What Easter Can Teach Us About Suffering

Read: The ancient math that sets the date of Easter and Passover

Easter weekend is usually a celebratory and social time of year, with pastel outfits and egg hunts and elaborate family brunches. The story it marks is one of joy for Christians: Jesus’s resurrection, offering the fulfillment of a promise and the hope of human salvation. This year, most people will spend the holiday alone, maybe tuning in to an online worship service or communicating with family members over Zoom. Many Christians will carry sorrow and worry, wondering about the health of their elderly neighbors or friends in big cities. But perhaps there’s theological insight to be gleaned from a painful Easter. “Most of us have taken the shallow way—we want to have Jesus as savior and get to heaven. They’re missing the Gospel,” Dorrell said. “It’s entering the pain, getting off of my place of safety and security, moving in among the poor, working among the broken, suffering with people.” In a time when many Americans are mourning their usual life, this may be a season of clarity about what it means to be a person of faith.

At the end of March, as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths was sharply rising, President Donald Trump declared that he wanted “the country opened up” by Easter. When a reporter asked why he had selected that date, he replied, “I just thought it was a beautiful time.” Public-health officials were quick to caution that lifting restrictions so soon would be dangerous, and the president soon backed off his statements. But his comments illustrate how unthinkable this moment is: Most of the country will be shut down through one of the biggest Christian holidays of the year. It’s hard for anyone not to yearn for a different reality.

While Dorrell would never wish a pandemic on the world, in a certain sense he seems to relish the normal ways of religious life getting turned upside down. “I grew up in that religious culture where we all had to have new clothes, and we all had to sit in the family row together” on Easter, he said. This is “the superficiality of most of the Christian Church in America: It’s pretty. We have a big building and a gorgeous place with choir robes and stuff.” Dorrell, who refers to himself as “a recovering Baptist,” describes his congregation, the Church Under the Bridge, as nondenominational in every sense of the word: middle-class and poor; black, white, and brown; ex-offenders and the homeless. “I’ve got Lutherans and Episcopalians,” he said, “and I’ve got wild-eyed charismatics.”

In recent months, the group has been meeting in Waco’s Silos—the headquarters of the home-decor empire run by Chip and Joanna Gaines—while the I-35 bridge is under construction. The pandemic has derailed its typical 300-person worship services, however. Now each week consists of cooking burgers for the homeless, calling and visiting congregants who live alone or don’t have internet access, and trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy during this unusual Lent. A traditional Palm Sunday celebration for the Church Under the Bridge involves Jesus riding in on a motorcycle—it’s a long story involving an intransigent donkey—and it kept that up this year, with a guy on a hog riding around a block away from its socially distanced gathering.