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Thought for the
Week 12 April 2009 – Easter Day
Easter
does not begin with the Empty Tomb, but of course without the Empty Tomb
there would be no Easter, no Christianity, no Church, no faith. Easter begins in the loving heart of God,
which has no beginning at all, because He is Lord of Space and of Time. As And
that’s the point of Easter - God’s love is expressed in God’s sending. Easter
is about incarnation just as much as Christmas is. Easter is about God’s love, not expressed
as a beautiful idea, but made real for us in our own little reality, our own
little envelope of story and space, here on planet earth. At Christmas the
immortal becomes mortal; the Lord of all Creation takes a place and a time
within his creation; the Almighty is born a human being. At Easter, the Lord of life is put to death
by the very people He came to save - that is by us. He, who is the Life of the world, has that
life taken away by the same world to which He gave and gives life. Perhaps
Easter is implicit in Christmas.
People cannot accept too much reality – we are too fragile for
it. You only have to think of the
number of prophets and good people who have been murdered for daring to
suggest a better way of being and of doing, to see how much of a threat
goodness and holiness really are.
Jesus was a threat not just to Judaism as it was being organised and
run at the time, but to all selfishness everywhere, and we are all selfish
beings. If Jesus came back again
today, would we put Him to death?
Perhaps the Disciples at the Last Supper give us our answer. When Jesus said you will all desert me,
Peter denied it vehemently, and all the disciples said the same. But when push came to shove, they all fled. But
their failure, their fleeing, tragic as it was for them – it wasn’t just
Peter who wept bitterly – didn’t make any difference to what God could
achieve. When they fled, they were not
resurrection people; the resurrection lay in the future, and they had no idea
that it was going to happen. We on the
other hand are resurrection people; we know that it has happened, and yet we
still flee from the holiness and goodness of our Lord. They
came back. Those eleven terrified men,
all of whom had denied their Lord, came back, and, in the power of the Holy
Spirit, they established the Christian faith and the Christian Church for
Him, and for us. At least ten of them
died for their faith, our faith. With
the death of Jesus on the cross, you might expect what He taught to fade
away, as his disciples died out.
Gradually it would be watered down, and He would just be remembered as
a great Prophet, Healer and Teacher; just another among so many great Jewish
examples and rôle models down the centuries.
If Christianity continued to exist at all, it would be as a minor sect
within Judaism. And to some extent, that did indeed happen, because Jews of
the Reformed strand within Judaism regard Jesus as one of their early
reformers. But the
Empty Tomb changed, and changes, everything.
Jesus is not just an example and rôle model (though of course He is
both those things); He is not just a Teacher, Healer and Prophet (again, of
course, He is all those things too).
It is the Empty Tomb that proclaims, “Jesus is Lord”. And if
He is Lord at that point in the unfolding of our Salvation story, then He is
Lord from before the beginning and for all time, and particularly important
for us, He is Lord now, in our own time and in our own world. Easter
is, like Christmas, a meeting point for all kinds of apparently opposing
things. At Christmas a virgin has a
baby; at Easter the immortal Lord of every person’s life is put to death by
the very people He came to save. At
Christmas, Kings pay homage to a baby; at Easter the King of Kings is
condemned to death by a minor ruler of a small part of a Roman province. At Christmas, the Saviour of the World is
born in a dirty stable and laid in a manger; at Easter, He is crucified
outside the city wall, in the rubbish dump, and then laid in the grave of a
stranger. But the
real significance of Easter starts with the empty tomb. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve did not
know death – death was part of their punishment, and has been the enemy of
mankind and of life ever since. The
empty tomb in another garden turns all that on its head. No longer is death the final victor, for in
Jesus’ resurrection, the old order of sin and death is overcome. The darkness of the tomb, which hung over
all of us, is transformed into the Light of the risen Christ. The agony of the cross is transformed into
the ecstasy of the Resurrection – Christ is Lord, and He is with us
evermore. The never of death is
transformed into the always of God’s love.
He is
risen! Alleluiah! Father Charles Howard: Anglican
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