Easter Light and Our Struggle to See

I woke up this Easter morning to an impassioned disagreement taking place in the next room. My nine-year-old daughter and four-year-old son were arguing about something. Up until this point, they had been playing a game in quiet whispers because they were the only ones awake. Nicole, the nine-year-old, was rightly concerned that their argument would disrupt those of us still sleeping. “Don’t yell Nate!” she said. “You’re going to wake up Mom and Dad.”

Her brother retorted in a loud voice: “I’m not yelling. You’re yelling! You’re going to wake up Mom and Dad!”

It went on like this for a minute. Then there was some admission of guilt by Nathan, but with (not entirely unwarranted) rationalization. “I have to yell because that’s what Dad does.” How powerful my influence is on the small people in my life!

Then he shifted back to complete denial: “Nicole, you are being woud (his adorable pronunciation of "loud"), and I am being as quiet as I can be!” From here, it just turned to nonsense. “You’re just being as woud as you can to make me wouder. Today is not Easter, cause you’re wrecking Easter! You are YOU. You are always just being selfish.” How quickly we degenerate under emotional stress!

I’ve recently been studying the Gospel of John. When I heard this conversation, I couldn’t help thinking about those who rejected Jesus. Like my four-year-old son, they were blinded to the truth by the emotion of their response, and they were very hard to reason with. Jesus made them mad, and in their anger, they were incapable of actually hearing the truth and beauty of his claims. To them, he sounded like a madman (8:48). John tells the story of the light shining in the darkness and the darkness refusing to see it, unable to understand it, because it exposed their sin in a way they didn’t want to see. The Jewish leaders couldn’t see that Jesus truly was their Messiah, sent from God, sent to save them. Because his words and deeds were surprising and unsettling for them, because he brought a message they didn’t want to hear, they stopped up their ears and simply denied the truth (the dialogues in chs. 5 and 8 are the best examples). They were like a four-year-old yelling, “I’m not yelling!”

But the problem was, they not only couldn’t see and hear Jesus, they couldn’t see or hear themselves. They couldn’t recognize that they were making no sense. So they persisted in denial. And so it went to the point where they had to deny the evidence of Easter itself, even though it was indisputable. They never saw the risen Jesus—so far as we know, he only appeared to those who had trusted him during his life—but they went right on denying the testimony of those who saw him alive (see Acts 2-4). The problem, you see, is that a resurrected Jesus was a vindicated Jesus. If God had indeed raised him from the dead, then everything he had said about himself and them—everything that had aroused their fierce defensiveness and anger to the point of killing him—must be true.

One thing I’ve come to terms with in my life, primarily through the grace of my perceptive wife, is the way my emotions can keep me from seeing and hearing the truth. The picture is swayed by my perception, which is defined by my emotions. Turns out Nathan is a chip off the old block. And we’re both a chip of the old human block. Our blindness is the same blindness that so often keeps people from seeing who God really is, full of grace and truth. In the trauma and pain of life, this can be hard to see, but this is what Jesus came to show us (John 1:14-18). The beauty of Holy Week is the way it tells us that Jesus didn't proclaim God's grace and truth from a distance. No, he put them on display from depths of our human mess, from the epicenter of anguish and despair, from Gethsemane and Golgotha. Here we see the true glory of divine love, the glorious love that, by pouring itself out, pulls all people to itself (John 12:32).

May God open our eyes and free us from the darkness of our incomprehension. May we not be like Jesus’ countrymen, who stopped their ears and shut their eyes to their Savior. On this Easter day, may we not be like irrational children, who believe that if we just yell loud enough, we’ll make our false claim true. May God help us see through our emotions and trust the truth that Christ is risen indeed!