Beautiful, springtime tulips were on the cover of Mom’s funeral bulletin. Appropriately so, she was an avid gardener. We sun deprived, winter weary people look forward to another spring. “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22). Old Earth is starting to tilt closer to the sun. Spring will come.
On the other hand, in the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray was trapped in a cycle again and again and again. Is that a better image of how many people feel about their slog through life? I don’t think church always speaks to our endless cycles. Lent starts later this month, suffering, cross. Then Easter flowers, but it’s all so cyclical, so over and over again. Do those flowers on mom’s bulletin symbolize something more than spring?
Most certainly! “From very early times…some of the major religions centered their symbols, stories, and praxis (practices) on the cycles of nature” but Christian faith is different. “When the early Christians spoke of Jesus being raised from the dead, the natural meaning of that statement, throughout the ancient world, was the claim that something had happened to Jesus which had happened to nobody else” (N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 80, 83). Springtime flowers are less about the rebirth of nature, more about the bodily resurrection of Jesus’ and the promised resurrection of our own bodies (see 1 Corinthians 15).
We Christians are peculiar people. As we go with others around the sun again and again and again, we radiate optimism and hope because we know God’s plan is linear. The repeated routines and cycles are leading to the revealing of Jesus Christ in glory and our own bodily resurrections to glory. “In this you rejoice” (1 Peter 1:6).