On Easter Sunday, Christians Remember: 'We Will Rise Out of the Dust'

All around her, she was seeing echoes of the story of Jesus’ final days. His suffering on the cross while his loved ones watched “at a distance,” as the Book of Mark said. His final gasp for air. His disciples waiting, hoping, wondering about life beyond death.

On Sunday, she looked up at a hospital television. A priest was celebrating the Easter Mass. She began to worship, her pager at her side in case she was called to see a patient.

“That is where I find my hope, knowing death did not have the last word,” she said, reflecting on the story of Easter. “There is a time when this will be over, and we will rise out of the dust.”

This Easter Sunday, amid a pandemic still working its way across the country, millions of American Christians found themselves refashioning beloved rituals and grasping for hope in the story of Jesus’ resurrection. Church buildings — normally packed on the holiday — stood empty as restrictions against mass gatherings kept families in their homes and unable to worship together on one of the most holy days of the Christian calendar. Parents dressed children in Easter clothes but had them watch services from the couch.

The vast majority of churches across denominations celebrated the holiday virtually, in online services. A small handful of pastors in states like Louisiana and Mississippi defied stay-at-home guidance and hosted in-person worship services, risking the health of their followers and their own arrests. Others tried something in between, an attempt to maintain some semblance of communal ritual. In Franklin, Kentucky, Victory Hill Church hosted a service at a drive-in movie theater, where people worshipped in their cars.

In an empty St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan prayed over the communion cup and wine, his voice echoing across empty pews to the locked front door, as parishioners watched online. In Dallas, from the pulpit of First Baptist, Robert Jeffress thanked President Donald Trump for defending religious liberty after the president said in a tweet he would tune in to the service. On the National Mall in Washington, a few people gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to sing hymns and watch the sun rise.

On a very personal level, the story of Jesus felt unusually close for many believers this Holy Week, and not just on Easter Sunday. Christians on the front lines of the coronavirus fight described in interviews their feelings of being drawn into the memory of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection as they stared into suffering in their own midst and reflected on what it meant to hope. The veil between the story of Jesus and the story of the nation, they said, has felt thin.

“It is an enormous mystery, and I do not understand it,” Rev. Amy Greene, director for the Center of Spiritual Care at the Cleveland Clinic, said of the resurrection.

“Our job is to stand there and bear witness to people’s suffering even when we can’t stop it,” she said. “One of my students said, it is like standing at the foot of the cross. To bear witness to someone’s suffering and not run away. To say, I cannot stop this for you, I’m so sorry that I can’t, but I’m not going to leave.”

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On Wednesday in Denver, Becki Rwubusisi, a nurse practitioner who worships at Church of the Advent, paused on a bridge outside of the hospital where she works.

She looked out to the mountains, opened the Bible app on her phone and took a moment to breathe. She recited a prayer with each breath in and each breath out: Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. When she got home that evening to her 6-year-old twins, she choked up.

“I was reading to them how Jesus died, was in the tomb, came back to life,” she said. “Thinking about how patients are entering into that suffering … ” her voice trailed off. “We don’t know if they are going to come out the other side.

“I keep clinging to this: Even death is not the end of the story,” she said.

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On Thursday, the day Christians remember the Last Supper, Dr. Raymond Barfield, a pediatric oncologist and palliative care physician, stood in an intensive care room in Durham, North Carolina, where his teenage cancer patient needed a ventilator to breathe and her father hoped she would not die.

Barfield, who is also a professor at Duke Divinity School, remembered how Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane on that same night years ago had asked God that “this cup would pass from me,” praying so fervently that his sweat became “like drops of blood,” as the Book of Luke said. The answer to that prayer was no, the cup would not pass, he remembered, and Jesus would walk on to his death.

“We have these apparently comfortable beliefs about God, that as long as we pray the right prayers and do the right things, we are going to be able to trust that the power of God will keep us from terrible things happening,” he said.

“God is saying, you are not alone,” he said. “You may think that death will leave you alone, but even in death, you are not alone; I am here.”

On Good Friday, the day Christians remember Jesus being crucified, Rev. Marilyn Barnes, vice president of spiritual care for Advocate Aurora Health in Chicago, and her team of chaplains offered packets of tea and chocolate to nurses and staff. She looked into their eyes, above their masks, to connect amid what she called “the darkness of grief.”

“I think about the death, and right now, the separation, when people are unable to be physically with their loved one when they die,” she said.

“I know that God is present and that the Spirit is present in those moments,” she said. “We are holding on to the love of God as that anchor until that light can burst through.”

On Saturday, the day Christians remember the fear of early believers that God had died, Father Matt O’Donnell, a Catholic priest on the South Side of Chicago, sat in his church, St. Columbanus, and made calls to church members, especially older people.

“A lot of my parishioners and people in my community, they really feel alone, and they feel the weight of this suffering,” he said. “The church is still here; we have still ministry to do.”

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It is that reminder of presence amid pain that Tata, the chaplain at Mayo, was also thinking about Saturday night. Like many Christians across the country, she watched an Easter Vigil service, observing a night of waiting, holding hope for Jesus’ resurrection the next day. In the online message, her priest pointed worshippers to Jesus’ disciples, who hid in a room after his death. Then, during their fear, Jesus appeared to them.

Before she went to sleep, she took a moment to write down a reflection.

“Hope does not mean the end of all suffering; it does not mean that when I wake up tomorrow, the coronavirus will be gone,” she wrote. “But to me hope means confronting my suffering and fear in a new way.”

And on Easter morning, in the hospital, she got ready to accompany patients in their suffering. She prepared to bring communion to one. She gathered medallions of angels for another.

“There is a heaviness in the atmosphere,” she said. “My hope is that I bring this with me, the hope and joy of the risen Lord.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

On Easter Sunday, Christians Remember: 'We Will Rise Out of the Dust'

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