By John Kepler
For years, my daughter and several of my friends urged me to read John Irving’s novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Finally, I picked up a copy, although I was intimidated by its size (some 500 pages, depending upon the edition).
The opening paragraph grabbed me with these words, “I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” I couldn’t put the book down and have since read it through twice and am getting ready for a third reading (caution – it is “R” for language).
At one point in the story, Irving writes, “I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished – I am terrified that this year it won’t happen; that, that year, it didn’t. Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer.”
While Christmas has become so absorbed in commercialism, secular trapping, and sentimentalities, it is hard for Holy Week and Easter to fall victim to the same, although each year, businesses are doing their best with Easter bunnies, baskets, eggs, and the like. However, it’s a harder sell because death-resurrection simply doesn’t evoke the same “feelings” as a baby’s birth.
Holy Week and Easter are blunt, even shocking. Christ dies. Christ is resurrected. And both have to do with us humans and the world in which we live. Both have to do with our sin (death) and our being made alive (resurrected). I think John Irving is right: it is the main event.
Holy Week and Easter speak to all who are afraid, caught up in their sins, feeling hopeless, sick and tired of life being a treadmill existence, those who only see everything going to hell in a hand basket.
Holy Week and Easter say that life can be transformed by the power that comes through Jesus Christ. We can wallow in our dying or start reveling in being made alive.
Editor’s note: to read earlier devotionals, please see:
