It should come as no great shock that Easter is a great opportunity to reach people who normally don't attend worship on a regular basis. Statistics show that while attendance goes way up on Easter, the spike is often short-lived and numbers revert soon after the big day is over. Such an opportunity should not be squandered with a "same old, same old" approach, especially when it comes to church visuals.
We've been designing worship media for twelve years, and every year we face the "Easter challenge." For us, it's been always been difficult to find new and fresh ways to creatively and visually present the familiar Easter story. Once you get past all of the standard imagery of empty tombs, crosses, and lilies, where do you go? Is it possible to create powerful multimedia for Easter that inspires, retains, and even transforms the influx of visitors who walk through our doors on that special Sunday morning? Obviously, we think this is not only possible, but also necessary.
Telling the story through metaphor
A great way to make this Easter all the more powerful is to use the technique of metaphor. Metaphor allows us to tell stories in ways that connect with the everyday experiences of individuals, believers and nonbelievers alike. We've come to define metaphor as a tangible way to express an abstract story, thought, or idea. Metaphor allows us to make the foreign familiar and puts the gospel into everyday language—both oral and visual.
Metaphor is sometimes perceived as an advertising industry buzzword with little or no place in worship. However, those who fail to explore the power of communication that comes through metaphor fail to understand that it was often the method used by Jesus during his public ministry.
In Mark 4, Jesus tells the parable of the sower, the longest parable in the Gospels (vv. 3-9). Afterward, when the crowds had left and the disciples were alone with Jesus, the disciples revealed to him that they had no clue what he had been saying. He took the time to explain the entire parable to them, actually spending more time on the explanation than he had on the parable itself (vv. 10-20).
What is really interesting is what happens next. Instead of concluding that such a creative presentation of the good news didn't work, he continued to speak in parables, telling the parables of lamp on the stand (vv. 21-25), the growing seed (vv. 26-29), and the mustard seed (vv. 30-32).The best moment comes in verses 33 and 34: "With many similar parables Jesus spoke the word to them, as much as they could understand. He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything."
Jesus didn't simply use parables as an alternative for the "dumb ones" in the crowd. He understood that to communicate ideas with effectiveness, he had to present his teaching in a way that made sense to his audience. Our audiences today aren't any different. People listen best when spoken to in a familiar language. This is the essence of metaphor.
Applying a metaphor to the Easter story
For many, the idea of an omniscient deity sending his only son to earth to die for the sins of humankind, only to be resurrected from the dead, can be difficult to grasp. Through metaphor, we can frame the story using familiar objects, settings, and experiences that make the story easier to understand.
A few years ago, we began brainstorming metaphors for an upcoming Easter season. We focused on John 20:1-18. In the story, Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb on Easter morning, distraught that Jesus' body has been removed. After encountering two angels, she turns to the person she believes is the gardener and pleads with him to tell her where the body of her Lord has been taken. He responds by calling out her name, revealing to Mary that he is, in fact, Jesus. Overjoyed, she cries out, "Rabboni" ("teacher") then, we inferred, reaches out to embrace him.
Some might say Jesus' response was a bit harsh. He responds to her affection by saying, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the father."
Why were his first words to push Mary away? After much discussion, we began to get excited about the idea that Jesus was telling Mary to let go of what she formerly knew of Jesus. No longer just the earthly man she had known, now he is the risen Christ. We realized that implicit in Jesus' statement to Mary is a warning about the human tendency to try to hold on to our experiences of God. We fear that we will lose our awareness of a connection with God, or even that we have "lost" God or that our connection with him is invalid. We must be willing to let go of former experiences, no matter how powerful, and continually redefine what it means to be a follower of God at every stage of our lives. Additionally, our faith experiences are meant to be shared, not bottled up, just as Jesus tells Mary to share the news of his resurrection with the disciples (v. 17).
A fresh and powerful Easter service
We built an entire service around this concept, with a primary image of a little girl watching the butterfly she had captured and placed in a jar. The opening video followed the chase, capture, and eventual release of the butterfly. A drama featured the discussion of a mother and her child just after the child had reluctantly released her butterfly back into the world. As worshipers entered the sanctuary they were also given origami-style butterflies made from tissue paper to use during a prayer time, and to later use in reflecting on the worship experience. The pastor even incorporated the metaphor into the sermon, holding a mason jar high as he talked about hoarding, and in the process killing, our faith memories.
As with every good metaphor, the butterfly in the jar opened up all kinds of creative possibilities for sharing the good news of Jesus' resurrection on Easter morning. The service was very meaningful and made Easter feel fresh and new.
But the most powerful part of using metaphor to communicate the gospel happens when worship is over. Even though we've been doing it for years in our ministry, sometimes it takes us by surprise. Not long after Easter we received this letter from the pastor:
A couple of weeks after Easter, I received a call from one of my church members. The man on the phone and his wife have been in the midst of an intense personal hell. They have had extreme difficulties with their teenage son, so much so that the son is about to become a ward of the state. This distraught dad told me that the previous night, he had gone out to sit by the family pool. He began to reflect on his son, wondering what he and his wife had done wrong along the way. As he obsessed over his own failures as a parent, a butterfly landed on the chair next to him and interrupted his thoughts. He watched as the butterfly flew up and around the pool, came down, and landed on the chair again. The man said the butterfly then paused a second and flew off. And in that moment, he felt God's presence with him, telling him to let go of the pain of his son and give the situation to God.
In that moment, this man experienced the presence of the Holy Spirit and the Easter message all over again. Had we done the usual Easter service, and used all of the familiar imagery and elements, this moment may not have taken place. But through metaphor we can take the gospel outside the walls of the church and make it real in the world of our faith communities.
Metaphor has the special ability to sear into our minds experiences with God in ways that other methods just can't. Days, weeks, even years later, metaphor can bring back a message we need to re-experience in our lives for comfort, conviction, healing, and beyond.
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