Easter without the binaries
The Good Friday story where you find what you need
For the past couple of days my seven year old has been asking me what we’re going to do on Good Friday. She just likes to know what the weekend holds. I’ve been irreverently replying, “Thinking about Jesus’ public execution.” The first time, she thought about it and said, “I think I prefer Halloween!”
When I said it today, she just rolled her eyes.
My kids are used to me pointing out the things I find absurd about Christianity, particularly in the way it’s often communicated to children. They know that both of their parents have a complicated relationship with it.
We both grew up taught to believe, grasping it with life-changing fervour at different points. These days, we’re generally both comfortable with uncertainty. Speaking for myself, I’d say that I actively question and reject a lot of the beliefs I grew up with but that I still feel a lot of affection for my inherited faith.
It makes me conscious that I’m not sure what my children will be inheriting from me. My confusion over what I should be passing on is often heightened at these peaks in the Christian calendar.
I value my own knowledge of the Bible because it helps me to spot patterns in the wider culture, whether that’s in books, films, politics or social media posts. I appreciate the depth it’s given to my understanding of how societies and systems (and me as a part of them) have been shaped by particular scriptural interpretations.
That doesn’t mean that my kids will or should care about that. What matters to me won’t necessarily matter to them. I had to remind myself of that the other day when I excitedly introduced my 12 and 10 year olds to the first X-Men movie and one of them gave the verdict that it was good but that Iron Man was better (!!!).
I do share Bible stories with them, though, especially at Christmas and Easter. There’s so much in this epic of the crucifixion, resurrection and the lead up to them. In the early years I shared because I worried about not giving them what I received, even though a lot of it was harmful for me.
But they will always have something different. They’re growing up in a different time, a different country, with different parents, different family structure, different experiences. And they are different people. So often I look at them to find the anxiety I’m so familiar with, except it’s not there. They are at ease.
And so I hand them these stories as a gift passed down through generations in our family, meaning different things to different people in different places at different times. A container for human experience and human complexity.
I find myself sharing new readings, looking at the Easter story as if God loves me in all my complexity. Year on year, there’s more discovery, less doctrine in it for me.
This year I’m thinking about fact that Jesus wasn’t who people thought he was. A lot of his followers thought he was a revolutionary who would help them overthrow the Romans. He was always going to end up disappointing people - it was inevitable.
He might not even have known himself what the outcome would be. But he was clearly driven by an inner sense of purpose and in touch with the loneliness of that.
I see it because it’s something I can relate to lately. In moving towards I don’t know what, I’m having to make various decisions that I know run the risk of disappointing others. I’m comforted that although we’re taught to value a crowd, the story goes that not many stuck around after Jesus’ arrest but a few did.
Now that I no longer really know what I believe, and feel at peace with that, not knowing has opened up a lot of possibility.
Both evangelicalism and atheism have felt to me Euro-patriarchal spaces, even where they are populated by global majority folk. Everything is binary.
I think many, many of us are living in queerer spaces where we’re recognising the gifts of living outside of certainty.
Here in this queerer space, I’m finding that it’s not really about whether the story is true or not. I can give it a different attention, to discover what is true in it - what has palpable value.
Perhaps this is what I’m passing on to my children, a different way of attending to a story, to ask the question:
In a world where I am loved, what does this mean?