Resurrection, Resistance, and 7g of Active Dry Yeast
How homemade hot cross buns became my quiet Easter ritual
I consider myself a competent cook, but as anyone worth their salt in the kitchen can attest, baking is an entirely different beast. That said, every year I try my hand at an Easter classic: hot cross buns.
My motivation has little to do with religio-culinary tradition, though. The real story is rooted in a season of deep wounds and crippling doubt. It was a season that taught me to see the Resurrection in a new light — not as a starchy sanitization painted in pastel, but as an act of resistance against the overwhelming darkness that lurks in the shadows of suffering.
Dark Days on Headington Hill
Like any good Evangelical English major, my early literary imagination was dominated by the works of C.S. Lewis. So naturally, when the opportunity arose to spend a few months in Oxford — living just down the road from The Kilns, studying his life and works in context — I jumped at it.
The ensuing months were full of cobblestone, old books, Gothic architecture, and the constant hum of ambition — but they were equally filled with pain, loss, loneliness, and heartache. The day I landed, I remember staggering to my room, locking the door, and proceeding to sob through the night — only pausing for an hour of restless sleep or to click “next episode” on whatever season of Parks and Recreation I was attempting to comfort-binge at the time. Term began shortly thereafter, but little improved. My tutorials were brutal, my classmates were drowning in work and therefore relationally inaccessible, and everyone I knew, loved, and felt understood by was an ocean away.
Within a few weeks, what began as homesickness (and a bit of jet lag) had morphed into a full-blown mental health crisis. But when I reached out for help, all I was given was the same canned answer over and again: it’ll get better.
It didn’t get better.
By spring break, I was desperate for a reprieve, so I hopped on an invitation from a roommate to book a shared room in Edinburgh for a few days. The first night we were there, I went for a walk and called my partner, who was also studying abroad at the time, but in Johannesburg.
Cidney was my one flickering flame in the crushing darkness of that season. We were childhood sweethearts — she knew me better than I knew myself at times — and we had every intention of tying the knot the moment we graduated college. In fact, I had already bought the ring.
The call connected as I waited on the corner for a bus downtown, and I could tell immediately something was off. I could hear it in her voice. For what felt like hours, I wandered the backstreets of Edinburgh trying to make sense of how and why that call went the way it did, but it didn’t matter. By the end of it, our relationship was over. The flame went out, and all that was left was the darkness.
(Quick aside: you should know that this part of the story has a happy ending. Cidney and I worked things out a few months later, once we had both returned to our real lives stateside. Today we’re happily married with two adorable children, falling more in love each day than we’ve ever been. But that’s a different story for a different time.)
An Unexpected Sanctuary
I spent the rest of spring break in bed watching How I Met Your Mother — probably not the best choice for someone who had just lost the love of their life, but it’s the one I made. When I returned to Oxford, I was broken. I mustered up the little energy I had to avoid flunking my classes. Aside from that, I spent most of my time lying in bed, practically catatonic.
Still completely disconnected from the people around me, my parents bore the heavy burden of trying to keep me afloat from overseas. When Easter came around, my mom begged me to let her buy me a train ticket to Brighton so I could spend a few days with someone who could at least try to help. I reluctantly accepted, and traveled down to the seaside to spend a few days with the McLeans — an older couple who had known me as a young boy in Texas before they retired back to their home country.
Ian met me at the bus stop and we walked to their unassuming church sanctuary, tucked away on the second floor above a row of shops. For the next hour or so, I sat listening to the same sound I had heard a thousand times before as they rehearsed early-2000’s staples like “Here I Am To Worship” and “Blessed Be Your Name”. It was comforting, but didn’t ultimately move the needle much when it came to the pain and hopelessness I was carrying with me.
The real resurrection came the following night at dinner. Ian and Christine poured wine, lit candles, and served me the first home-cooked meal I’d had in months. They told me stories about their lives, and invited me to exchange some of my own. They showed me love without agenda and without reservation. I don’t remember them asking me much about Oxford — not because they didn’t care about my studies and the work I had been doing, but because they cared even more about me, who I was, what and who I loved. And as the meal came to a close, Christine placed a plate on the table, spilling over with rich, warm hot cross buns.
Resurrection and Resistance
The Resurrection of Christ we celebrate at Easter is far more powerful than we often give it credit for. It’s not enough to say that Christ defeated sin and death. The real power of the resurrection is found in the kind of death Christ defeated, and the way he defeated it.
Christians today, especially in the West, have grown accustomed to a romanticized depiction of the cross. We wear it around our necks, tattoo it on our bodies, and stencil it onto greeting cards. But the reality of the cross as Jesus experienced it was overwhelmingly and intentionally repulsive. Much like the lynchings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, the cross was meant for more than death — it was designed for humiliation and dehumanization. Those who were condemned to the cross were destined for a slow and public execution, during which passersby were encouraged to add insult to injury by spitting on and insulting the dying.
As author and Episcopal priest, Fleming Rutledge, puts it:
“Crucifixion is an enactment of the worst that we are, an embodiment of the most sadistic and inhuman impulses that lie within us. The Son of God absorbed all that, drew it into himself. All the cruelty of the human race came to focus in him.”
– The Seven Last Words from the Cross, 8
The way Christ dealt with this evil and inhumanity is peculiar. In John’s account of Christ’s Passion — after he had already been beaten, mocked, and crowned with thorns — Pilate interrogates Jesus a final time, but Jesus remains silent.
“Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” (John 19:10).
On Easter we celebrate the defeat of sin and death through the resurrection of Christ, but there’s far more to it than a mind-blowing magic trick. Christ encountered the worst that the powers of darkness had to throw at him, and he welcomed it. He could’ve denied the accusations. He could have explained what was really going on. He likely could have saved his own life, or at very least prolonged it.
The victory of Easter was not a show of force — there was no demonstration of dominance. Instead, Christ embodied quiet surrender. Yet somehow, the very act of submitting to the darkness without letting it put out the light within him was the one thing the darkness could not withstand.
That’s why I make hot cross buns at Easter — because, when I look back on that dark, painful season of my life, I can still see that faint light flickering on Ian and Christine’s dinner table.
The Resurrection is more than a loophole for extending time on Earth. It’s a refusal to take death and darkness on their own terms. It’s the defiant decision to let the light keep shining, even if it feels way too small and insignificant in the moment. I make hot cross buns every Easter as an embodied reminder that, even in the darkest of nights, there’s a light to be found. And when I can’t find it, I can look to Christ, trusting that,
“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
– John 1:4–5
