One of the things that was new to me when I moved to the United States was the popularity of historical reenactments. I looked with some bemusement at people setting up a-frame canvas tents, dressed in drab, scratchy woolen clothing, and standing over smoky fires, guns propped in the background. But over time I came to appreciate the instinct for preservation - not only of artifacts in museums, but of traditions and ways of life - that drives such reenactments, as well as the honoring of the shared history of our country that occurs at such events.
As we approach the annual celebration of the death and resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ, it's tempting to view what we do in Holy Week and Easter as something like those historical reenactments. On Palm Sunday, we process around our churches in imitation of the crowds greeting Jesus with branches that first Palm Sunday. On Maundy Thursday, we share bread and wine as Jesus did with his disciples the night before he died. On Good Friday we keep vigil at the foot of the cross, remembering the disciples and the women similarly keeping vigil. And at the Easter Vigil and on Easter morning, we do our best to recreate the excitement of that first Easter morning.
However, if all we do in Holy Week and Easter is reenact and remember, then we have missed the point. As valuable as reenactments are for our understanding of the original events and their contexts, they remain reenactments. The original events stay in the past. We have no access to them, and no benefits other than those accrued over time.
But the tradition of our faith is clear. God does not merely work in the past; our experience of God's grace is not simply a two thousand year long chain of inheritance. Instead, God works in us today in and through those events that happened two thousand years ago.
How is that possible? In essence, it's because God is not constrained by time in the way that we are. We have no choice but to live in the present, and to experience time as a line that runs in one direction. But for God, as 2 Peter 3.8 reminds us, "with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day." One way of imagining it is that time is like a line on a piece of paper. We experience it by tracing along one section of that line. But God is able to pick up the piece of paper and bend it, so that one part of the line touches another.
So when we come to Holy Week and Easter, God bends the paper, so that our part of the line touches the part two thousand years ago, when Jesus lived and died and rose to life. We don't just remember and reenact; we became part of those events that ensured our salvation, and Christ acts in our lives here and now. We know the crowds' adulation and betrayal; we experience his presence in bread and wine. We die with him. And we are raised with him in glory.
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
