Reimagining Easter: A Journey Towards Renewal
Rediscovering Hope, Healing, and Action in Today's World
I invite you to take about 20 minutes and meditate on this with me.
Seven years ago in August, I started IMAGINARIUM - a fresh expression of a spiritual space. We still feel today that it’s time for renewal in our world and in spiritual spaces. We recognize that we live on a planet whose climate is changing, whose systems are failing, and whose species are going extinct. We want to be a part of something new, life-giving, and holistic. This is why we started IMAGINARIUM and why I wanted to share my thoughts on a weekend like this. As a no longer religious and post-Christian person, I do not shy away from any stories and holidays that can inspire new life and challenge a more profound, fuller life for us as individuals and the world in which we live. Thus, I believe EASTER still has a lot to say to us.
We need an EASTER that speaks not to the salvation of individuals but to the healing of this world and the many deaths that we are facing right here, right now.
It seems that we hold too narrow a focus on life and humanity often because of the family we were born into, the location of the world in which we grew up, and the culture we inhabit. Considering the analogy of an artist's palette of paint, we realize that many of us were brought up with beautiful shades of red or orange. Or beautiful shades of blue and green, but we thought this was the only color, tool, and lens through which we could see and enjoy the world. But now I’m asking if we can represent and see all shades of the palette. To see and honor all shades of our humanity. Can we begin to see and honor all the shades in our natural world and see, honor, and utilize all the shades of spirituality? We are trying to tap into the beauty of a full palette. So, this Easter weekend and every day, I ask if we can color our world a little more, a little deeper, and with a broader perspective.
As a singer and artist, I know music can express sentiments more easily than words. I think the story of Easter is inviting us to pay attention, care, step in, stand up, love more profoundly, and extend our reach a little further. This song is a protest as well as an invitation to transformation.
Listen to Marvin Gaye’s WHAT’S GOING ON. (TW: This video depicts real-life tragedies.)
Context - It was 1970 - Marvin's own life provoked the themes of this song and the album. His brother Frankie returned from Vietnam, and Marvin noticed his outlook changed. Surrounded and being face to face with death will change your perspective. Marvin decided to write a song that would raise our consciousness.
He looked at what was shaping American culture at the beginning of the 1970s, it was a time of hippies and protests, of war, and heavy drug abuse and of racial misunderstanding. Many themes are still repeated today.
In May 1970, students protesting the bombing of Cambodia by United States military forces clashed with Ohio National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. When the Guardsmen shot and killed four students on May 4, the Kent State Shootings became the focal point of a nation deeply divided by the Vietnam War.
Marvin wrote this song with this tragedy in mind. As his worldview expanded, singing three-minute love songs seemed less appealing. This song was his version of protest and helped change the national conversation.
NPR wrote, “The song started as a party but became something much closer to a prayer.”
This song and story reminds us when you start paying attention to destructive systems and structures, when you come face to face with death, you feel it and empathize with those affected, you want to do something about it. You want to inspire not only healing but a different kind of world. You want to confront and transform it. You want to take a moment in time and turn it into a movement that shakes and rattles and unleashes life into the world. A better life for all. That takes us to the story of Jesus.
The narrative of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is full of mystery, surprise, drama, inspiration, and a reversal of expectation.
Before you can get to the resurrection story, you must look at the death and crucifixion. Before you look at the crucifixion, you have to understand the life of Jesus, this Jewish, brown-skinned Galilean, and what led him to that cross.
Rabbi’s today will often tell you that the TORAH, what they consider the law of God, is about how to live an ethical life, it is about leveling the playing field. It is about understanding systems of oppression and seeing how they set people up to fail.
So, in the life of Jesus, we see a man who, in his few years of ministry, is speaking to, confronting, and trying to heal a system. This social system has ostracized individuals and built hierarchies out of power and wealth. It has refused to give rights or decency to anyone with a sickness, a religious system that was seemingly so caught up in and entangled with the empire of the day that the message they were preaching had no ministry tied to it. So Jesus walks around healing people – he heals them often by refusing to accept traditional and official sanctions against the diseased persons. He touches them; he eats with them, and works on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest.
He breaks a lot of rules.
Also, as he healed people, he did so without charge, and as he did so, he was upending the idea that you need a priest or a mediator to get direct access to God. He then dined at tables with outcasts and sinners, those he wasn’t supposed to sit with, much less eat with. He spoke of a kingdom of God that was not in the future but inhabited their time and space, a kingdom with radical equality. His most well-known sermon was the Beatitudes, where he says blessed are the poor, meek, hungry, and those who mourn. He was calling for a reversal of his day's present religious, political, and economic system. His message was lived out in his life, calling for a strategy to build a new way of life with different values and principles than the current one. It was for all people without distinctions, discrimination, and definitely without hierarchies.
Jesus lived in a time when the elite, or those with power, tended to draw many lines in the sand. They habitually made boundaries to keep some in or many others out. They established hierarchies where the rich and poor were fully divided and maintained discrimination—in essence, rules and structures to keep the elite and those with privilege comfortable.
Now, because of Jesus’ strong words and actions and this following of people he was establishing - he incited those people to rebel against the ways of established authority because these systems in place didn’t serve everyone well – because of all of this, an execution was inevitable. Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for this crime of rebellion. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a titulis, which was, according to dictionary.com - “a sign bearing the condemned man's name and crime, attached to the top of the cross at a crucifixion.” This sign declared their specific crime, and Jesus’s crime in the eyes of Rome was striving for kingly rule. Jesus spoke of this kingdom of God in direct revolt against the kingdom of the day. And he was killed for it.
The story goes that his disciples and his mother mourned his death and tended to his body. On the third day, Mary and two disciples arrive at the tomb at dawn, only to find it empty, leading to a mix of grief, confusion, and possible anger at the disappearance of Jesus' body.
POINT HERE - Where they expect to find death, you suddenly encounter one instead who has been transformed, but they do not recognize it right away.
One part of the story in the gospel of John says Jesus appears to Mary, but she does not recognize him. Once he calls her by name, she knows this is Jesus and reaches out to him. He says do not hold onto me. Mary is being ushered on a new path forward. This is the resurrection and the new life ahead for not only Jesus but for her and all of the disciples.
Jesus’ vision that his life was cast was a wake-up call to humanity to right the wrongs of injustice by the oppressor to the oppressed. Then, I offer that the resurrection represents new life and a new awareness of the evils of oppressive systems.
While some may choose to glorify the cross and the suffering it represents this weekend, can we instead view Easter as a time for confrontation? Can we strive for a deeper understanding that transcends this particular day and extends into our daily lives?
To understand the story of Jesus’s resurrection, we must ask the powerful question—is the world made better through the way of Jesus and this kingdom he spoke of or through the way of Caesar and his empire of dominance?
I think the Easter narrative is an invitation to build that new kind of world.
Realizing that new LIFE begins when we choose to no longer be afraid to use our power to affect change in our world.
What if death represents the incarnation of our deepest fears?
If so, we can defeat death when we defeat fear.
Then, we will gain this abundant life for all of us. But for many, fears are real, powerful, and threatening. So defeating death and thus fear means ending the systems of evil that cause those people to fear in the first place.
We need to bear witness to the tragedies of our time, we have to make space for those who bear much pain and make space for their grief and work towards healing and social change to stop this from happening again.
We have to embody compassion. Aung San Suu Kyi, who led a nonviolent movement in Myanmar and won the Nobel Peace Prize, says this compassionate way requires the courage to see, feel, and act.
To see the connection between ourselves and those who suffer.
To see that all of human life is infinitely precious.
To see that the rights of others are as important as defending our rights.
We should not see compassion as a duty or a burden but as a desire to bear responsibility for the needs of others and let it be our blessing to do so.
So then this means practically when we see the death - such as the tragedy at Covenant School a year ago - do we actually see it, feel it, and then act differently?
Because if we can truly see these people, then, as the compassionate saying goes, we will feel along with them.
Michelangelo's Pieta is a beautiful work depicting a mother with her crucified son. Mary is holding the body of Jesus. I’ve seen this work in person, as Ben and I had the chance to go to St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City, in Rome years ago, and it was breathtaking.
I also discovered a different pieta at the Roofless Church in New Harmony, Indiana. This Pieta is the feminine form, but the nail marks of the crucifixion are on her sides and her feet, and emerging from her chest is the head of her crucified son. The sculpture says ultimately that when the son suffers, the mother also suffers. This is what it means to feel compassionately. When our son or our child has been hurt, when one we love is in agony, we experience that loved one’s pain not from afar, but we know it as ours. We experience it as if the pain were emerging from our hearts.
We FEEL deeply and want to protect, change, comfort, and nurture - in essence, to do everything we can to help.
When we compassionately feel like this with others, we choose to act.
When we act, we start to change and have a broader perspective. We understand the role of our family histories, geographical locations, religious formations, and social contexts, which shape our perspective and understanding of the world around us.
What if we saw our inhumane treatment of each other, our wars, the way our economy is run, the hierarchies in place in our institutions, and the poor treatment of the planet as our modern–day crosses? Something that equally needs to be prevented and something that every time we see pushes us to the point of change and transformation that is so desperately needed?
The resurrection then looks like a fuller LIFE rising in response to every death.
See, I no longer believe that the Easter story was just a once-in-a-lifetime event; I believe it is an everyday opportunity for us to join the revolution of a better world and a better way.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech during a Unitarian Universalist General Assembly 1966 entitled “Don’t Sleep through the Revolution.” Dr. King’s speech was a clarion call to remain awake to the social injustices of the day and to join the Civil Rights Movement’s efforts to eradicate unjust racial and economic systems in the US and around the globe.
So I ask this Easter weekend: What is our call? What did we need to wake up to? Most importantly, what circumstances are within our immediate control? In other words, what actions can we take today to bring about love, peace, and justice in our part of the world?
Easter, the narrative of Jesus and Spring is about new life and new ways unfolding.
There was nothing gradual about resurrection in the story of Jesus; however, the realization of resurrection was gradual. It was a dawning understanding that had to be lived into.
That dawning of a fuller and connected life, of a better way for our world, will take a lot of work and many of us to recognize and bring to fruition. But if we let this idea of A FULL EQUAL LIFE permeate every fiber of our being, then we can begin to live in the reality of what EASTER represents for us here and now.
We may not all be called onto the world stage of political action, but each of us has a critical role to play in our families, relationships, workplaces, and communities. No one else can play your role.
We know this work is hard, but it is liberating. In our history, the cross of Jesus also points to the lives of people like Gandhi, Archbishop Oscar Romero, and Rosa Parks.
So, this weekend brings the question to our hearts, minds, and bodies. It offers an opportunity to name the unnecessary deaths that happen in our world, to look for new life, for the signs of life, and to embody them.
Remembering that new life brings a vulnerability that must be protected and celebrated—anyone with a newborn can attest to this.
Oh, friends - you and I are alive today, and a revolution is happening in our nation and world. Spiritual leader Thomas Moore says, “It is deadly always to be doing what we’ve done before. We are shedding things previous. But we are shedding things because we are growing up.” And I’d add, I think we’re also growing out. We are linking arms with one another and understanding our connectedness and responsibility. We allow ourselves to be creative with our lives, systems, and structures.
So, on this Easter weekend, let this revolution dawn on us and, more importantly, dawn in us.
We know that just as our eyes take a moment to adjust to the brightness of the sun, it will take some time for us to fully embody this radical re-visioning of a fuller life for all of us and the world in which we live.
So this weekend, celebrate:
new life,
new joy,
new possibilities.
What was visible in Jesus,
It is visible in us,
It is visible in people from all walks of life.
All shades of humanity
All shades of spirituality
THIS is the beauty of a full palette.
Let’s color our world a little more and join the revolution - Shall we?
Happy Easter. Happy Spring. Love, Melissa Greene.
“spring song”
by Lucille Cliftonthe green of Jesus
is breaking the ground
and the sweet
smell of delicious Jesus
is opening the house and
the dance of Jesus music
has hold of the air and
the world is turning
in the body of Jesus and
the future is possible
Your thoughts are beautifully expressed and I am grateful for them. Even though I now (as you do) struggle with the concept of Jesus and Easter. Because of my past, they evoke trauma that I am still grappling with. But you have wonderfully managed to bridge this gap, these shipwrecks in my Spirit with your "sentiments." Thanks so much, Melissa.
“What if death represents the incarnation of our deepest fears?” I love that