Happy Easter, day 2

I thought about posting nothing but "Happy Easter" for the next 50 days, but I decided against it. It might start to get tedious by about day 27 or so. (Easter, of course, could never be boring, but one of the advantages of having such a long Easter season is that we celebrate it in lots of different ways, not just one way lots of times. That said, I still haven't been able to figure out what an egg roll is, or what it actually has to do with Easter.)

The number "50" is pretty significant. For one thing, it's longer than Lent (even if you count the Sundays), so 40 days in the wilderness are neatly surpassed by 50 days celebrating the risen Lord. In fact, it's the longest festival season of the church year, and with good reason. (The so-called "season after Pentecost" does not count, as it technically isn't a season so much as a lack of a season.) In popular understanding Lent tends to be associated by Jesus' death (although it actually involves much more than that), so the length of the Easter season is just one more indication that in Christ, life triumphs over death.

There are other, more complicated reasons for the number of days to be 50, of course. It goes back to the significance of the umber seven, the number of days it took for God to create the earth and all its creatures (and then have a day of rest)--so seven is the number of completion and perfection. 49 days, or 7x7, a week of weeks, is completion multiplied by completion, perfection multiplied by perfection. And then, when you've come up wnith the most perfect number imaginable...you add one. It's fully, totally complete...and you add one more. That's Easter. That's the resurrection. It's the +1 that really hints at what God is about in this season (and in all seasons). So it is fitting and appropriate that we would take that many days to celebrate the resurrection--no less would do!

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By sheer coincidence (no, really, it is the sort of thing I would do, but I didn't, this time), this is also my 50th published post on this blog. Sometimes these things happen.

~Pastor Sarah