Posted Saturday 1 March 2008
There was, as usual, a lot of comment about the way that Christmas should be celebrated.
Representatives of non-Christian faiths encouraged the Church to get on with its celebration because that made room for all to celebrate. Churches were filled at Christmas services as folk remembered that Christ is the centre of it all.
At Easter, although the hot cross buns and chocolate eggs made their appearance in supermarkets in mid January; there probably will not be quite the same debate – or increase in worship attendance for that matter – that we experience at Christmas.
Yet Jesus remains the focus of Easter. The hot cross bun carries a pastry cross to remind us of Jesus’ death on Calvary, commemorated on Good Friday each year. The eggs are a symbol of new life as Jesus rose from the dead the first Easter morning.
Those two events together give meaning to each other. Had Good Friday been the end, that would have told us one thing.
Had there been an Easter event without the preceding Passion, that too would have changed the nature of how Christians experience and talk about God.
The fact is that they go together and give us the content of our proclamation that God is love – so completely love that there was no end to God’s commitment; and also that it is the urging to life of love that shall in the end overcome everything that tends towards death.
It is hard to grasp this shocking idea that because of Jesus there is life after death and that death-defying life is given in him.
‘Love is stronger than death,’ say the words of a prayer by Archbishop Tutu and this gives us cause to hope against hope that, in spite of the truly terrible hurts that people inflict on other people; in spite of the fact that our own human life is limited by physical death, there is a continuing reality in which the love of God is finally and ultimately expressed.
May God give to each of us that sense of trust in his love that we may find fulfilment in this life and, in the world to come, life everlasting.
Category: Bishop Idris, Thought for the Month
