They Have Threatened Us With Resurrection

Am I the only one who found Easter to be especially problematic this year?

The service was beautiful. The sermon was on point, but how do you faithfully celebrate the risen Christ amidst an anti-Christ regime? The whole time we were singing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” I couldn’t help thinking we were collectively whistling past the graveyard.

Without sounding blasphemous, Easter is far and away my least favorite holy day. Good Friday I get. Silent Saturday is understandable. But Easter? Two thousand years later and little has changed. The imperial powers that be, in cahoots with religious fundamentalism, continue to crucify poor, Brown, disenfranchised victims. I’m not in the mood to celebrate. I want to burn this place to the ground. As RedStar Ministry recently shared, “It's healthy to feel rage and discomfort and a complete disconnect from the social reality of daily life in the imperial core. Because there's a genocide happening right now…and if you, like us, are located in the USA, your own government is sponsoring it.”

For anyone paying attention, Easter not only reveals the kind of world we inhabit, but also the kind of God we serve.

Most of us worship a God who looks like us. Which is why Easter is so popular among white people. In the West, Easter is the high point of the church year. Why? Because Easter is triumphant. It’s why American churches are filled to the brim on Easter Sunday and deserted on Silent Saturday. Imperial people worship imperial gods. An autocrat on high is exactly the kind of God you would expect white, privileged people to worship.

The exact opposite is true among Latin Americans, Native Americans, and People of Color. “The Christian ‘feasts of life and hope’ mean nothing to Indians and Mestizos. Their feast is Holy Week. The suffering and death of Jesus, the pain and mourning are something in which they can understand. There in the suffering, they are at home. That is their life,” writes theologian H. Luning.

Privileged people worship a triumphal God. Suffering people worship a suffering God.

As I sat in the pew on Sunday morning surrounded by Easter lilies, a brass band, and all the white people an Episcopal Church could hold, I couldn’t help wonder, what is Easter to the deported and disappeared? How is Kilmar Abrego Garcia celebrating Easter? What is the resurrection to Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Ozturk? The answer? Everything.

When today’s victims of the American empire open their Bibles and read about a person of color not given a fair trial and killed by the cops, they know exactly what is going on. Jesus, the wrongfully accused, is their brother. Jesus, the victim of state-sanctioned-violence, is their father. Jesus, the colonized day-laborer working his ass off to make ends meet, is their lived experience. In fellowship with this crucified Christ deprived of freedom, dignity, and a long life, they find recognition and hope. Those who live under the constant threat of death and dehumanization understand resurrection better than the rest of us.

Perhaps it is my white privilege blinding me to the real meaning of Easter, of fully participating in the life and death of Christ. During the Great Vigil of Easter service on Saturday night, my friend Pastor Gordon Sandquist put it this way:

“What if Jesus is not the exception, but the revelation? What if the crucifixion isn’t primarily about divine punishment, but about what happens when a fully alive, fully loving, fully free human being stands in the world as it is, speaks the truth, heals the sick, and refuses to back down in the face of death. This changes everything. It shifts the meaning of salvation, not rescue from sin as private guilt, but rescue from empire as a totalizing system of violence and death. Not salvation as a transaction, but salvation as transfiguration. The ongoing, unveiling of what God looks like in human life. This also means that Jesus’ life and death, they weren’t done for us in the way that we often think. They were lived with us, and as us, and through us. They were participatory from the beginning.”

What is Easter to the victims of the American empire? Easter is the two thousand year invitation to participate in the ongoing story of death and resurrection. Easter is knowing what it means to dream wide awake, to live threatened with the promise of new and unending life.

Today, as I ponder the full meaning of Easter in the shadow of fascism, I am reminded of the writings of Guatemalan poet, theologian, and peace activist Julia Esquivel.

Following the U.S.-backed coup in 1954, Guatemala experienced a series of highly repressive military dictatorships. The Guatemalan government, supported by the U.S., often labeled peace activists and reformers as communists in order to justify their persecution of the poor. As in any war, peasants suffered the most. Human rights abuses, torture, disappearance, and extrajudicial killings were the norm.

In 1980, after almost thirty years of fighting and unrest, Esquivel wrote her seminal poem, “They Have Threatened Us with Resurrection.” Imagine the courage to compose such an anthem.

The poem captures the resilience and hope of the Guatemalan people despite ongoing oppression. Even in the face of death, the hope of salvation cannot be extinguished. For a people who identify with the Jesus of Gethsemane, for a community who understands betrayal, the hope of resurrection is palpable. Esquivel and her community are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. They were troubled on every side, yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always carrying around in the body the death of the Lord Jesus. They were threatened with death, yet promised resurrection.

As you pause to participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus this Eastertide, remember that we were commanded to follow him down the dark, anti-imperial road to death. We are dead men and women walking. As my dear friend Father Brendan E. Williams once told me, “We’re all headed toward the same place in this life. We’re all headed to the grave, or to the burning ground. And we can either go there free, or we can go there imprisoned, and that choice is always ours to make.”

How do we truly celebrate the risen Christ this Easter? The same way Mary Magdalene did. Even though the empire had killed her beloved, she still showed up at the tomb to tend to the dead. And in so doing, many believe she participated in Jesus’ resurrection. Like Mary, we look for the living among the dead, because they have been promised resurrection.

Amen and amen.

Gary Alan Taylor

P.S. I’ve attached excerpts from Julia Esquivel’s poem, “They Have Threatened Us With Resurrection.” Take some time today and meditate on her words. What role can you play in helping to bring new life among those threatened with resurrection?

It isn't the noise in the streets
that keeps us from resting, my friend,
nor is it the shouts of the young people
coming out drunk from the "St. Pauli,"
nor is it the tumult of those who pass by excitedly
on their way to the mountains.

It is something within us that doesn't let us sleep,
that doesn't let us rest,
that won't stop pounding
deep inside,
it is the silent, warm weeping
of Indian women without their husbands,
it is the sad gaze of the children
fixed somewhere beyond memory,
precious in our eyes
which during sleep,
though closed, keep watch,
systole,
diastole,
awake.

What keeps us from sleeping
is that they have threatened us with Resurrection!
Because every evening
though weary of killings,
an endless inventory since 1954,
yet we go on loving life
and do not accept their death!

They have threatened us with Resurrection
Because we have felt their inert bodies,
and their souls penetrated ours
doubly fortified,
because in this marathon of Hope,
there are always others to relieve us
who carry the strength
to reach the finish line
which lies beyond death.

They have threatened us with Resurrection
because they are more alive than ever before,
because they transform our agonies
and fertilize our struggle,
because they pick us up when we fall,
because they loom like giants
before the crazed gorillas' fear.

Join us in this vigil
and you will know what it is to dream!
Then you will know how marvelous it is
to live threatened with Resurrection!

To dream awake,
to keep watch asleep,
to live while dying,
and to know ourselves already
resurrected!