Most years, Easter sneaks up on me.
Because the date changes every year—sometimes it’s in early spring and sometimes it feels like it’s nearly summer—I never feel fully prepared for it.
With Christmas, it seems like there is a long build up of physical and spiritual preparation. But Easter always surprises me and I never feel that I was quite as spiritually ready for it as I wanted to be.
On Saturday night as I was vacuuming through my house and madly trying to pick up and prepare for the rapidly approaching Easter Sabbath, I thought again how I had been caught off-guard and unprepared. Resurrection dawn was coming fast and I was not ready.
My mind went to Mary, who on that Saturday night so long ago was probably willing the dawn to move closer as quickly as possible. She only wanted to get to Christ’s body and do what she could to honor his life by anointing his discarded mortal frame. I imagine for her that night lasted forever. She probably didn't sleep, didn’t undress, just sat waiting and watching for the slightest hint of color change from black to deep indigo in the night sky to leave for the tomb “very early in the morning.”
She was waiting for it.
This morning as I sat outside in the early sunshine, listening to the birds in the orange trees around my house, I thought about how she was not alone. The whole world had been impatiently waiting for four thousand years for that first miraculous resurrection morning. It didn’t sneak up on anybody. It was the reason for all the sacrifice and all the worship and all the signs and all the prophecy that had been given for millennia.
I thought about how for four thousand years, lambs had been place on altars, again and again and again. Thousands of times. Maybe even millions of times. Unblemished lamb after unblemished lamb, placed in the stead of another who was still coming. Generations of sacrifices. Thousands of years of place holding, until the precious Lamb of God came:
“And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground.”
From Adam’s first careful steps out of one garden to Christ’s heavy steps into another garden, a long line of lambs had bridged the gap between God and man and allowed the fallen access to the divine. But the only reason it worked, the only reason those sacrifices had the power to close that enormous chasm, was because of the blood of him that had yet to be spilt. In that great, last sacrifice, the blood of the Lamb would reach back through time to rescue and flow forward into the future to save the whole fallen earth.
The whole plan hinged on this sacrifice. And all our possibilities depended on the sacred dawn that followed three days later.
It occurs to me that in every area of my life, I am behind and unprepared. The wretchedness and shocking depth of my fallen nature is always sneaking up on me. This is the state of things. I’m always madly trying to clean up the messes of my life and appear presentable so God can come into it.
But the truth is, I am incapable of ever achieving a level of acceptability to meet that holy standard on my own. If he left it to me, to my faith and my works, we would be separated forever.
Instead, God sent a Lamb.
And given the depth of my need, it was not a moment too soon.