A Chastened Victory
Easter is a victory. It is the day and season when we remember that death is not the end, that there is a love stronger than the vulnerability of our bodies and the brokenness of our world. It is the day when despite so much suffering, we dare to proclaim that Christ is risen and that all things are being renewed.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Yet what kind of victory is Easter, exactly? In some places in the Scripture and in Christian tradition, God’s resurrection victory through Jesus can feel a bit inflated. In John’s Gospel, the resurrection can be read as a magic trick that God’s incarnate Word pulled over the eyes of unsuspecting death. John’s risen Jesus appears behind locked doors without any warning and, with a command, multiplies the catch of his disciples’ fishing nets. Matthew’s resurrection story ends with Jesus declaring from a mountaintop that all power in heaven has been given to him. Then he launches an expansion plan of sending his disciples to the ends of the earth as heralds of God’s good news. In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, the resurrection is a victory that elicits overpowering praise: “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:54). And in many mainline churches, we are sometimes guilty of Easter celebrations that resound in only one key. Holy Week is often reduced to an upbeat cheer between the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and the Alleluias of Easter.
Christianity in the West has all too often flexed muscles of overblown triumph, of triumphalism, which means excessive exultation over one’s success or achievements. Especially as Christianity aligned with political powers-that-be, we turned truth into an “either you’re with us or you’re against us” weapon. This tendency to separate insiders from outsiders, winners from losers, only snowballed over time. Before a crucial battle for the Roman throne, so the legend goes, the emperor-to-be Constantine dreamed of a cross in the sky. He believed he heard God speaking to him Latin words that meant “In this sign you will be the victor.” So he placed crosses on his soldiers’ shields. And they won—they vanquished rival Maxentius’s troops and distorted a symbol of suffering love into a tool of triumphalist victory. But zero-sum victory always leaves victims trailing, and the logic of triumphalist religion has inspired countless forced baptisms, hellfire sermons, antisemitic pogroms, violent crusades, and plans to take America back “for God.”
Possibly in reaction to the checkered history of Christianity, the temptation for progressive Christians like myself sways to the opposite extreme. It’s not inflated imperialism that we struggle with so much as deflated defeat. Some of us may be tempted to give up hope that the church can still be a community of transformation in the 21st century. Some of us may be tempted to give up on the possibility of passionate faith convictions that do not perpetuate oppression. Some of us may be tempted to give up on the meaningfulness of prayer. Some of us may be tempted to give up on Jesus. Many of our reasons for surrender are justified, but the effect is that many progressive Christians often settle for Christianity-lite. A lowest-common-denominator form of Christian identity that doesn’t offend anybody because it doesn’t stand for anything.
Easter is a third path beyond the poles of God’s swagger on the one hand and depressing defeat on the other. The Easter season is a reminder of the paradoxical victory of God triumphing through failure.
We see Christ’s risen presence in the legacy of Pope Francis. Upon his election as Pope in 2013, the former Cardinal Bergoglio turned down the bright red shoes of his predecessor Benedict in favor of practical loafers. He hadn’t even planned on wearing new shoes at all to the big papal celebration; his friends had to talk him into trading in his previous shabby sneakers. Pope Francis set a more humble example than has been seen in his high office for years. In previous Holy Week services, the Pope transformed the traditional foot-washing ceremony of Maundy Thursday into a demonstration of God’s love for people in need. One Holy Week, he washed the feet of twelve prisoners in one of Rome’s prisons. During another Holy Week service, he washed the feet of the elderly and those with disabilities. Pope Francis’s leadership was grounded in authentic humility—when else did Protestants like the folks in one of my former churches do a book study of a papal encyclical (Laudato Si’)?
The truth that the Gospels remind us of every year is that there is no resurrection without the cross. We need the failure of the cross to make sense of the victory of the resurrection. The four Gospels differ in details, but each takes a significant amount of time to tell the Passion story. Paul’s message of God’s victory over death was empowered by the counterintuitive message of Christ crucified. If our celebration of Easter is not tempered by the harrowing reality of Jesus’ death, the proclamation of resurrection can become unmoored and twisted into triumphalist victory.
Mark's resurrection story is anything but triumphalist. Mark’s story tells of a wavering win, an unstable and uncertain triumph. It’s a victory that barely deserves to be called a victory at all. Mark’s Gospel downplays the resurrection. There are three different endings to Mark’s Gospel. Mark’s original ending in 16:8 is so abrupt and unfinished that it makes its hearers squirm: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). This is no algorithmic happy ending packaged for streaming; it’s more like the nuanced last scene of a Paul Thomas Anderson film.
Mark’s resurrected Jesus is, in the original ending, nowhere to be found. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and another woman, Salome, sought to sneak near Jesus’ tomb under cover of night and honor his burial with an anointing of oil. A large stone guarded Jesus’ body, but they had no well-construed plan to remove it; they even discussed the logistics of their stealth anointing as they walked, only to find, on arrival, that the stone had already been rolled back. They peered into the tomb and found, not the body of their dead Rabbi, but a mysterious young man in a white robe.
A young man in a white robe would have been cause for fear and amazement. Earlier Jewish texts recount a similar story, perhaps of an angel, who pays a visit in dramatic, world-shaking moments when heaven unveils itself on earth. This man claimed that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised, but that he was not here, that he had gone ahead of them to Galilee (Mark 16:6-7). The tomb was empty, the stone had been rolled away, heaven had unveiled itself on earth, but the women were too shocked to speak and the men had fled the scene entirely.
The paradoxical victory of resurrection in the Bible is tied to humility and defeat.
Resurrection is a chastened victory born through flawed and all-too-human characters.
God rose through Sarah, who gave birth to Isaac even after years of barrenness.
God rose through Jacob, the swindler, who wrestled all night with an angel, and was left with a limp that he called a blessing from God.
God rose through Joseph, who, before serving as Pharaoh’s top aide, was abandoned by his brothers and left for dead.
God rose through Jonah, who dwelt in the whale’s belly for three days and nights.
God rose through David, the shepherd nobody who became a king.
God rose through Jesus on the third day, after he was crucified on a cross.
God rises today through our lives, our communities, and world, through our doubts, uncertainties and failures, through our terror and amazement.
My wife and kids went to New Orleans this week during school spring break. We saw alligators and ate beignets. This is an old Easter sermon from the archives. Have a great week.
There is something profoundly true—and profoundly unsettling—in the way you have stripped Easter of its pageantry to reveal again its trembling, human heart. We are too often tempted to demand from the Resurrection a final, triumphant chord, a blinding certitude that spares us from the trembling in our knees. But the first Easter was not a coronation—it was a wound turned inside out, a light so fierce and strange that even the faithful fled from it in terror.
You have named, with a clear and sorrowful eye, what we prefer to forget: that Easter’s victory is not a conquest but a transformation, not the obliteration of weakness but its transfiguration. Christ does not rise with the swagger of a general; He rises with the quiet, aching authority of one who has known the grave from the inside, and carries its scar still burning in His flesh.
And this, too, is the secret that incarnational mysticism, which I explore in Desert and Fire, whispers to those willing to listen: that the Resurrection is not merely a distant historical event or a future cosmic promise, but a living sap now running through the veins of the world. That in the trembling hands of women at the tomb, in the half-frightened recognition of bread broken on the road to Emmaus, in the worn sandals of a pope who stoops to wash the feet of prisoners—there, already, Easter breathes.
God has always chosen the trembling vessel, the broken reed, the pierced side as the means of His rising. He still does. Resurrection is not a crushing of the human story but its infusion; not the erasure of our wounds but their strange and shining fulfillment. The same Christ who stood weeping outside Lazarus’ tomb rises now not to erase sorrow but to fill it with an indestructible hope—a hope so fragile that it must be carried with shaking hands, yet so strong that not even death can overthrow it.
It is easy to miss it, of course. Easier to demand certainty, easier still to surrender to despair. But the Resurrection comes to us like the morning mist on the fields: soft, almost imperceptible, waiting for those who have learned, painfully, to see with the heart.
You have helped us see again—not a Resurrection of shouting banners, but a Resurrection stitched quietly into the trembling fabric of our frailty. A Resurrection that bids us not to escape the world, but to dwell in it more deeply, carrying in our bodies the dying of the Lord, that His rising may also shine through us.
I love this. I have been pondering the chaos and confusion of Easter morning. There was no triumph or victory. No “He is Risen Indeed!”. Mary wasn’t believed and a couple of disciples were out of town, still in Emmaus. There was much teaching left to do through his teaching body. They had to learn to see through a deeper gaze. It is what We are charged to do as well.
This is a keeper