Post-Easter Blues?

I don’t know about you, but after a particularly wonderful event I always feel a little bit down: you plan something, like a special birthday, for ages, and it is great while it lasts, but the next day, well, life carries on as normal, and you have to pick yourself up and get back to the old, familiar routines. It’s the same with Holy Week and Easter. For Christians, this is the most important week of the year, and the services we have in church are inspirational, devotional and emotional in equal degree. But now, in the week after Easter, the emails creep back into your inbox, that boring meeting is getting closer, and you have to come down from the spiritual high of Easter Day to the ordinary and the routine.

 There is no way of avoiding this, of course. However, post-Easter for a Christian is not the same as the post-party blues we all feel from time to time. This is because that what we are celebrating, the Resurrection, is not a one-off event, nor is it something that only happens to us when we reach the end of our lives, but is constant and it is happening now. The trouble is, we call it Easter Day, as if what we are celebrating is only real for that day alone. However, when Jesus rose from the dead he shared his risen life with people for forty days before his Ascension – in the garden with Mary Magdalen, on the beach with his closest friends – and he does the same with us now through the activity of the Holy Spirit. For what the Resurrection actually is is the reality of God in our daily lives, not something for future fulfilment. Jesus himself called this the Kingdom of God, and St Paul called it the new creation, but they are the same thing.

 So, when we have a boring meeting to go to, and we remember the high jinks of Easter Day, remember that the Resurrection is here and now, and whilst that may not make the boringness of the meeting any less boring, it does mean that it is not the be all and all of our lives. The power of the Resurrection is, and that lasts much longer than Easter Day, and indeed, the less exciting things we have to do.

Dean Roger