Lately, I find myself quoting C.S. Lewis a lot.
Not that I agree with his particular slant on everything. But what I do agree with resonates with me so much that I want other people to see things that way, and to encounter this extraordinary intellect that God saved from atheism and transformed into one of the 20th century’s most influential Christian apologists.
Take Easter, for instance. When Lewis reflected on Easter, he used the ordinary to make us think about the profound, the simple to illuminate the holy. For example, have you ever considered what those chocolate eggs you buy at Walmart have to do with the actual, biblical Easter?
Consider this passage from Lewis’ book, Reflections on the Psalms:
There is a stage in a child’s life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas or Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began ‘Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen.’ This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer seem sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They will have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life.
His point, of course, is that once we are capable of distinguishing between the mundane and the holy, we tend to replace the extraordinary with the mundane. And worse, we don’t even notice when we start to trivialize the wonders of God. The longer we are Christians, the more likely we risk losing our wonder at the majesty of God, sometimes symbolized in small things to help us better grasp God’s greatness. And if we lose that sense of wonder, next we start to make the small things bigger than they are, and pretty soon even the small things no longer matter much.
If the child, Lewis says, starts putting the eggs first, pretty soon they are just tasty eggs, and soon after that, they really don’t taste very good anyway. The child doesn’t even appreciate the taste of the chocolate if he forgets what the egg stands for—cracking open the empty tomb to find Christ has risen!
In the same way, if we forget that church is about Jesus, pretty soon we find ourselves making the small things the main things, and after that, the small things don’t really matter either. When we forget that Easter is about the risen Christ, the indescribable majesty of a holy God raising His Son from a clammy tomb and investing life in a sinful and dying world, to, in turn, raise us to life, then we start to object to the color of the chairs, quibble about the quality of the music, snipe about the pastor’s less-than-perfect sermons, and fuss about not getting out of church in time to beat the Methodists to lunch. Because it has all lost its wonder, its meaning, its power.
But when we remember who Christ really is, when we thrive humbly in the thrill of knowing He did this for us, when we grapple with the possibility that we, too, can rise from the dead, then the wonder returns, the worship begins, and the small things again remind us of the majestic things of God.
So rise for Easter. Wake up with anticipation. Worship the Lord with abandon. Engage in the wonder!
The tomb is empty! Life has come to us in Christ. The cross is vacant! He is alive today. And we are His people, saved, loved, and empowered to serve!