March Madness & the ambiguity of Easter

Photo by Jacob Rice on Unsplash

As a rabid sports fan and a theologian, things couldn’t have lined up any better than they did this year, when the men’s and women’s college basketball Elite 8 matchups took place on Easter weekend. To my delight, fellow chubby king, D.J. Burns, Jr, led his underdog North Carolina State University to an upset win over Duke University and to the Final Four, one win away from the championship game. (Imagine all the terrible sermons that have been cooked up since the Duke Blue Devils lost on Easter Sunday!) Unfortunately, I’m a foot shorter than Burns, so high-level athletics have always been out of reach. 

Even if they don’t love me back, I love sports because of all that athletes pour into them. I cry after huge games as I think of the lifetime of sacrifice that brought the winners to that moment–from the athletes, their families, and their broader support systems. How that weighs on the losing side. The callous finality of the results. Watching Burns and his teammates celebrate, though, I couldn’t help but notice an ambiguity there: They accomplished something uncanny as a low-ranked team, but nobody grows up dreaming of being a semifinalist. They could have their hopes dashed a week from that euphoric moment. The job’s not done. 

So much of life feels open-ended like that to me; and this year, Easter especially. The earliest New Testament documents were not the four gospels or Acts of the Apostles. They relate the earliest events of the Jesus movement and later the Church, but they were written retrospectively decades later. Scholars generally date them following both the Jewish rebellion against the occupying Roman Empire in 66 C.E. and the Roman recapture of Jerusalem and destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. For as long as believers have read these five documents, it has been with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that Jesus’ earliest followers survived those first days and weeks.

Jesus’ first followers did not enjoy that benefit, however, so the triumphant emotional tenor of our Easter celebrations couldn’t be further from what they experienced back then. Roman authorities execute Jesus on charges of sedition against the empire on Friday, he returns on Sunday, reveals himself to Mary Magdalene and other members of his inner circle, charges them with leadership, and then ascends to heaven. 

That’s cool, but miraculous or not, he’s still gone and they’re still fugitives. At least some of the relief his friends felt after the resurrection must have dissipated after he left. After all, they are implicated in his alleged crimes, and empires are not known for their restraint. The way that we celebrate Easter blows by their confusion, dread, and hope. It does so with the same force that it ignores their status as both colonial subjects and fugitives. The resurrection did not decriminalize their community, and they knew it. 

That’s why the Eastertide tenor of absolute victory just feels off. Religious expression is theatrical. It pulls us on stage to participate in or commemorate the creative activity of the divine, as well as the human response to that activity. The whole person, mind and body, is up there. If you’ve ever participated in Jummah or a Catholic mass or a charismatic service of any religion, you know there can be an almost aerobic quality to this: stand, sit, kneel, call, respond, jump, shout. Yet, in the U.S. Church, at least, Easter does not reflect any of the ambiguity that moment was charged with. It’s as if we’ve all read the script, but we don’t understand the characters’ motivations. 

I suspect the Western church misses this point because it identifies with the Roman Empire from which it inherited its broader culture, rather than the colonized Palestinians from which it inherited its religion. Those who identify with the project of empire–Roman or American–couldn’t possibly access the emotional depths the texts try to convey. Perhaps only the outsiders who are sometimes tolerated inside our empire can relate to that mixture of anxiety and hope for a better tomorrow. People whose bodies know mortal fear when police sirens light up the darkness around them or bosses mention immigration authorities or strangers ask if they’re in the right bathroom. In short, people who live closer to death because they were born the wrong kind of person. 

We should commemorate the fugitivity of the early Church on our liturgical stages. Perhaps then the contemporary Church would identify more with today’s oppressed people and less with the powerful. That solidarity could save us.

In solidarity,

Dwayne