The Abundance of Easter

Beloved in Christ,

Last night, I spent a few hours at my daughter’s orchestra concert. The high school ensemble performed Dmitri Shoshtakovich’s famous "String Quartet Number 8". The piece captures the composer’s experience of being in Dresden during the World War II bombing of that city, and of living under authoritarian Soviet rule in the years following. It is haunting, dark, occasionally grotesque, and stunningly beautiful. Harvesting such beauty from so much suffering and oppression is an act of profound resistance to those forces in the world. 

In our gospel lesson for this Sunday, the risen Jesus appears to the disciples, and seeing their empty nets, tells them to cast on the other side of the boat, from which they draw an overwhelming haul of fish. He invites them to see a hopeless situation in another way, and to find abundance in what looks like desolation. 

Easter, like Shoshtakovich’s composition, is about looking at the very worst the world can offer, and refusing to take death, devastation, and oppression as the last word. Our spiritual work in Easter is to keep casting our nets in other places, fully expecting God’s abundant love and defiant joy to be drawn up, like a great catch of fish. 

Easter’s abundance is not about getting and hoarding more for ourselves. Easter’s abundance is meant to be food, given freely away for our love-starved world. 

The darkness faced by Shoshtakovich, or the first disciples scraping together a lean living through casting nets, is now before us, as it ever is. What Jesus both promises and expects of us is not to escape from it, but to keep casting into new places, in new ways, so that we can join God in drawing the whole world into the net of God’s liberating life, shouting our joyful and defiant alleluia to all the forces that break down the children God so cherishes, and longs to hold. 

Grace and Peace, 

The Right Rev. Craig Loya