Life Is Full—Because the Tomb Is Empty

"He Is Not Here," by Walter Rane

As I do most years, I celebrate more than just Easter day; I celebrate the Easter season, and particularly Holy Week, from Palm Sunday through Resurrection Sunday.

Celebration can take a lot of forms, as it does for other holidays (holy days) as well. For me, that involves home decorations, food, family traditions, music, study, and anything that helps me focus on the reason for the celebration. Easter is particularly rich in meaning, so it’s full of opportunities.

At Christmas I’ve been filling my decorations with nativity scenes my entire adult life, so I have a pretty sizable collection of small ornaments and table decorations. For Easter there are beginning to be decoration items related to the actual meaning of Easter, little scenes, maybe with moving parts, to tell the story. But I haven’t acquired any yet. I have a couple of small art pieces, and I painted one last year, of the moment of resurrection. This year I have plans to do one of the empty tomb. It’s still in planning stages, but I’m hoping to get time this weekend to make it a reality.

Music celebration is something I fully embrace. This year on actual Easter Sunday, the twice-a-year Worldwide General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be taking place (it’s always the first Saturday and Sunday of April and October). So we’ll be listening to the Tabernacle Choir and hearing messages from general church leaders, including our prophet and apostles, as well as a few others. So music locally was done this year on Palm Sunday. Our ward (congregation) did a very nice program, mostly music, for our sacrament meeting (worship service) this past Sunday. I was assigned the organ that day, and I play for the choir and the Primary (children 3-11). And I sang a solo, accompanied on organ.

I did that solo again in the evening for our stake concert (a stake is a geographically combined group of congregations, like a diocese; ours has eight wards). I also sang in the choir.

The piece I sang was “He Was Despised,” an alto aria from Handel’s Messiah, not one of the more well known ones, but one I really like to sing. Handel knows how to write for the different voice parts, and all of the alto solos are a good fit for my voice; they feel good to sing. This one is mournful. It uses the words from Isaiah 53: “He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” written some 700 years before they happened.

To read the full article (which includes a video I made), FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.

Celebrating His Coming

I enjoyed watching an Unshaken video going through Handel’s Messiah and listing all the ways that Jesus is referred to in that work, along with the scripture verses the words come from. Surprisingly, Messiah is only used in the title. The many other names all come from scriptures, most often Isaiah, I believe. I took those names and made a word cloud in the shape of a star. There are so many names, they’re mostly small here, to all fit, but they are all beautiful.

Another tribute to the many names we use for our Savior is a video from the several of the cast of The Chosen, from three years ago, talking about the names of God and their meanings. Here are the ones I was able to capture:

Adonai El-Roi               The God Who Sees Me

Jehovah Shalom             The Lord Is Our Peace

Jehovah Raah                The Lord Is My Shepherd

El Shaddai                    Almighty God

Emmanuel                    God With Us

As I'm enjoying the Christmas season, I also listened to Jonathan Cahn talking about the Bethlehem story. Most of these details I have heard over the years, but he puts them together beautifully. Bethlehem itself means house of bread in Hebrew. This is appropriate as the place where the Bread of Life came down from heaven to earth.

Jesus was born in a manger—a place of eating, for the animals. It was likely of stone, rather than wood, as is often depicted. Ahead of Passover, the newborn sacrificial lambs—the firstborn males without blemish—would be placed carefully in the manger, where they were swaddled in consecrated temple cloths to be inspected for blemishes. Bethlehem was the place in particular that the sacrificial lambs for the temple were raised. It is likely that the shepherds who saw the angels and were directed to seek the babe in the manger were the shepherds tending to the temple lambs.

a stone manger, image from Stone Manger—The Untold Story
of the First Christmas, by Jeffrey R. Chadwick

Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was also the sacrificial lamb. It seems fitting that he would be born in Bethlehem, where the sacrificial lambs of Passover were born.

Bethlehem, just on the outskirts of Jerusalem, is still surrounded by shepherds and their flocks in the fields. It is where David watched over the sheep as a boy, and practiced his harp music, and honed his skill with a sling, which he’d used to protect the sheep, and later to protect the Israelites from the Philistine giant, Goliath. David became king, and it was through his lineage that Jesus Christ was born; if all had been right through the ages, Jesus would have been the literal heir to the throne and King of the Jews.

Bethlehem was small and insignificant, as was David, the youngest son of his righteous but mostly insignificant family. But as with David, we are told not to look on the outward appearance (1 Samuel 16:7). Small and humble are qualities God works with to make great things come to pass.

Cahn also talks about the guell, or redeemer. There was a tradition that, if a man died childless, his brother or a close relative could marry his widow and provide a posterity for him. This was the case with Ruth and Boaz. Boaz, as well as the deceased husband of Ruth, the son of Naomi, to whom Boaz was a kinsman, was a descendant of King David. In the book of Ruth, we see that there is another kinsman who could have redeemed Ruth, but he chose not to and gave Boaz permission to be the redeemer. The place where Boaz redeemed Ruth happens to be Bethlehem.

As I understand it, another meaning of redeemer is one willing to pay the ransom price, if a wife is captured by an enemy. The promise to do this would be written in the betrothal contract, called the ketubah: the bridegroom would promise to redeem the bride if she were captured, because of his love and devotion to her.

Jesus Christ qualifies as the Redeemer of all of us, however you define it. He redeems us, to make our lives fruitful; He redeems us to save us from the captivity of sin.

I'd like to actually learn to paint someday, but in the meantime,
this is a little nativity painting I did for this year's Christmas card.

There’s a part, late in the video where Cahn talks about the Hebrew wedding tradition—one of my favorite things to study. He reminds us that the bridegroom needed to travel from his home to the home of the bride, to bring her back to his home with him. Christ came down from heaven, to our home here on earth, in order to bring us back to His home in heaven. I’m reminded of the second and third verses of the Christmas hymn “Once in Royal David’s City”:

2: He came down to earth from heaven,

Who is God and Lord of all,

And his shelter was a stable,

And his cradle was a stall;

With the poor, and mean, and lowly,

Lived on earth our Savior holy.

3: And our eyes at last shall see him,

Through his own redeeming love;

For that child so dear and gentle

Is our Lord in heav’n above,

And he leads his children on

To the place where he is gone.

            —words by Cecil Frances Alexander

May He lead us all home, to the place where He is gone.

Merry Christmas!

Hallelujah!

It’s Easter week, when we celebrate the most important event ever to happen on earth—the resurrection of Christ.

Why celebrate just a day, when we can celebrate all week?

·         Palm Sunday—The Triumphal Entry

·         Monday—Cleansing of the Temple

·         Tuesday—Teaching in Jerusalem

·         Wednesday—events unknown, but He told us, “Come, follow me.”

·         Thursday—Gethsemane—where those in my religion believe He suffered the sins of the world, overcoming the spiritual separation from God the Father, which would be followed by overcoming physical death soon after.

·         Friday—Crucifixion and Burial

·         Saturday—The Tomb

·         Sunday—The Resurrection—it is not life that is empty, but the Garden Tomb.

It’s worth looking at what we have because He lives—and offering a Hallelujah for those blessings.

I’m sharing this video for that purpose:

You can find this video, and a daily celebration of blessings from the resurrection at Mormon.org/easter.

The video uses many words from Handel’s Messiah. I’m singing “He Was Despised” this Sunday, as part of our Easter worship program. I love the piece, which isn’t done as often as many others; it is mournful, so it needs to be followed up with some Hallelujah songs, which we are doing.

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir recently did a project inviting the world to join them in singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. People were invited to send in a video of themselves singing along, and then a master chorus was produced using those thousands of videos. It’s kind of glorious.

If you loved that, you might want to try singing along for the entire Messiah, with the Tabernacle Choir, and soloists from the Metropolitan Opera, this Friday, Good Friday. It’s being broadcast at my church building at 8:00, and many other places. But it’s also available online for streaming through April 4^th. You can even download a public domain score if you don’t already have one.

Music is one of my favorite ways of shouting Hallelujah, or feeling anything really important. When times are troubled and dark, it’s good to take time to sing Hallelujah, while spring celebrates with us, and everything seems to, and light and hopeful.

Hallelujah!