you get out of bed changes.

You can't take that in between a parking lot crowd and a Sunday lunch. You need fifty days.

There's something else I've been sitting with. In the New Testament the resurrection is almost always described in the passive voice — he was raised. Not: he rose. He was raised. By the Father, through the Spirit. Easter is a Trinitarian event — the Father vindicating the Son who had gone all the way down into death for us. What Christ did in our humanity was real and finished. The Father's raising of him was the answer to that.

And because it happened in our humanity, resurrection isn't just something that happened to him. It's something he has secured in him, for us. So when we gather on Easter Sunday, we're not just marking the date he came back. We're standing in the reality that death has been defeated in the nature we share with him. That's not an anniversary. That's more like — waking up to something that was already true before you opened your eyes.

I still lead Easter Sunday services. And I still think carefully about the music, the transitions, the key changes. Those things matter. But I've been trying to carry a different question into those mornings now. Not did we pull it off? but something quieter.

Am I actually here? Is this landing somewhere in me, or am I running the service?

The fifty days after Easter are the season the church built specifically for that question — not the execution of Easter, but the inhabiting of it. Most of us will have been back to regular life by Monday morning. But the season persists anyway, a quiet invitation to keep asking: what does it mean that he is actually alive?

I'm still learning to sit with that. Most Easters, if I'm honest, I'm still more production manager than participant. But some years — in the middle of a song, or in a quiet moment before the service starts — something opens up. Something that feels less like a commemoration and more like a presence.

Those are the Easter mornings I come home from and feel something other than the strange flatness of a race run well.