Easter is the cornerstone of the Christian faith. That has always been both its strength and its scandal. The notion of resurrection is so radical that unless one encounters in some fashion “the Risen Christ”…well, then all the rest is merely a nice story. A bit bloody around the edges, but a lovely myth.

Christmas gets the most notice, but it is a nighttime story and tangential to the center of Christianity. The celebration takes place at midnight, deep in the northern European cold. That story gets the children through the hard winter.

Easter though, is intimately connected to Passover. Without Passover, there would be no Easter. No glorious sunrise, no empty tomb.

Since I didn’t come here to argue but merely to celebrate this beautiful Easter morning, I’ll simply let C.S. Lewis take the stand to make the case for Easter.

You can find this essay here: God in the Dock.

In the twelfth piece from this collection, the one used for the title of his book, Lewis puts Jesus on trial so that reasonable men — and we are, all of us, “reasonable men” — can have a say in this very old argument:

…[The] problem is to reconcile two things. On the one hand you have got the almost generally admitted depth and sanity of His moral teaching, which is not very seriously questioned, even by those who are opposed to Christianity. In fact, I find when I am arguing with very anti-God people that they rather make a point of saying, ‘I am entirely in favour of the moral teaching of Christianity’ — and there seems to be a general agreement that in the teaching of this Man and of His immediate followers, moral truth is exhibited at its purest and best. It is not sloppy idealism; it is full of wisdom and shrewdness. The whole thing is realistic, fresh to the highest degree, the product of a sane mind. That is one phenomenon.

The other phenomenon is the quite appalling nature of this Man’s theological remarks. You all know what I mean, and I want rather to stress the point that the appalling claim, which this Man seems to be making, is not merely made at one moment of His career. There is, of course, the one moment, which led to His execution. The moment at which the High Priest said to Him, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am the Anointed, the Son of the uncreated God, and you shall see me appearing at the end of all history as the judge of the universe.’ But that claim, in fact, does not rest on this one dramatic moment. When you look into his conversation you will find this sort of claim running throughout the whole thing. For instance, He went about saying to people, ‘I forgive your sins’. Now it is quite natural for a man to forgive something you do to him. Thus if somebody cheats me out of five pounds it is quite possible and reasonable for me to say, ‘Well, I forgive him, we will say no more about it.’ What on earth would you say if somebody had done you out of five pounds and I said, ‘That is all right, I forgive him? Then there is a curious thing, which seems to slip out almost by accident. On one occasion this Man is sitting looking down on Jerusalem from the hill about it and suddenly in comes an extraordinary remark — ‘I keep on sending you prophets and wise men.’ Nobody comments on it. And yet, quite suddenly, almost incidentally, He is claiming to be the power that all through the centuries is sending wise men and leaders into the world. Here is another curious remark: in almost every religion there are unpleasant observances like fasting. This Man suddenly remarks one day, ‘No one need fast while I am here.’ Who is this man who remarks one day, ‘No one need fast while I am here.’ Who is this Man who remarks that His mere presence suspends all normal rules? Who is the person who can suddenly tell the School they can have a half-holiday? Sometimes the statements put forward the assumption that He, the Speaker, is completely without sin or fault. This is always the attitude. ‘You, to whom I am talking, are all sinners,’ and He never remotely suggests that this same reproach can be brought against Him. He says again, ‘I am the begotten of the One God, before Abraham was, I am,’ And remember what the words ‘I am’ were in Hebrew. They were the name of God, which must not be spoken by any human being, the name which it was death to utter.

Well, that is the other side. On the one side clear, definite moral teaching. On the other, claims which, if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most same and humble of men.

And indeed, Jesus’ own mother had her doubts. According to the New Testament his family sought to grab him and haul him off. He was obviously the black sheep in their family, and as black sheep are wont to do, he stayed two steps ahead of them. I do wish C. S. Lewis had pointed that out.

Ah well, it’s a small omission, one I’m sure he’d have included had he thought of it. Let’s continue with his compare-and-contrast dissection of this crazy man:

There is no halfway house and there is no parallel in other religions. If you had gone to Buddha and asked him: ‘Are you the son of Brahma?’ he would have said, ‘My son, you are still in the vale of illusion.’ If you had gone to Socrates and asked, ‘Are you Zeus?’ he would have laughed at you. If you had gone to Mohammed and asked, ‘Are you Allah?’ he would first have rent his clothes and then cut your head off. If you had asked Confucius, ‘Are you Heaven?’ I think he would have probably replied, ‘Remarks which are not in accordance with nature are in bad taste.’ The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said is out of the question. In my opinion, the only person who can say that sort of thing is either God or a complete lunatic suffering from that form of delusion, which undermines the whole mind of man. If you think you are a poached egg, when you are not looking for a piece of toast to suit you may be sane, but if you think you are God, there is no chance for you. We may note in passing that He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met him. He produced mainly three effects — Hatred — Terror — Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.

Here I will disagree. It has been my experience that awe can begin with the smallest seed of simple admiration and go on to encompass something more awe-inspiring. It all depends.

I am not a mystical person. Thus Martha, busy in the kitchen, is more my mode of being than is that swoony Mary, sitting at Jesus’ feet. With my characterological predisposition leaning toward getting everyone fed, I have little patience for the loungers. Sometimes this is my strength; sometimes — taking into account my unfortunate tendency toward Attention Deficit Disorder — it’s a weakness; it leads to muddled distraction and overload. I’ll bet if Martha were here today she’d have two cell phones and a myriad of To Do lists, along with matching lists for the people she lived with. Men who marry Marthas often find themselves the target of a “Honey Do” list full of repair and replace chores that can take up the better part of an otherwise beautiful Saturday.

Having established those parameters and the ways in which they can distract, I will admit to a few “spiritual” dreams. One of the most memorable occurred when I was twenty-eight or so. I found out later that this age is often a time of a spiritual “awakening”; those experiences are peculiar to the individual but they underscore the universal aspect of spiritual passages which punctuate our lives. Christians call it metanoia. Those who describe “being saved” know well it’s never a once-and-for-all salve, an ointment which blesses the rest of one’s life. “It is a terrible thing to fall into the Hands of the Living God”. Indeed it is. And to learn that surrender must happen as often as need be, over and over till one realizes experientially that this surrender is always accompanied by a “catch”. You cannot let go until you are sure there is someone to catch you. That kind of catch. But keep in mind also the other connotation of “catch” — i.e., “What’s the catch? Let me read the fine print, please.” The apostle Peter was very much of that mindset — until finally he ended up as his Master had.

That dream of mine at twenty-eight was my first experience of the Living God, but before that moment I couldn’t have told you I was missing anything in the experience of religion. Can a person born blind really miss the sighted experience of a blue sky? And life after the dream? Gabriel Marcel, a committed French intellectual atheist put his own conversion experience this way: “everything is exactly the same and entirely different”. In other words, I was no more “virtuous” than I’d ever been. The next morning I got up and fixed breakfast and helped the children get dressed and life went on, not always smoothly. But the foundation had changed and it never changed back.

Lewis says:

What are we to do about reconciling the two contradictory phenomena? One attempt consists in saying that the man did not really say these things; but that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that he had said them. This is difficult because His followers were all Jews; that is, they belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God — that there could not possibly be another. It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.

Another point is that on that view you would have to regard the accounts of the Man as being legends. Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there is no conversation that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence. In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.

Then we come to the strangest story of all, the story of the Resurrection. It is very necessary to get the story clear. I heard a man say, ‘The importance of the Resurrection is that is gives evidence of survival, evidence that the human personality survives death.’ On that view what happened to Christ would be what had always happened to all men, the difference being that in Christ’s case we were privileged to see it happening. This is certainly not what the earliest Christian writers thought. Something perfectly new in the history of the universe had happened. Christ had defeated death. The door, which had always been locked, had for the very first time been forced open. This is something quite distinct from mere ghost-survival. I don’t mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. I don’t mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. On the contrary, they believed in it so firmly that, on more than one occasion, Christ had had to assure them that He was not a ghost. The point is that while believing in survival they yet regarded the Resurrection as something totally different and new. The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the universe. Something new had appeared in the universe: as new as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get divided into ‘ghost’ and ‘corpse’. A new mode of being has arisen. That is the story. What are we going to make of it?

One thing I’ve pondered about this story of the Resurrection is that even his closest followers didn’t recognize Him immediately. He had to speak, they had to hear his familiar voice before the realization set in. That’s what my own ‘dream’ made me see: that the man I was watching was who they said He was. My reaction? Well, don’t forget I’d had years of hearing the stories so when I finally re-cognized who it was standing across that dusty road looking at me —looking into me and accepting what He saw there — my response was a startled surprise followed by laughter. I thought, “I’ll be darned. So that’s why they followed You.” No awe, no drama. At least not then. Instead, the experience was one of child-like delight. Underneath all the other stuff, that shared smile has remained.

The question is, I suppose, whether any hypothesis covers the facts so well as the Christian hypothesis. That hypothesis is that God has come down into the created universe, down to manhood — and come up again, pulling it up with Him. The alternative hypothesis is not legend, nor exaggeration, nor the apparitions of a ghost. It is either lunacy or lies. Unless one can take the second alternative (and I can’t) one turns to the Christian theory.

‘What are we to make of Christ?’ There is no question of what we can make of Him; it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story.

The things he says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say, ‘This is the truth about the universe. This is the way you ought to go,’ but He says, ‘I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.’ He says, ‘No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.; He says, ‘If you are ashamed of Me, if, when you hear this call, you turn the other way, I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything whatever is keeping you from God and from me, whatever it is, throw it away. If it is your eye, pull it out. If it is your hand, cut it off. If you put yourself first you will be last. Come to Me everyone who is carrying a heavy load, I will set that right. Your sins, all of them, are wiped out, I can do that. I am Re-birth, I am Life. Eat ME, drink Me, I am your Food. And finally, do not be afraid, I have overcome the whole Universe.’ That is the issue.

C. S. Lewis’ words have lived on past his own journey here. Those who travel the same road find his words are often a welcome signpost on this via dolorosa.

For you who are reading this essay, who are here at Gates of Vienna for your own reasons, we wish you a Happy Easter. If you are decidedly not a Christian, please take one of the cards that says “Happy Spring”. Celebrate with us the blossoming of trees and flowers all around Schloss Bodissey. We are fortunate that for the moment, in this place at this time, peace abounds. And we are fortunate to understand how deeply blessed we are to be given the privilege of living in a place of peace. It won’t last — the way of the world is war, after all — but while it is here we will look at it fully, enjoying the gift of all this bounty.