Crowds are clueless. They never get it right. They cheer for the superstars, and look past the saints. They glorify the rich and even cast votes for a new American Idol. Crowds are addicted to all the hype, bling and buzz they can consume, but then complain of loneliness, fatigue and overload. They look for a warrior-king riding high on a stallion, aloof and larger-than-life; what they got was a voice crying in the wilderness, a simple carpenter riding on a donkey, and parables from a peasant. They got nothing they asked for, but everything they needed. Crowds are confused. Easter is rarely understood or embraced by crowds.
Our greatest temptation in life and faith is to become part of the crowd and be swept away by conventional wisdom. But in Easter, God has outwitted us. Easter is the twist the mob never saw coming, it is the answer to an unspoken prayer, and it is the power of God they cannot control.
I asked for riches that I might be happy.
I was given poverty that I might be wise.
I asked for power that I might have the praise of men.
I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God.
I got nothing that I had asked for,
but everything that I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
You have, O God, outwitted me.
Easter creates a whole new story and invites you to take your place in it. It is a story filled with hope, passion and friendship. I hope you will join us this Easter and continue to support our efforts to tell the world what the crowds don’t know, the story of Jesus.
“I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God.”
Perhaps, you never feel more weak than when, on your knees in prayer while holding his hand for comfort — his and yours — you sob, not just cry, but sob, in the midst of keeping a bed-side vigil for someone whom you love more than life itself and whose all-too-short of a cancer-ravaged life is hours and minutes away from the inevitable — Death.
It is then that you not only “feel the need of God” but that your faith begins repeating to your heart the Lord’s New Testament words that “your faith has made you whole” and you praise God for the promise of that wholeness for the one lying near death whose legs no longer walk that “those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, and they will walk and not be faint.”
It is then “when we are the weakest,” that Easter, begun with the birth and gift of Christmas’s Child, becomes most real to you as “the answer to an unspoken prayer, as the power of God they cannot control,” and that in “Easter, God has outwitted us ” because what we know, dread, and fear as Death and its power over us, now, through Christ’s Resurrection, is really freedom and life itself.