What Easter Means to Me: A letter to my neighbors in Basking Ridge

I love this time of year. The eggs, the chocolate, the children in their new clothes, the family gathered around a table that probably has ham on it. Spring deserves to be celebrated — the world coming back to life after a long winter is genuinely worth marking. I celebrate all of it.

But I want to share what else is happening for me this week. Not to correct anyone's celebration, but because there's a deeper dimension to Easter that perhaps doesn't get shared often enough — and I think some of you might find it interesting.

Here is what this week means to me.

It's the story of a man who devoted his life entirely to humanity. Who entered into human suffering not to escape it or fix it from a distance, but to live inside it with us. Knowing that going to Jerusalem — the center of his people's government and faith — would almost certainly get him killed, he went anyway. And the people he came to serve received him with genuine joy.

On his last night, he gathered with his closest friends. He washed their feet. He shared a meal. The lesson was almost unbearably simple: we need each other. None of us can do life alone, and none of us is fully in control. Then he was arrested, tried, and executed — not because he had done anything wrong, but because he refused to be bullied into abandoning what he believed. He wanted there to be another way. But when there wasn't, he didn't run. He walked forward, courageously and compassionately, into the full darkness of what humanity can do.

The day after he died, the world lived with what it had done. A man of such extraordinary love had been killed. A light had gone out. Hope seemed genuinely lost.

I'll be honest with you: the part of the story that comes next — the empty tomb, the appearances, the physical resurrection — I hold with more questions than certainty. I'm with Thomas on that one. What I am convinced of is this: killing this man expanded his story rather than ending it. His followers discovered something in themselves they might never have found if he had simply stayed with them. And somehow, impossibly, the light came back.

That's what Easter means to me. Not that death doesn't exist — I'll stand in the cemetery at 6:30 this Easter Sunday morning fully aware that it does. But that it doesn't get the last word. That God's light and hope continue to dwell with us even when we do our worst to extinguish them.

And here's what that's actually done in my life: it's freed me to live more courageously. To push against my comfort zones. To serve people who have turned against me rather than retaliate. To walk into situations where I have no idea what I'm doing, because I'm not alone in them.

Easter isn't about being a good person. It's about actually living — not just existing, but building something larger than yourself, repairing what's broken, loving people who are difficult to love.

If any of this stirs something in you, I'd invite you to explore it. At any church in town. Or come stand with us in the cemetery in the dark on Sunday morning and see what it feels like.

— Pastor Dave Tillisch

Bishop Janes United Methodist Church, Basking Ridge