Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It’s certainly not something resurrection people worry about.
― Rachel Held Evans,  Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

As I consider all I’ve written about over the years, in one way or another, I’ve written about resurrection, about that archetypal journey into and out of the bowels of death, about rising from the ashes, about claiming the cross. Last week as it snowed (again!), I looked out upon the hyacinth and jonquils that were just about to bloom, having waited in death only to rise again each April. And I lamented their arrival in snow, conceding that they’d probably freeze, their beautiful blooms never to see the April sky. But I was wrong, just as I’ve been wrong before. They’re tough little flowers whose resurrection continues to amaze me. Today, they flaunt their colors and fly the banner of new life, as they stand in sharp contrast to the gray world that has yet to catch up with them.

Gardeners don’t worry about death, as Christian columnist and author Rachel Held Evans writes. For they understand the truth of the crocus, the tulip and peony, the strawberry and pear, the cucumber and tomato and onion. They know the resurrection power of plants and rest in its assurance through the long, dark winter. Each seed waits in death for its birth in soil and light; each perennial suffers the darkness for its eventual rebirth in the spring. Gardeners don’t mourn death; they accept and celebrate its vital role in new life.

I admit that each spring I get particularly excited when I see the first green points of my hostas break ground. Like little cathedrals, they raise their spires from the earth into the sun. And the violets that dot the grass each spring–don’t get me started about the violets! The plants and flowers, the trees that begin to leaf out, they’re all remarkable reminders of the sanctuary we find in resurrection.

As impressive as this natural sanctuary is, it is but a physical testament to what we experience as resurrection people. Most of us can testify to experiences with death that result–figuratively speaking, that is–in new life. We can cite times when we mourn the loss of jobs, relationships, roles, or circumstances. We grow to love and count on them, perhaps even to define ourselves and our lives through them. And when we grieve their loss, this is often no less profound than if we’d lost a loved one to death. Still, even as we grieve, we begin to feel something happening–sometimes slowly, imperceptibly, but surely. Then one day, we wake to see how something new is rising from the ash heap: a new job, relationship, role, or circumstance. And it is different but good.

Many of us can testify, too, to times in our lives when we set out to purposely destroy a damaging part of ourselves. In these times, we become painfully aware that we must die to self. I continue to try to kill that self-conscious part of me that often shames me into submission, inhibiting me from actively participating in the world. It’s a ritual sacrifice I make, daily. If there is to be new and abundant life, I understand that this part of me must die. In the book of John (12:24), Jesus reminds us:

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

In a few, short days, it will be Easter. Even those who aren’t Christian and don’t accept the power of Christ’s resurrection generally understand its claim. They can often see this power reflected in lives that seemed lost but now are found, lives broken and sometimes destroyed but now mended and made whole. Often these lives are startingly new and extraordinarily different. In his book Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, Christian pastor and author Rob Bell argues that [i]t is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.

For Christians, Easter is everything. In his classic work, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Easter is everything because Christ never intended to leave us open to claiming him to be a great moral teacher. But we have–and we do. Interestingly, most don’t claim him to be a liar or lunatic, but they do position him solidly as an ethical role model for the ages. As such, they strip him of real resurrection power and place him among other great men and women who’ve changed the world.

To believers, Easter is everthing because there was–and is–real resurrection power in the knowledge that Jesus died, rose, and later ascended in heaven. As the Son of God, his resurrection is the resurrection, the means through which lives are saved, and heaven comes to earth. In his book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, theologian and author, N. T. Wright claims:

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.

For believers, Easter is everything because it charges us to genuinely live the Lord’s Prayer, to colonize earth with the life of heaven. The power of resurrection lies gloriously in this.