Every Easter at the home of my adolescence, my Mother would host the family Easter gathering after church. There was usually ham, sweet potatoes, a congealed salad, green beans, red velvet cake, and sweet tea. There was lots of laughter and fun. The Easter Egg hunt was what my cousins and I looked forward to, even into our tweenage years. (We also enjoyed dying the eggs the day before.) We couldn’t wait to take off our Easter “Sunday Best” clothes and put on some more comfortable “egg huntin’ clothes” and compete with our cousins in the annual decorative colored oval orb quest in the front yard. BUT before the meal and the egg hunt was the family picture in our Easter clothes… ugh. This happened in the front yard, usually in front of the Weeping Cherry tree if its blooming corresponded with Easter that year. Though I probably didn’t acknowledge it at the time, this tree was beautiful. Its weeping branches filled with copious pink cherry blossoms looked like a mushroom fountain of flowers spraying up and over and running to the ground. It wasn’t until a storm broke a branch from the tree and it became just a tree no longer weeping, nor producing as many pink flowers…actually kinda ugly… that I learned what had to happen to produce this kind of beauty in the first place. My Dad explained that at some point, the trunk had to be cut and branches had to be grafted-in and the wounds of the tree and the grafted branch had to heal and grow together to make a new tree that was both weeping and produced a beautiful fountain of flowers.
As I think back on that tree, I’m reminded that our broken humanity is just sad, disappointing, and ugly until we are grafted into the Divine through the scars and death and resurrection of Christ. We are redeemed to be a new creation that is compassionate, connected, and beautiful. Easter communicates to us what God had to do to graft us into His beautiful family, adopt us as His, so we could become beautiful like Him, and belong to Him. God had to cut, bruise, and wound His own Son Jesus, in order that we could be forever firmly attached and grow with Him. He says, “See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands...” (Isaiah 49:16a NIV) God’s disappointment with our ugly, rebellious, meanness doesn’t overcome His loving desire for us to be His children forever. “For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” (Psalm 30:5 NIV) When our stiff-necked pride is broken and we confess our failure and sin and ask God to forgive us and connect us with Him, He takes our broken and helpless self and attaches us into Jesus’ humble but perfect self and our wounds heal and grow us together. He was cut and broken for our sake. On that first Resurrection morning the new growth from the grafting begins… Paul uses the symbolic language of grafted trees to tell us what happens when we let God attach us to Himself through Jesus. We are connected to God as His people forever. He says, “…and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root… ”(Romans 11:17 NIV) We become a new creation, capable of both weeping and beauty, compassion, love, connection, and great joy that spills out to be shared with all those around us. We then continue becoming the full God-redeemed creature that He had in mind to make us from the beginning.
Hang in there people! God is glad to be with us! I’m praying for us all!
