After Easter

The trumpets have quieted. The lilies, once brilliant white on Easter morning, are starting to brown at the edges. The pews are a little emptier now than they were on Easter morning. And yet — the resurrection still calls.

After Easter, the question is no longer just what do we believe — but how do we walk with Jesus now that death is defeated?

This, perhaps, is one of the great questions of the Christian life. Jesus came, Jesus died, Jesus rose again — and we're still stuck down here? What are we supposed to do now?

The truth, however, is that walking with Jesus is not a one-day street. It is dusty roads and aching feet. It is the heavy scent of sweat and bread shared at simple tables. It is listening for His voice in the hush before dawn, seeing glimpses of His glory in the ordinary — in the garden soil under our nails, in the crackling fire, in the tear tracks on a friend’s face.

Think of Mary Magdalene, stunned in the garden, mistaking the risen Jesus for the gardener. Or Peter, shoulders slumped by the shoreline, smelling fish roasting on coals as Jesus invites him to love again. After the resurrection, the walk with Jesus became deeply real for these people— tender, raw, and full of second chances.

But then, the actual, physical, blood-and-bones Jesus left them. Can you imagine how that would have felt? To walk for years with Christ, to go through the grief and amazement and confusion and amazingness of that first Easter morning, only to have to suddenly live the rest of your life without the physical presence of Jesus?

History offers other witnesses too. Think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer — a man who chose to walk with Christ even into the dark corridors of a Nazi prison, even as the scent of damp stone and cold iron filled his last days. Bonhoeffer wrote of "costly grace," a grace that calls a person to pick up their cross and follow. For him, resurrection meant not comfort, but courage.

To walk with Jesus after Easter is to accept the invitation to new life — not someday, but today. It means choosing walking in forgiveness when bitterness feels easier. Speaking truth when silence would be safer. Loving our enemies when hatred is the easier path.It is a road paved with small, daily resurrections: moments when hope is chosen over despair, when life bursts out of dead ground, when Christ’s risen life pulses through our own tired veins.

I've felt this myself lately. I work in public health in the United States, and so much of the work that I do has had funding cut. I've had graduate school offers rescinded due to grant money that's been pulled back. This is hard personally, but I most mourn those whom it will hurt the most: The women in rural areas who whose hospitals will keep closing when they need to give birth; the toddlers crawling around lead-infested apartments who will keep bearing the brunt of the health impacts of the housing epidemic; the people with cancer who won't get the treatments we've been working on for decades; the hundreds of thousands of children and adults around the world who will die entirely preventable deaths from HIV.

Sometimes it's just hard to keep walking, isn't it? Sometimes the empty tomb almost feels like a farce.

But it isn't. I know it isn't, because the story of God's work in the universe doesn't end there. It keeps going, even though it's hard and uncomfortable and we have no idea, really, of the specifics of what comes next. Of where we will be called next.

So we stand at the edge of the empty tomb, the morning mist still clinging to our skin, the stone rolled aside.
The question is open, lingering in the cool, fragrant air:

Where will we walk with Jesus next?