The best and worst we can do with anything, alas, is to ritualize it. The best, because ritualization is the most effective mode of preservation and perpetuation. More than diamonds, rituals are forever. That is also the problem. What is envisaged to last forever is also rendered petrified; or, as we say, like what’s written on stone. 

To do justice to the significance of Easter, we have to recognize and respect its fixed and fluid aspects. What should be deemed fixed, or unchanging, is the fundamental pattern. What should be fluid, and therefore, undogmatic must be its paraphernalia. We, however, do exactly the opposite. We deify the superfluities and ignore the kernel of meaning. 
Let us see how this works.

Christians have been celebrating Easter for decades and centuries. The world in which we live has been changing all along; but our manner of knowing and doing Easter has remained unchanged. This means only one thing: we are mindful of the mechanism, but unmindful of the meaning, of Easter. We have brought it as close to the metaphor of the ‘whited sepulcher’ as possible. 
So, then, what is the spiritual pattern embedded in the Easter event?

Even at risk of jolting some of my readers, let me suggest that this can be understood better in light of that popular story for children: Jack the Giant Slayer. Jack, the brave young lad, is hopelessly inadequate as compared to the giants he faces one after another. But, each time, Jack prevails. The Giants lose. (For details, please read the story, readily available on the Net.) 
But that is not how it happens in this world; you might well expostulate. You are right! And that is the point too!! Having spent a lifetime among young people, serving them and mentoring many, I can vouchsafe that the difficulties that many young Christians experience about the credibility of the Easter event is involved here. Easter flies in the face of the logic of the world; but does so, only as Jack the Giant Slayer does. 

As per the ways of the world, the giants are entitled to prevail and have their way. If you want to stand the Easter event on its head, all you have to do is to consider Trump’s tariff war, in effect World War III, launched against the rest of the world. It is as though Goliath alone has the right to dictate. The Davids of the world -well, his secular counterparts- must fall in line. What amazes and amuses me is that Christendom has no problem with this. They are persuaded that it is in the best interests of Christianity that Goliath should wield the catapult, and David lose his head. 

This irony reaches a head with the Easter event. It is the spiritual fountain-spring of the Jack the Giant Slayer story, if you won’t accuse me of blasphemy; except that it is a little more complex for being true to life. In the Easter version, the Giants seem to prevail on Good Friday. The Giants heave a sigh of relief on the Holy Saturday. But come Sunday! The Giants know not where to hide! And that too, from Jack…. 
That, by the way, is the quintessence of the good news for the poor which, Jesus said, he came to preach (St Luke 4:18). We know the good news to the rich. God loves the rich and the powerful and chooses the likes of Donald J Trump to be the Defender of Christianity. What would the Lamb of God have done, if he didn’t have a battery of billionaires to wield the chainsaw for him? 

The good news for the poor was brought by one who had ‘nowhere to lay his head’. He unveiled a God-centred scheme of things in which the Davids and Jacks of this world stood a good enough chance to prevail. He pointed to a God who was Father to the poor, the lost and the least. A God who chose the weak of the world to put the powerful of the world to shame. 

It was the rich and powerful of the world -in religion and politics alike- who plotted and accomplished the judicial murder of Jesus. The two main Giants -Caiphas and Pilate- seemed successful. Poor David, poor Jack seemed lost: hopelessly lost. A huge stone was rolled on to the mouth of the rock-hewn tomb, and the seal of the Imperial Giant was affixed on it! You could read, in an ironic twist of the words of Jesus on the Cross: ‘It is finished!’ Hip, hip, hurray! 

No, my friends, the Easter is a democratic thing. It is the triumph of the tiny, the victory of the victim, and the unveiling of the new Earth for the disinherited. It denotes the faith that light can break even out of the heart of darkness. But this is no delusional piety, or sentimental escapism that shuts its eyes to reality. Rather, it is the Reality; accessed only by that magical of all words: Faith! 
Consider the Jack the Giant Slayer story. Had Jack succumbed to fear due to the terrible asymmetry of strength, the Giants would have ruled the roost. Though the story makes no explicit mention of it, there was something that enabled Jack to venture against them, despite overwhelming odds. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews defines it as ‘the assurance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen’. If it is not physical strength, it has to be some other strength. We cannot confront a mode of strength with the weakness that corresponds to it. One mode of strength has to be met with another mode of strength. It is precisely in this regard that contemporary Christendom is woefully deceived. 

We think that we can win the world for Christ either with the resources of Mammon or with the patronage of Satan. We assume, therefore, that Jesus was sadly mistaken and naïve in rejecting these options. Had he availed himself of both, very likely he could have avoided the Cross. This is our working faith. But when Good Friday and Easter come, we assume an entirely different pietistic garb and pay obeisance to the Jesus who got himself into deadly trouble by not being wise like the rest of us. Small wonder Jesus said from the Cross: ‘Father, forgive; for they know not what they do.” 

The interesting insight in the Jack the Giant Slayer story and the Easter event is that it is the weak who can afford the luxury of courage. The Giants of the world need no courage. They only need arrogance, insensitivity, impudence and the unconscionable inclination to trample the weak underfoot. This is mistaken for ‘heroism’ by those who know not.  

Regard Trump. All his tariff muscle-flexing stems from the fear of China. An accredited Giant fears the emergence of an upstart Giant! Where is the margin for courage in all this? There should be, for God’s sake, some distinction between courage and recklessness, or courage and bullying. But recklessness and bullying are the insignia of cowards. So, there is a marked and awkward difference between how Trump bullies Zelenskyy and how he treats Putin. Between two Giants there must be courtesy and patient endurance. But when a Giant deals with an informally head of state he must behave as Trump did with Zelenskyy. 

My point here is not political. I am a dispassionate observer, situated in the so-called Third World. But I am a Christian thinker, who believes in the Easter pattern. I am nothing as a Christian if I don’t believe, and believe with my life, that the weak ones of the world too are relevant and have a right to prevail. Even more so, that God is on their side; and not on the side of the Giants of the world.  
If it were otherwise, there would have been no Easter!

Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah!!

Rev. Dr. Valson Thampu is the former principal of St. Stephens College. Delhi and a renowned author. Currently, he is on YouTube discussing religion and politics.
___________________