Approaching Easter from a Place of Loss

I was going through my Monday morning emails and smiled when I saw a message from Brendan McGloin. Brendan is an Irishman who is carving our beautiful stone Celtic cross that will stand in the garden outside our new Chapel. He is a true craftsman from the Old World. Very few people are capable of carving these intricate images out of raw stone.

Brendan also has cancer. For the past two years, he has alternated between chemotherapy and working on the cross. I hadn’t heard from him for several weeks, but a George Fox Digital team had just visited Brendan in February and found him in good spirits and hopeful as they told the story of his work through this beautiful video. Brendan had written me in mid-March and said he was “cracking on” with the work. I expected an update on his progress. 

The smile left my face when I read the note. The email address was Brendan’s, but the message was from his wife Allie. The chemotherapy had not worked. He was in his final days. My heart sank. Brendan had become part of our family, and we loved him. I had visited him at his home and had shared numerous calls. Now, there would be no more updates. It is a great loss for us and a greater loss for his wife and two small children. 

You might ask, “Why begin an Easter message with a story of pain and suffering?” It has been a year of loss for me and my family – my father, my brother-in-law, and my cousin who baptized me – have all left this world for the next. The losses live with me every day. 

It seems to me that “loss” is the perfect place to begin a conversation about Easter. Six days before the crucifixion, our Lord came to Bethany where he found Lazarus in the tomb. The shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept,” describes the deep pain he felt as he considered the loss of his dear friend and the task ahead of him. Even though he raised Lazarus he knew the man would die again. The penalty of sin in this world is that death comes to all. 

In Holy Week we first remember loss. On Friday, Good Friday, our Savior was brutally sacrificed for our sins. He bore our sins willingly to make possible the creation of something new. But in the loss, as we mourn, we also claim the rest of the story. Jesus gains victory over death, and three days later he is raised from the dead!  

I love the passage from C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. In the last book of the Narnia series the children were sure they would be sent back to Narnia as they had been in all the adventures, but Aslan notes that this time there will be no going back – they are killed in a “real” railway accident. But in the same breath the story quickly moves … 

“The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

In Easter we celebrate that we will be awakened to the morning and begin anew our stories with Christ. The victory is won; death is defeated! He is Risen! He is Risen indeed.