THE MESSAGE OF EASTER: IT'S GOOD NEWS

This Easter editorial was first published by the Birmingham (Ala.) Post-Herald in 1997:

Beginning with the sunrise services attended by many in this city, Easter is the most holy day in the Christian faith. It is the day, Christians believe, when a crucified Savior arose from the dead, assuring the faithful of forgiveness from sin and of eternal life. Why, then, is the cross the pre-eminent symbol of Christianity? Why not an open tomb or a sundered sepulcher?

Perhaps the answer is that the cross -- a place of suffering and humiliation -- is a token more resonant with the human condition. We, all of us, know or will know hurt. The scourging and the thorns and the painful lonely spectacle are not alien to us; they are much of the stuff of mortal life, the trappings of calvaries custom-made. Just as Christmas is accessible to our imaginations because everyone is born, the crucifixion is an event understandable because each of us sometimes agonizes. But resurrection -- that is something outside our experience. That is -- dare we utter this word? -- supernatural.

So that's why there is a kind of hush in believers' souls on Easter. It is the sound of a searching silence, a muted attempt to grasp the ungraspable -- that a man, both like and unlike us, died, descended into Hell, conquered death on behalf of billions yet unborn, then took off his burial shroud to walk once more in the land of the living.

Not that the Easter story pioneered metaphysics. The entire drama unfolded during Passover, celebrating the time that the death angel spared Jewish households that marked their door frames with the blood of a spotless lamb. But even angels are easier to apprehend than the act of undying.

Spring helps. From nature come intimations of the supernatural. Empty dawns fill with robin song. Fields and trees, bare and brown-scorched by winter's cold fires, erupt into flowers and green leaves. The season is a parable for the senses, a facilitator of faith.

But not a substitution for it. Today in little country chapels and mighty cathedrals, millions of Christians will exercise irrational, wonderful faith. They will resist what writer Rod Serling called "the strange and perverse disinclination to believe in miracles." They will imagine tombs ajar. And in so doing, they may see that a cross, viewed from a certain angle, looks much like a key.