Easter in the desert

Next year I propose that we all take a trip at Easter time. A long trip. Let’s go further south. A lot further south. Let’s go way down south of the equator to the Southern Hemisphere. Why go down there at Easter? Because it’s not springtime.

I confess that I borrowed this idea from similar one offered by Martin Marty in a sermon that I remember reading. Marty thinks that our perspective on Easter may be affected in an unfortunate way by springtime. Have you heard the sermons about Easter being about reawakening and rebirth? Chirping birds and awakening plants tell us life returns where there had been apparent death. Many preachers in this part of the world say that it is the same with the resurrection of Jesus.

But Marty says that we should forget that sort of perspective. He thinks believers in the Southern Hemisphere have it better. They have to ponder the resurrection in the midst of scenes of grass turning brown and trees turning gray. With dead leaves and dead flowers on the ground they must celebrate the living, resurrected Jesus.

So I have a place picked out for an Easter pilgrimage next year. How about we go to the Atacama Desert that runs from the southern border of Peru into northern Chile in South America? That’s in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Atacama Desert will definitely give us a very different setting to celebrate the resurrection.

At its center, climatologists describe the Atacama as absolute desert. It is known as the driest place on earth. There has been no rainfall in portions of the Atacama Desert as long as humans have kept records of it. Now that’s a long dry spell.

We will see no plants at all in the deepest part of the Atacama—not even a stump of a cactus. We will see no animals, not even a lizard, not even a gnat or any other sort of bug. There is essentially no life in the deepest part of the Atacama. The landscape is moon-like. I read that it was chosen as a testing ground for a lunar rover.

While we will find no evidence of life in the Atacama Desert, we may find evidence of death. Because there is no moisture in the Atacama, nothing rots. One visitor to the region reported seeing seemingly petrified human remains on the dessert floor—even those of children.

What would it be like to go to such a desolate place of no life and ample evidence of death to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus? No birds singing. No trees budding. No flowers blooming. No birds, trees, or flowers, period. Only a ghostly wind amid the remains of the dead.

Sounds great, huh? Are y’all ready to go?

While the Atacama Desert is not the sort of Easter setting that we are used to, let me tell you something: The power of the resurrection is no less real there than it is here. Whether your life is full of sunny joy like springtime, or whether it is full of dark and lonely despair like the Atacama Desert, Jesus is alive. He died in a cruel and unjust way on Good Friday, but he was raised to life again on Easter Sunday.

The Easter story does not offer us an easy formula for joy. Indeed, were we to try to establish a formula out of this story, many in our society might not like it a whole lot.

Jesus prayed earnestly and repeatedly for the heavenly Father to stop his impending suffering, but the answer was no. Jesus’ perfect obedience to the heavenly Father did not cause him to escape sorrow and heartache and physical suffering. As Dorothy Sayers wrote, “God did not abolish the fact of evil: He transformed it . . . He did not stop the crucifixion: He rose from the dead.”

The Easter story is not a quick fix, simple formula of joy. If you think it is, then you have it all wrong. But when we choose begin and nurture a relationship with the one named Jesus who was crucified and then was raised to life, then we have the chance to give in to what Philip Yancey described as “a long, slow undertow of joy.”

The brightness of Easter in springtime is beautiful. But the undertow of joy offered by the resurrection of Jesus is just as real in the dead of winter. Maybe celebrating Easter in a barren desert would give us a new sense of resurrection joy.

I wonder if my local travel agent has a last minute Easter package to the Atacama Desert available?