Easter stirs with new life

There's something amazing about the Easter celebration. For Christians, of course, it marks the resurrection of our Lord, the one whom we believe was God become man. However, there is perhaps an element in that marking that carries an image, a shadow, a glimpse, of that reality to the world regardless of faith perspective.

New life arrives around us and fills the air. True, the dryness which has characterized our area lately has made it less colorful, less noticiable, perhaps less in all ways. Nonetheless, spring is still upon us.

New life traditionally enters the world of our animal companions. No, I'm not using that word in the "animal activist " sense, but simply as a broad ranging term covering many species of animals, wild included.

New life seemingly enters our bodies as well. The other day, after spending time in the Clovis Community College weightroom, I actually felt like running. Felt like was as far as it got, but for someone whose acceptable exercise pattern includes biking, lfiting, swimming, and almost anything but running, it was an unusual response.

Easter can, of course, occur any time between mid March to mid April, but that same time span is broadly defined as spring. There is a plethora of folk lore and folk religion which surrounds this holy day, but for the Christian, the central impact remains the Resurrection of the one whom we acknowledge Messiah.

For reasons which are obvious in the context of The Story, Easter coincides to one extent or another with Passover, when our Jewish cousins also celebrate an aspect of new life, the Exodus event.

It is not easy, it takes a great leap of faith, to believe that a man was raised from the dead, by God. It takes a leap into something perhaps harder to explain, to believe that this man was, at the same time, God. Greco Roman and Scandinavian mythology are full of stories about persons who were such, but never attached to an actual human who lived and walked among us.

For me, part of the impetus to believe actually emerges from that new life which springs to being all around us. If that is within the province of the Divine, then certainly the Resurrection story is. Joyous Easter.

Clyde Davis is a Presbyterian pastor and teacher at Clovis Christian High School. He can be contacted at:

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