Charlie Brown Wants to Know: Doesn't anybody know what Easter is all about?!

THIS WEEK is one of the most exciting weeks of the year for me. It's the week of Good Friday and Easter (today being Easter)! My family celebrated not only Easter but also my grandpa's birthday and retirement and my grandparents' housewarming! I had a lot of fun cleverly hiding plastic eggs with Rina and Kenny around my grandparents' new house.

But Charlie Brown wants to know, Doesn't anybody know what Easter (and Good Friday) are all about?! Is it really about the luscious chocolate bunnies and jellybeans in a basket, or colorful plastic eggs filled with candy and money? Is it about the Paas Easter equipment or cute pictures of baby animals? Is is about pushing the other little kids down during the Easter Egg Hunt, or dressing up in brightly colored clothes to go to church and visit family? Marshmallow chicks? Hard-boiled eggs? Ribbons and crayons and plastic grass? I hope not.

Let me help you out, Charlie Brown. It sure would be awful if those things were what this weekend were really about. It would mean that Easter is simply a day set aside to celebrate American consumerism and Springtime sterotypes. I mean, is the increase in the bunny and chick populations really as noticeable this time of year as all the pastel-colored advertisements suggest? I haven't seen a single real bunny outside the television screen all month.

No, Charlie Brown, Easter is about something much more important, something I fear many of us forget.

Do you remember the first Easter morning? I don't mean the first time you jumped out of bed in the and ran to the front of your house in search of your Easter basket, which the Easter Bunny left you so you could have candy for breakfast for one day in the year. No, I mean the very first Easter morning. The Sunday that started as a really awful day.

It started as a mournful morning. Nobody was eating chocolate or wearing fluffy dresses. Instead there were girls coming to tend the grave of a very good friend, who had died for no crime of His own that Friday. It was Sunday now. They shuffled their feet down to where they knew the stone had been secured tightly in front of His tomb, where there were guards standing by. We don't know whether any one of them wondered how they would even get to Him to annoint His body. They just went; they would figure it out when they got there.

But when they arrived, they didn't find it how they thought they might. Here was an angel, who terrified the guards, telling them that Jesus wasn't here anymore. Where had He gone? He had risen, just like He said He would. Not long afterward, they saw Jesus Himself, who appeared to many people so that we could be sure He was alive.

The Easter Bunny, or Peter Cottontail, was not present at Jesus' Crucifixion, which is remember on Good Friday. When they looked inside the empty tomb, they weren't looking for Easter Eggs. Those things are fine and plenty of fun, but when I wake up on Easter morning, I try to remember what the day represents before I bite the ears off my chocolate bunny.

At around 3:00 pm, on one Friday about 2000 years ago, Jesus the Son of God died to save the world. He had done nothing wrong. Fulfilled prophecies, made hundred and thousands of year prior, surrounded His death just as they surrounded His birth and His whole life.

In Hebrew counting, Sunday was the third day after His death: they counted Friday, Saturday, Sunday. On the third day, He wasn't in His tomb anymore. He just wasn't there. This is remarkable because He told those who believed in Him in advance that He would die and that He would rise on the third day afterward.

Conspiracy theories arise: Was Jesus really dead then? Yes - not only was it impossible for a human to survive whipping, nailing, blood loss and cardiac arrest under extreme emotional stress, but they also made sure He was dead by stabbing His side afterward. The veil in the center of the temple ripped at that moment as well, representing the end of the division between us and God, since He had paid for the sins of believers.

Could the disciples have stolen His body? Not with the guards there, and not with the tomb locked up so tightly. Besides, those disciples who died for their faith would not have become martyrs if they knew He hadn't really risen.

Could it be a myth or a legend? Could it be some kind of mistake? Only if hundreds of people all imagined the same thing. The simple historical fact of it is that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to His followers. Then He rose up into heaven not long after that.

That's what we celebrate on Easter. We rejoice over the fact that God loves each one of us enough to come into this world in the form of a Man, and then lay down His life for our sakes. We celebrate the fact that He proved our faith to be well-founded by fulfilling His promise to rise again. And anyone, of any color, with any history, in any situation is welcome to come and be saved by His grace if we just believe this. He is alive today. He loves saving people, not scaring us.

I hope nobody is turned away because of the scary, cold Christians who talk of hellfire and don't explain why Jesus is the answer. That leaves the love out. Think for a moment about how much God has to love us, to love you, to die that way voluntarily. After all, He is God. He could have just walked away. Think about how much He has to care to give us the Holy Spirit, performing spiritual and physical miracles even today, just to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that He is alive!

But I wasn't there. I didn't see the stone rolled away, nor the angel sitting on it, nor Jesus Himself appearing to His followers. How can I know that I know that I know that it's true?

Do you know the song called "He Lives"? My favorite lines of that song explain a lot. It goes, "You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart!"

I couldn't celebrate Easter today if I knew it wasn't true. But there is no reasonable way for me to even consider that anymore. Any true Christian could tell you that Jesus provides such complete, unfailing fulfilment in our lives, such an asnwering of our needs, that we know He is alive no matter what we are told. Today we celebrate His life, His death for our sins, and His resurrection to justify us. We celebrate salvation, because now we know deep in our souls that death itself is allergic to us and can't touch us. Thsi is a gift for anybody and everybody who believes, and that is all it takes.

That is what makes Good Friday so Great. It's what makes Happy Easter so Happy. So Happy Easter to you, because if you're a human being, Jesus is giving you a reason to celebrate today.