Eternal reward of self-sacrificing, feet-washing love

The Easter, the peak of Christian festivities, is celebrated around the same time that Buddhists and Hindus of our own country celebrate their New Year. In fact tonight, during the Easter Vigil, all over the world most churches will witness the Chief Celebrant of the Holy Mass lighting a New Fire and carving on the Easter Candle the figures 2,0,1, and 9 symbolically welcoming the New Year. Starting life afresh leaving behind bygones, is a healthy desire expressed by adherents of most religions despite their differences. Easter, for Jesus’ disciples, is an annually recurrent reminder that a new beginning dawned when their Master was thought to have been brutally eliminated from his life as well as from their memory. For they found him continuing his mission. 

Here the Christians have adopted an ancient Jewish custom. The Jews began their liturgical year during Spring Time (around April) by celebrating the Passover to remember their “exodus” or liberation from slavery and becoming an independent people. We should not forget that their nationhood had its origin in a workers’ revolt in Egypt, simultaneously encountering a unique God (YHWH) who played a major role in their struggle for independence, revealing for the first time that the true God has to be a God who sides with the oppressed and never with the oppressors. The Spring time offered them the occasion to celebrate their emancipation. Jesus, as a Jew, chose this very time to register in the annals of history his own act of liberation on the cross.  

Christians, therefore, believe that it is the self-expression of the same Divine liberator of Jewish slaves that was born into a worker’s family as Jesus of Nazareth and gathered twelve disciples almost all of them coming from a worker background to start a non-violent movement for a socio-spiritual change in a country in which injustice reigned. For Palestine was by then politically and economically subjugated by Rome; the linguistic domination resulting from three centuries of Alexandrian colonization that had devalued Aramaic, Jesus’ mother tongue, as a barbarian language and forced the Jewish masses to communicate in Greek for daily business.

The local ruler, Herod by name, retained power as a stooge of these alien powers. The hierarchy known as Sadducees sided with the rich and the powerful as well as with the colonizer rather than with YHWH, God of the poor and the powerless. In reaction, the conservatively ascetical pharisees imposed religious taboos on the people. In the midst of this new species of slavery, the nationalist liberation front led by Zealots and Sicarii was preparing for an armed insurrection.   

It is against this socio-political backdrop that Easter took place as the climax of what looked like a naive campaign of a crazy prophet. The “army” that this Jesus the Nazarene gathered around himself comprised the deaf and the mute, the lame and lepers, blind and the crippled, reformed prostitutes and apostate Samaritans, women and children, the religiously ostracized sinners such as the publicans and, last but not least, mentally disturbed ones that the priests spurned as demoniacs.   
How do historians assess the outcome of this non-violent freedom-movement triggered off in an obscure place in the world map by this Labourer-Son of a peasant woman called Mary residing in Nazareth, a shanty town which did not enjoy a good reputation? The first Easter is the annual reminder that only the Jesus movement has survived the vicissitudes of time whereas almost all the aforementioned movements of that age are buried forever in the archives of our collective memory. 

 
Easter reminds us that self-sacrificing love is the weapon used by the powerless to bring peace and justice --- the “foolishness of the cross” as an early Jesus-follower called it. Easter, therefore, offers this assurance -- whoever joins the God of the oppressed in a courageously non-violent struggle against every form of injustice, saturated with such selfless love as to risk ones death, actually defies death and lives on forever. For such love is eternal. It outlives the grave. Resurrection is the word for it. Easter is the annual reminder that death is not the end but the door to a new life to be won only by self-sacrificing love.