Last Sunday, I found myself looking around our beautifully decorated church, and thinking to myself: Easter at churches is like our Open Day for the local community. We snazzy up the sanctuary and pull out the flowers and amp up the music and wear our best clothes and bring out a nicer morning tea, and do whatever we have to do to impress visitors. It’s like the church’s version of bringing out the guest towels and wedding china.

But really, the gospel story of Easter isn’t fancy at all; it’s messy. The Easter story is not about new dresses and flowers and chocolates and niceness. It’s about flesh and dirt and bodies and confusion and smashed expectations. When Mary stood at the tomb, she didn’t encounter some perfected, radiant, glowing Jesus in a three-piece suit. If Mary mistook Him for a gardener, He can’t have been looking all that glamorous.

No, perhaps Mary mistook Jesus for a gardener because He still had the dirt from His tomb under His nails. Think about it: I don’t think I’ve ever seen an artwork or sculpture of the resurrected Jesus with any sense of dirtiness about him – like we’ve had to clean him up to look more impressive at Easter. No, the resurrected Jesus always seems squeaky clean and stain-resistant.

I wonder if this is because we go straight from the merriment of Christmas to the merriment of Easter, from cute baby Jesus to amazing resurrected Jesus, from Santa Claus to the Easter Bilby – so quickly, that we don’t really bother with what’s in between: what Jesus taught, how he lived, and how he died.

But Jesus was born into straw and dirt and poverty. He grew up to be a carpenter, and found some unimpressive characters to follow him (fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, homeless, lepers). He spent his ministry making wine, eating with the outcasts, angering the powers-that-be, touching the unclean, using spit and dirt to heal the blind, and saying crazy, destabilizing things like: “the first shall be last and the last shall be first”, and “sell all you have and give it to the poor.”

And perhaps what offended people wasn’t the question “is Jesus like God?” It was “what if God is like Jesus?” What if the most reliable way to know God is not through rules and regulations and sin-and-punishment, but through a person? What if the most reliable way to know God is to look at how God chose to reveal God’s self – in Jesus?

Yes, if what we see in Jesus is God’s own self, revealed, then what we have is a God who is utterly indiscriminate about choosing friends; a God who would rather die than be in the sin accounting business anymore; a God unafraid to get God’s hands dirty for the ones God loves. This is the God who rises to new life with dirt still under God’s nails.

So while all churches may try and clean up Jesus so the visitors will be impressed, the God of Easter who brings life out of death doesn’t want to make you impressive at all. So if you think that’s what resurrection looks like, you might be wrong. Because God isn’t about making you spiffy. God isn’t about making you nicer. God is about making you new. And new doesn’t always look perfect, with a fabulous new dress, because like the Easter story itself, new can be messy.