Sunday's on its way (originally composed especially for Alexandra von Maltzan at All Things Beautiful)

This piece was specially commissioned by the delightful Alexandra von Maltzan of All Things Beautiful, and if you want to comment on it, may I request that you go join the conversation going on at the ATB version of this post? Thanks.

On Easter, Christians celebrate what C. S. Lewis called, “The Grand Miracle,” the one single event in human history that changes the meaning of the entire human story in general – and our own personal story as well. A lifetime isn’t enough to exhaust the contemplation of Easter. All you can do each year is contemplate what Easter will have to teach you this time around.

I think it a particularly great challenge to attempt to explain to people who aren’t Christians, what it is that Christians see in Easter – particularly since the Christian response to Easter is so highly individual, given the richness of the Myth That Really Happened. So I thought that I would take a shot at explaining – to an imaginary audience composed of interested and intelligent, but unbelieving, imaginary friends – one of the odd ways in which I think Easter looks different when you're seeing it from the other side, as it were. This is very far from the most important thing to understand about Easter. But it’s interesting, I think, in its own quirky way, and it’s almost certainly something that hasn’t occurred to you if you are not yourself a Christian.

God is, of course, the Author of the human story, the Dramatist who created this world that famously is all a stage. Most monotheists would agree with that, at least in some sense. Now, Easter tells us what kind of story God is writing – it is a mystery novel and a thriller and a romance all rolled into one, but most especially it’s the kind of novel where you can’t tell what’s going to happen next. It turns out that the infinite God is not unlike M. Night Shyamalan – the moment when the Resurrection happened is exactly like the moment the audience realizes that Malcolm is himself dead, only more so. The second time through The Sixth Sense the entire story is different from the first time you watched it, because you know the great central secret: Malcolm is dead. And for Christians, the “second time” through the story, as it were – whether it is the story of one’s own life and apparently pointless sufferings, or the New Testament story of the disciples cluelessly tagging along behind Jesus without ever figuring out what He was talking about, or even the “second time” through the Old Testament – the second time through, the entire story is transformed, because you know the great central secret: Jesus is alive.

I have a wonderful Jewish friend, a person, by the way, considerably more intelligent and nicer than myself, and one who understands Christianity incomparably more deeply and sympathetically than I understand Judaism. One of my friend's objections to Christianity is precisely that the Resurrection, if it means what Christians and indeed Jesus himself claim it means, radically transforms the apparent meaning of the Tanach and upends all sorts of rabbinic applecarts, even though the rabbis strove diligently and sincerely to understand the story God was telling. My friend cannot accept that God would be so deceitful and so unfair as to set the Jewish people up to believe one thing and then spring such an astonishing and unforeseeable surprise upon them. But to a Christian, the Resurrection is the mother of all great plot twists, sprung with a dramatic skill that, as one would expect, utterly transcends the abilities of M. Night Shyamalan or Neil Jordan. Of the millions of people who saw The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game, there are bound to have been a few who figured out the secret before the director’s great moment of triumph. But the Resurrection is the one unsurpassingly masterful plot twist that nobody figured out in advance. And Christians rejoice in that moment of unforeseen, unimagined, astonished enlightenment in very much the way moviegoers delighted in the shock of revelation in The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game. Indeed, we suspect that God shaped us to delight in plot twists precisely because He Himself delights in them. The pleasure Shyamalan and Jordan take in knowing that their skill made it possible for viewers to see one movie the first time through and a radically different movie the second time – at the same time recognizing that in fact it has been the same movie, honest to its principles and playing fair with the viewer, all along – is an echo of the pleasure God takes in His greatest of all surprise endings.

But of course, there is the difference that in both The Sixth Sense and The Crying Game, the surprise, while artistically deeply satisfying, is also tragic and poignant. The Resurrection, by contrast, is not only the greatest of all surprise endings – it is also the happiest of all unexpectedly happy endings. What looked on Friday like the most unspeakable of tragedies turns out on Sunday to have been the setup for the most delightful of all romantic comedies. It rather strains the bounds of credulity to think, for example, that Mark Darcy would really choose Bridget Jones, but that patent mismatch fades to nothing beside God the Son’s choice of us as His Bride – and yet while the former is fiction, the latter is triumphant fact.

Once Easter settles into your heart for good, hope can never be lost. No matter how bleak things may seem, the God who sprung the Resurrection on an unsuspecting world (and, to be candid, a not terribly grateful one, all in all)…well, who knows what surprises He has in store for us? Easter assures the Christian of two quite remarkable things about the Eternal, Omnipotent, Omniscient God of the universe: (1) He loves surprises, and (2) He loves us.

Or, as the Christian songwriter/performer Carman Licciardello put it:

On Friday night, they crucified the Lord on Calvary,
But He said, “Don’t dread; in three days
I’m gonna live again, you’ll see.”
When troubles try to bury you and make it hard to pray
It may seem like Friday night…
But Sunday’s on its way.