Easter doesn’t ‘comfort’ believers. It turns their lives upside down

To the Christian, Jesus rising from the dead isn’t a metaphor: it is accepted as historic fact. And from this flows the call to lead a life of the greatest possible risk

Easter is the perfect festival for a society coming out of a pandemic: a columnist’s dream. It starts with a death, a chance to mourn, and ends with a resurrection – the promise of an end to lockdown. When you get that kind of coincidence between theology and current events, it’s tempting to describe religion as metaphor, a set of stories someone wrote to bring comfort. But religion also challenges one’s assumptions. If you really believe in it, it can turn your life upside down.

Jesus rising from the dead is not poetry: to Christians it is a historical event. This is mind-blowing, not only because it defies the laws of science, one in the eye for Richard Dawkins, but because it implies that everything Jesus said is true and that all his teachings are not just “good advice” but the word of God. Then there’s the proposition that Jesus went through the horrors of crucifixion willingly, that he could’ve stopped it but chose not to.

Covid and the lockdown have been about trying to avoid death, which is right and human. Easter is about the son of God dying voluntarily, which is divine. To clarify, lots of people have lost their lives helping others during this pandemic, people of all faiths and none, and sacrifice is a theme you find across all cultures. But Jesus, Christians believe, was actually put on this Earth in order to be killed, and this narrative flies against our human instinct to cling on to as much of life as possible.

Countless Christians have tried to emulate Jesus’s selflessness, such as Damien of Molokai, the 19th-century missionary who worked so fearlessly among the diseased that he caught leprosy and died, or the Medieval visionary Angela of Foligno, who bathed a leper and then drank the water. She rejoiced when she got a scab caught in her throat. Suffering is more than a sad fact of life, many believe, but can be ennobling. God is pro-risk.

Mystics have been replaced by scientists, doctors and rational thinkers, which is fine because it’s nice to live in an era without crucifixions and in which plagues might be beaten, not just endured. But a downside for religion is that it is now hard to sell the “life of the spirit” to a society that is almost wholly materialist, for which death is the end, best hidden from view, and terrifying.

This is why so many churches have had a “bad pandemic”: they remain superb at “accompanying” others through their grief, but they are nervous about talking about what happens next, that resurrection is on the cards. How do we connect the dots between the story of a good man dying, which we can all wonder at yet accept, and the outrageous claim that he was God and he came back? That’s a huge leap to expect in human comprehension. Many Christians fear that if they ask people to take it, they’ll leave them behind, so they don’t try.

Nevertheless, Christianity isn’t only about teaching the right way to live but also the right way to die. The two are connected. I’d like to die suddenly, painlessly – perhaps in the middle of a good cigar – but also with a clear conscience. I suspect that means I’ve got to start living more courageously and, against all one’s instincts, for the benefit of others.