When you get right down to the core of it, past that goofy bunny and the pastel colors, Easter is still a ridiculous day. All the pomp and fancy ceremony can’t hide the fact that it revolves around a man who, by any reasonable standard, lived a hard and unenviable life. He said and did too many insane things and so his own people nailed him to a tree as if he was a common criminal. And so this Sunday, we are celebrating the most unlikely of events: His coming out of a tomb in a now unknown location some unknown number of years ago.

It’s a ridiculous story. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot. But as smart and as cynical as I want to pretend I am, I was reminded last week why I believe it.

I was in Seattle along with a few other students from Iowa. That Friday evening we were standing outside Seattle’s well known Broadway Avenue, praying in a circle with Sanctuary, a group devoted to helping Seattle’s poor. We helped them deliver blankets and food to the homeless that night. As we prayed, a saying of Jesus crossed my mind:

“When I was hungry, you gave me food . I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me . They will ask, `But Lord, when did we see you?’

“And He will answer them, saying, `Truly, I tell you, whatsoever you did to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

I’ve read and recited that verse countless times, and each time I still shake my head and wonder to myself what a crazy son-of-a-gun Jesus was. I felt crazy myself as we carried blankets down the busy avenue, which was lined with neon lighting and bars. The work was hard; a number of the people we offered to help were too intoxicated to even respond. One guy, Johnny, was sober enough to talk to us. He had been on the street for 10 years since his parents abandoned him when he was 15. Tonight he was panhandling with a cardboard sign across his chest that read: “Ugly, Dumb, and Broke: Help Me or Shoot Me.” He didn’t need a blanket – he was fine with his sleeping bag and futon under a bridge. So I asked him if there was anything we could pray about for him. He thought for a few moments and shook his head. “No . nothing that I can think of. Maybe a beer . but I know you won’t pray for that.”

I think a lot of the people who were on Broadway Avenue that night could sense that hopelessness. There were some supportive smiles and thanks. But mostly we received apathetic and sometimes hostile stares from the bar hoppers who walked by. There were even a few mocking grins and laughs, as if the beggars we tried to help were too pathetic to deserve pity.

And I don’t blame people for laughing at us for trying to help the helpless on a Friday night in Seattle. It’s hard not to laugh right now at the whole thing myself, and if I had lived to see Jesus walking around doing his radical bleeding-heart ministry, I might have laughed at him too. He said some things about love that both Christians and non-Christians today like to quote – mostly because it makes us feel warm inside. But I think if we were to go beyond the tip of what he said, if we were to fully understand the scope of the love he meant, I think many of us would learn to bite our tongues rather than follow him.

Mother Teresa, a follower of Jesus if there ever was one, often told a story that happened when she was young. She and her mother found a woman named File on the streets, half-eaten by maggots and fast approaching death. But File was weeping, Mother Teresa said, not because of her condition, but because everyone she loved, even her own son, had abandoned her. The incident had helped convince Mother Teresa to gladly devote her life to loving the poor, whom she saw as Christ Himself. She won a Nobel Peace Prize, but even she knew that her love was only a drop in the bucket against all the poverty in the world. I imagine if she had stopped to think about the ridiculous statistics against her, she wouldn’t have raised a finger to help that very first dying woman.

I’ve taken enough philosophy and religion classes to know most of the reasons why we shouldn’t believe in Easter. I’ve read enough of the Bible to know the hard line that Jesus walked. But when it is hard for me to believe in Easter, I think of the moment in the book of John when Jesus, whose disciples were ditching him after hearing his absurd teachings, asks Peter, “Are you going to leave me too?” and Peter replies back, “Who else can we go to?”

So this is the heart of Easter for me: Believing the ridiculous – because there is nowhere else to go. To believe that Jesus, somehow, could beat death. And to believe that following his love is the only hope we have. I’m as surprised as you are about how he did it, but I am glad he found his way out of that tomb so long ago.

Dan Nguyen is a senior in computer engineering and journalism and mass communication from Iowa City.