365 days of Easter
At the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, there’s an Easter every day.
In one gallery hangs a painting by Eugène Burnand known as “Peter and John Running to the Tomb” (Full title: “The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Sepulchre on the Morning of the Resurrection”). Against a backdrop of the soft yellows and purples of morning light, the faces of these two disciples are full of anxious hope, disbelief, hesitant anticipation, and the stirrings of resurrected joy as they hurry to the sepulchre. They’re responding to the astonishing news from Mary Magdalene that their Master has risen, as he had promised he would (see John 20:1–10 ).
To see this masterpiece—even through an image on the Internet—is to be caught up in the moment, to feel the power of the Christ pulling us from a place of mental darkness into the dawning confidence that “with God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27 ). And while we know how this central story of Christianity ends—not with crucifixion but with resurrection—these two disciples haven’t yet witnessed it, and they don’t seem quite as certain about it as they soon will.
Certainty. That’s the Easter gift offered to each of us. The displacing of doubt with confident trust. The supplanting of discouragement with fresh expectation. The dropping of sorrow for profound comfort. And it comes with tangible proof, year in, year out, season by season.
But there’s something we must do, too. And this painting reminds us of it. It is to seek the risen Christ, to be active in following the good news, and to make room for its healing message. Too often, we let the world’s view of things persuade us of inevitable tragedy and loss, rolling that heavy mental stone between God’s grace and us, which seems immovable and impenetrable. That’s where the disciples were the morning of the resurrection. Isn't it likely that Peter was wrestling with his own sense of failure and cowardice? For all his conviction that he had found the Christ and dedicated himself to following God’s beloved Son, he fell short when it was most needed (see Matthew 26:57–75 ). In fact, all the disciples, even John, had fallen asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus had asked for their prayerful companionship (see Matthew 26:36–46 ).
But that wasn’t the full story. What happened that Easter morning so long ago was a seismic shift from limited human reasoning to expansive divine logic. When we start with God as eternal Life, as the unchanging Principle, Love, that animates the universe, there’s only one conclusion that will stand: a continuity of goodness, life, and love. No matter what has happened.
Mary Baker Eddy, raised in a devout Christian household, held the Easter story sacred. When she discovered that Bible victories rested on an eternal Science that had application to humanity throughout all time, she conveyed these healing and redeeming ideas through her own writing, teaching, and ministry. The resurrection was central to it all.
Certainty. That's the Easter gift offered to each of us.
In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she wrote: “He [Jesus] proved Life to be deathless and Love to be the master of hate” (p. 44 ). God—as eternal Life and Love—has the final word on every human experience, however difficult or heart-wrenching. Whether a condition of health seems overwhelmingly negative and the prognosis irreversible. Or whether the world’s hatred seems aimed at us from others, or perhaps most devastating, we’re directing it at ourselves in self-condemnation and guilt. The resurrection reorients us to a new view of life as sourced wholly in God. The unlimited and eternal defined Jesus, and he proved it. And this defines us as well.
Peter and John didn’t find their Master in the tomb. The tomb could never contain who he was or what his purpose continued to be. Rather, Jesus found them when they remained in fearful hiding (see John 20:19–23 ) and when they tried to go back to what they used to do before they knew him (see John 21:1–24 ). No matter where they were feeling separate from love and purpose, the Christ reached them, chastened them, strengthened them, and gave them a new sense of the magnitude of God’s love and grace in their lives.
Eddy writes: “His resurrection was also their resurrection. It helped them to raise themselves and others from spiritual dulness and blind belief in God into the perception of infinite possibilities” (Science and Health, p. 34 ).
Not long after that extraordinary morning, Peter and John met a man born without the ability to use his legs. On the spiritual strength of what they had learned from their Master, they lifted this man up, set him on his feet, fully healed and able to walk—and leap!—with them as they entered the temple for worship (see Acts 3:1–10 ). Whatever they might have felt hesitant about as they walked toward Jesus’ tomb that first Easter morning, they knew with certainty when they encountered this man by the temple gate.
We can feel that Easter confidence to heal, too.
The resurrection reorients us to a new view of life as sourced wholly in God.
The spring of my senior year of college, one of my roommates left me a message that my grandfather had passed on. I found the news devastating. Not because his passing was sudden, but because I felt that for several years I had failed him. I grew up spending most mornings in his kitchen, eating breakfast with him before I got on the school bus. With both my parents working full time, he was an integral part of my upbringing, and we were very close.
But as I had become involved in college life, so far away from where he lived, I hadn’t written or called as I had hoped to, or, I realized at that moment, as I should have. With a heart full of guilt and grief, I headed home for his memorial service.
The following Sunday was Easter. As I sat in church with morning light streaming through the windows, I began to hear the message of resurrection from a new perspective. Just as Jesus proved to his students that he couldn’t be found in a tomb, my grandfather couldn’t be found there either. A burial place could never contain the spiritual essence of his true identity as God’s child. And as God was always present, all the God-given qualities I loved in Grandfather were eternal and always present. The more keenly I was aware of the presence of God as infinite Love and Life, the more I saw that this divine presence conveyed an eternal, unbroken relationship with my grandfather and every one else I loved.
I felt that enormous weight of sorrow and self-condemnation roll away. There was just an irrepressible joy and gratitude—for Jesus’ profound example, for his disciples through the generations carrying it forward, for each of us at that service cherishing this message in our own lives.
The service concluded with the well-known Easter hymn (No. 413 in the Christian Science Hymnal) that put an exclamation point on all this for me. I was singing with genuine “Easter gladness” because I had seen “the man whom God hath made.” I felt “freed of fear, of pain, and sorrow” and inspired with a fresh commitment that “every day will be an Easter, / Filled with benedictions new” (Frances Thompson Hill).
The painter Eugène Burnand certainly did catch the humanity of the disciples on their way to a new understanding of the Christ. But what they saw can never fully be captured in paint or any other artistic medium. It requires the breadth of our own spiritual living and loving to color it completely, letting each day become its own masterpiece on Easter.
