Easter and the Empty Tomb Religion in black and white

Certainty is comforting. Truth is more demanding.

There is something visually powerful about certainty.

You can see it before a word is spoken. Before a doctrine is explained. Before a belief is defended.

Black.

White.

Clean lines. Clear boundaries. No ambiguity.

Across centuries and across traditions, movements with the strongest claims to absolute truth have often chosen the simplest visual language to express it. In Catholic history, black clerical dress was not merely aesthetic; it became a marker of distinction and restraint. Medieval church rules pushed clergy away from bright, aristocratic display and toward darker, simpler garments, and by the nineteenth century American bishops were explicitly requiring black cassocks and Roman collars for priests in liturgical settings. The uniform was meant to signal seriousness, separation, and submission to office rather than personal style.  

The same instinct appears in Jewish life, though from a different historical path. Many ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities retained forms of dress rooted in Eastern European styles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with black coats and hats communicating dignity, modesty, continuity, and resistance to assimilation. Yet history adds an irony here: in some Muslim-ruled societies, Jews were also forced by law to wear prescribed colors or dark garments to mark them off from the surrounding population. What begins as chosen religious identity can, in another age, become imposed social control.  

That is one of the reasons clothing matters so much in religious history. It is never just about clothing. It is about authority, belonging, and the management of moral boundaries.

The Amish instinct Dr. Gary Kellner mentioned in his podcast fits this pattern as well. Plain dress was never only about simplicity. It was a discipline of humility, a visible refusal of vanity and competition, and a way of preserving communal order against the pressures of the wider world. When even a blue bumper on a buggy could provoke controversy, the issue was not really paint. It was whether small visible changes signaled a deeper surrender to modernity. In communities built on the preservation of order, symbolism is never small.

The instinct is wider than Christianity or Judaism. Islam, too, has long had traditions of morally freighted dress, though with enormous variation across regions and schools. What matters for Dr. Kellner’s argument is not that every Muslim community looks alike, because they do not. It is that dress, color, and bodily presentation have repeatedly been used to embody moral seriousness and social boundaries. Sober shades such as blue, gray, brown, and black were characteristic in some Islamic dress traditions, while scholarship on Islamic sumptuary regulation shows that clothing colors and forms were often sorted into the permitted, the preferred, and the forbidden.  

And this is not merely historical. In Afghanistan, the Taliban codified a morality law in August 2024 that requires women to cover their bodies and faces and requires men to conform to beard and prayer regulations under the state’s interpretation of virtue. Reuters reported that these rules are enforced by the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, with penalties ranging from warnings to detention and prosecution. UN Women warned that the law imposes sweeping restrictions on women’s public lives and deepens the state’s direct control over daily moral presentation.  

Iran offers another modern example. Since the 1979 revolution, the state has enforced mandatory dress codes for women, and recent reporting shows that penalties for violating those codes have expanded rather than diminished. Human Rights Watch says Iranian authorities broadened penalties for women who violate discriminatory dress laws, while Reuters and Al Jazeera have described continuing enforcement and public conflict over the hijab, including demonstrations by women dressed in full black chadors demanding stricter observance. Again, clothing becomes a proxy for ideology, and ideology becomes a means of policing the body.  

It is easy to smile at stories about red dresses, blue buggy bumpers, or clerical collars. But they are not really about fabric or color.

They are about control.

About clarity.

About the deep human desire to reduce life to something manageable.

Black-and-white thinking offers a kind of relief. In a complicated world, it promises right and wrong without hesitation, belonging without ambiguity, identity without confusion. It removes the burden of discernment. It replaces wrestling with certainty. It draws a line and asks only that you stand on the correct side of it.

This instinct is not limited to religion. Secular ideologies do it too. They may not issue cassocks or veils, but they still divide the world into pure and impure, enlightened and backward, acceptable and untouchable. The language changes. The architecture remains.

But life is not actually lived that way.

Life unfolds in tension, in incomplete information, in competing loyalties, in moments where there is no neat chapter and verse to settle the matter. We live, as Dr. Kellner put it, not in black and white but in living color.

The Jewish tradition itself is built around it.

It begins, not with a flawless hero, but a deeply flawed man named Jacob - a man who lies, deceives, and struggles his way into blessing. He started his path to prosperity by stealing his brother’s inheritance and deceiving his aged father. His life was marked by exile and struggle. Jacob married into a family where his father-in-law was as shady and sharp a trader as he was. The story culminates in an all-night wrestling match with an angel. Jacob exited the bout with a dislocated hip and a new identity— “Israel,” or “he who struggles.:

That is not incidental. It is foundational.

And that is what the faith life is—a wrestling match in this world with God, or His designated alternate. It is a wrestling match without quick and easy answers. It is a life of constant struggle.

Which may explain why Jesus also challenges the idea of religion in black and white. He always disrupted those who tried to reduce it to one. That is one reason Jesus was such a disturbing figure in his own world, and it caused the absolutists to put a price on His head

The people most associated with rigorous moral seriousness in first-century Judaism were the Pharisees. Described as strict adherents to the Law, deeply concerned with purity, holiness, and how Mosaic commands should be lived out in changing circumstances. They were not cartoon villains. In many ways they were serious reformers. But seriousness can harden into separation, and separation can become a habit of soul. Even their name may derive from the idea of being “separated” from what was unclean.  

Jesus repeatedly challenged that tendency. Not because he rejected truth, but because he refused to let truth collapse into performance. The Jewish world of his day contained real disputes over Sabbath and purity practices, including handwashing and questions of ritual cleanness. Jesus stepped directly into that world and often unsettled it, not by endorsing moral chaos, but by insisting that human need, mercy, and the deeper intention of the law mattered more than the visible maintenance of a system.  

That is why the conversation with the Samaritan woman is so important. She tries to relocate the issue into a familiar dispute: which community is right, which mountain counts, which tribe owns the true location of worship. But in John 4, Jesus refuses the trap and redirects the conversation toward worship “in spirit and truth.”

Jesus will not be forced into a false binary merely because the culture around him is built on one.  

The same pattern appears in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18. The text explicitly says Jesus told that story to people “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt.” That is black-and-white religion in one sentence: moral self-certainty joined to social disdain. The tax collector, by contrast, has no performance left. He simply asks for mercy.  

So, the larger point holds up under inspection: religion in black and white tends to produce two equal and opposite distortions.

First, moral superiority.

“I thank God I am not like other people.”

Righteousness becomes performance. Identity becomes comparison. Faith becomes self-congratulation.

Second, moral despair.

“I can never measure up.”

Failure becomes identity. Shame becomes distance. Faith becomes resignation.

One inflates the self.

The other crushes it.

Neither leaves much room for grace.

What is striking about Christianity is that its central claim is not that truth arrived as a rulebook alone, but that truth became flesh. God did not merely hand down an abstract code. In Christian belief, God entered human history in an embodied life marked by labor, poverty, rumor, conflict, friendship, meals, tears, and death. That is a faith already operating in color rather than abstraction.

Which is why black-and-white religion is always a temptation, but never the whole of faith.

It is easier to manage. Easier to enforce. Easier to display.

But it is not enough for real life, and it was never enough for the Founder of the Christian faith.

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Easter Reflections from Dr. Gary Kellner

If faith is not black and white… what does Easter reveal about the full color of redemption

Easter has a way of disrupting tidy thinking.

We prefer our categories—right and wrong, in and out, worthy and unworthy. We build them carefully. We defend them passionately. And, if we’re honest, we feel safer inside them.

Then comes Easter.

Not as an argument.

Not as a philosophy.

But as an event.

An empty tomb does not fit neatly into anyone’s system. It does not reinforce our categories—it unsettles them. It suggests that reality is larger than our conclusions, that truth is not something we manage, but something that confronts us.

What I find most striking is not simply that death is overcome, but how quietly it is first discovered. Not by the powerful. Not by the certain. But by those who had already run out of answers.

Which raises an uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps the people most ready to recognize what God is doing are not the ones who have everything arranged in black and white… but the ones who have learned, sometimes painfully, to live without that kind of certainty.

The Easter event does not abolish truth.

It reminds us—gently, and then unmistakably—that truth is far more alive than we are inclined to make it.