Many Christians, but not all, have celebrated Easter today by going to church. One reason the Nones are refusing to fulfill their annual obligation is the lack of both intellectual and emotional investment in the deeper meaning of Christ’s long suffering, death, and resurrection. 

 My parish on Palm Sunday play-acts the trial with the priest reading a script for Jesus Christ, and others having the chief priest accuse Him of blasphemy, with Pontius Pilate sitting in judgment. But it’s not been enough to catalyze a change of heart in the Nones.

The Church’s traditional emphasis on outward rules, ceremonies, and rituals — such as baptism, confirmation, penance, and holy communion — has implied that those externals have always been enough for its members to behold the kingdom of heaven. 

A closer reading of Scripture suggests otherwise…

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.  He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs You are doing if God were not with him.”  Jesus replied, ‘Truly, truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.‘

For untold factors, what rarely occurs is the interior conversion of wayward, sinful conduct that would signify our being born again.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. Matt 7:13-14

 Like a woman giving birth with anguished labor, so too must each of us suffer much, dying to the old self, and being ‘born’ anew. Then, a deep sorrow turns to lasting joy after a painful conversion that emotionally reenacts His Passion, Death, and Resurrection.

It will be like a woman suffering the pains of labor. When her child is born, her anguish gives way to joy because she has brought a newborn into the world. John 16:21

What’s all this got to do with those unhatched decent eggs wearing spiffy clothes who show up at church on Easter?  

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

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