What Your Son Asked About Easter

The worksheet had a drawing of a calendar on it and four blank lines underneath, and Toby had been chewing the end of his pencil for eleven minutes.

Ross was at the sink with his back to him, doing the pans, half listening the way you do.

"Dad."

"Mm."

"What do we say Easter is?"

Ross laughed, because it sounded like a trick. "Chocolate, and your grandma crying in the third row."

"No, but for the sheet." Toby turned it around and held it up so the light caught it. Write four sentences about a day your family keeps, and why. "Mrs. Achebe said four. I've got one."

"Go on then."

"It's in spring."

Ross dried his hands on the dish towel and came and sat down opposite him, and what happened next took about six seconds and he has not stopped thinking about it since.

He opened his mouth with the answer already moving. He could feel the shape of it. It's about starting again. It's about being a better person. It's about forgiveness, so, you know, being kind, and trying harder than you did last year.

And he heard it before it got out.

He heard it the way you hear your own voice played back on a recording, flatter than you thought it was. And he thought: that is not news. That is a school assembly. My son has asked me what the biggest day of the year in this house is actually about, and what is loading in my mouth is a list of things for him to do.

He said, "Give me a minute, buddy."

He went and stood in the hallway by the coats with his hands on the radiator, which was cold because it was April, and he did the arithmetic. Thirty-one years of Sundays. A funeral where he read the second lesson without shaking. Small group on Wednesdays for a while, in the year the twins were born.

And he could not do it in four sentences.

He could do the moral. He could do what it means for us today, because he had heard that phrase five hundred times. What he could not do, standing by the coats, was say the plain thing that had happened, in order, the way you tell somebody the score.

Which is not because he is a bad father. It is because nobody ever told it to him that way either. He got the application every year and the announcement never once, and you cannot pass on what you were not handed.

He came back and sat down and said, "Ask me again on Saturday. I want to get it right."

Toby wrote It's in spring on line one and drew a rabbit in the margin, because he is nine.

And if a child asked you tonight, at your own table, with the pans still soaking, I think something similar would load in your mouth. Not because you have no faith. Because somebody handed you the response before anybody showed you the announcement.

So let me put the announcement back in your hands. It is four sentences long and it was never yours to earn.

The four sentences he was owed

First, what I am not going to do, so you can put your shoulders down.

I am not going to give you a better script for Saturday. A script is one more thing to get right, and there is a drawer full of those already. Toby did not ask for a performance. He asked for news, and news is not a thing anybody delivers well or badly. It is simply a thing that happened, in an order, and I think nobody has ever told it to you slowly.

Here it is, slowly.

The first sentence is that a lamb died and a household did not.

Egypt, the last night. A lamb picked out on the tenth day and kept in the house until the fourteenth, four days in a small room with the children, long enough for everyone to know its face. Then blood on the two doorposts and across the top, put there with a bunch of hyssop while the bread was still flat because there was no time to let it rise.

The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you.Exodus 12:13

Read who is doing the looking. When I see. Not when the family sees, and not when the family feels it properly. The mark went where the household could not even admire it, on the outside of their own door, and God told them in advance exactly what He would be reading. You were passed over on the strength of a mark you did not make, and that is not my opinion, it is Exodus with the ink dry on it, and the Spirit who moved on that page is in the room while you read this one.

The second sentence is that the offering turned out to be a person, and He volunteered.

Fifteen centuries later a man standing waist deep in the Jordan looked up, saw somebody walking toward him along the bank, and said it out loud in front of a crowd.

Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!John 1:29

Not a lamb. The Lamb. Every doorway in Egypt had been a rehearsal for a face, and here came the face, walking toward the water on purpose. Nobody took His life off Him. Isaiah had written centuries earlier of one wounded for our transgressions, carrying what was ours, and there He came, in step, unhurried. You have a substitute and He was not conscripted. That is the second sentence, and His Spirit carries it to you as relief rather than as information.

The third sentence is that the tomb is empty, and it stayed empty.

They buried Him on the Friday and the world went quiet for a day. Before the light was properly up on the first morning of the week, women walked out to the tomb carrying spices, which is what people carry when a story has ended. The stone was rolled back. The linen was lying there in the shape of nobody.

The stone did not move to let Him out. He was already gone. It moved so that people could put their heads in and see an empty shelf with their own eyes.

We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.Romans 6:9

Feel where that leaves you. You are standing on the far side of a death that is finished and cannot be reopened, and the word for that is not hopeful. Paul wrote it as a settled fact, and the same Spirit who put that line in Scripture is holding it open in front of you now.

The fourth sentence is that the Father said what He thought of it, out loud.

At the Jordan, before Jesus had preached a sermon or healed a single person, before there was one thing anybody could have put on a report about Him, a voice from heaven said: This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.

And at the tomb the Father said it again, louder, and this time He said it by doing something. Paul writes that Jesus was declared the Son of God in power by His resurrection from the dead. The empty shelf is the Father's verdict on His Son, published in the one language nobody can argue with. The offering was accepted. The account is closed.

And here is the part that turns four facts into news at your table. That verdict is the verdict now spoken over everyone the Lamb was given for. You are inside it, not applying for it. The word says you are accepted in the Beloved, and His Spirit is what makes those words your own address rather than somebody else's good fortune.