Easter Day 2025

One of the things I forgot about when moving back to Southeastern Nebraska was the spring fires. While fire evacuations are very much a present concern in Colorado Springs, where we lived last Easter, those situations are more in your face than the fires in Kansas, blowing smoke north, causing hazy skies, sore throats, and sometimes the faint smell of burning in the air. I’ve been paranoid all week that my sore throat is the result of a pending illness, not of the air quality alert that my weather app has been constantly warning me about.

I watch a lot of cooking shows, and one of my favorite programs is The Pioneer Woman, a tongue-in-cheek title claimed by “accidental country girl” Ree Drummond who married a cattle rancher in rural Oklahoma. The opening title of each episode ends with her saying, “here’s what’s happening on the ranch.” So if you watch enough Pioneer Woman, you not only learn how to make Easter dinner for 30 people or a steak befitting a cattle rancher, but you also learn some of the how-tos of ranching, including spring burnings. During spring burnings, ranchers set boundaries around the pasture that is to be burned, surrounding it with turned over dirt, water, and fire trucks on site. Through the generations, ranchers learned that by burning prescribed portions of pasture, the regrowth is particularly attractive to their livestock. As science progressed, they learned the additional benefits of controlled burns to wildlife, to the health of the pastures themselves, to wildfire preventions - and why the regrowth is attractive to their livestock. I found a plethora of research on the topic. And even with all that information, controlled burning can seem out of control, especially if you’re breathing in smoke from another state away. It can seem crazy, if you’re not “in the know”. Why would you set your own land on fire? Isn’t it dangerous? How can such a practice be worth the risk?

Jesus’ behavior throughout his passion and death seems crazy. Out of control, even. One of my favorite things about the original Broadway cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar is the cacophony of the orchestra as Jesus is dying. It doesn’t even sound like music, just maddening noise and chaos until Jesus dies, when it all suddenly stops. But to Jesus, it isn’t chaos. Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus never wavers in his journey to the cross. He knows what he’s doing. There’s no sweat like drops of blood like in Luke, no asking for the cup to be taken from him like in all three of the other gospels - on the contrary, when the disciples wanted to fight the soldiers arresting Jesus in the garden, he said to Peter, “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (18:11) I wonder if the disciples thought Jesus was crazy.

Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus uses agrarian metaphors to speak to his own death and resurrection. Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (12:24) And then he lives the metaphor. In the same way as theologian Obi Wan Kenobi tells Darth Vader, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” Jesus’ death plants the seeds of the resurrection, bearing more fruit than the disciples to whom he’s speaking could ever imagine.

It can be difficult to accept that things that seem out of our control are actually under God's control. We see the world, creation, and time itself in such smaller snapshots than God does. 

We’ve never understood more about how creation works. There’s a parable Jesus tells in the Gospel of Mark, where he says, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Every time I hear that parable I think, man that hasn’t aged well because…well…we do know how. But there is still plenty in this world that we don’t understand. There is plenty that happens where we do not know how or why. And when we are struggling or suffering, hearing “God is in control” is perhaps one of the least helpful things to hear, its truth notwithstanding.

But God is God and I am not. Jesus was in control of his own path, choosing obedience to God’s call on his life. In the midst of her despair, anguish, and shock of what happened, as her world turned completely upside down, Mary Magdalene embraced her powerlessness and visited what she thought was the final resting place of her Lord. She went to his grave, not expecting to find the Risen Lord, as we know from her interaction with the angels and her reaction when she realized who the “gardener” really was. And here, God demonstrated God’s control over the cosmos as he remade the relationship between humanity and the grave through the power of the resurrection. Mary supposed Jesus to be the gardener, which echoes the beginning of humanity’s relationship with God: where God is the gardener in Eden. So she wasn’t mistaken. Not really. Jesus is the gardener. Only his garden is a graveyard where he calls us into the new life of the resurrection.

The resurrection opens to us a new relationship with God in a new and remade world that God has re-created, where a graveyard is a garden and Mary Magdalene’s proclamation, “I have seen the Lord!” changes everything. She calls us to bold honesty. To love. To an openness to the moving of the Spirit in ways that are new and unexpected. To a willingness to proclaim the risky, crazy message of a resurrected Savior, not needing to know how God accomplished this victory over the grave. It was enough to know that God had. That Jesus lives, opening the doors to eternal life for us all. Thanks be to God. Alleluia.