Fr Andrew's thought for Easter Day

Happy Easter! Christ is risen!

What a joy to celebrate this pinnacle of our lived faith once again, and to rejoice in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. It is now perfectly permissible to eat and drink to our hearts content and to sing and dance and bask in the glory of it all. That’s all absolutely fine, but we might be rejoicing in news that most of the world has rejected and possibly we are not feeling in the mood to rejoice so much today, for any one of a number of perfectly good reasons. Maybe you’d like a family member or a friend to share your faith, or maybe you’re struggling with Church at the moment. Well, how about this thought;

How does the thief on the cross fit into your theology? No baptism, no communion, no confirmation, no speaking in tongues, no pilgrim badges, no volunteering, no financial donations, no Sunday Best and no readers rota. He couldn't even bend his knees to pray. He didn't say any prayers and among other things, he was a thief. Jesus didn't take away his pain, heal his body, or defeat his scoffers. Yet, it was a thief who walked into paradise the same hour as Jesus simply by believing. He had nothing more to offer other than his belief that Jesus was who He said He was. No spin from brilliant theologians. No ego or arrogance. No shiny lights, vestments, or music. No incense, roast lamb, or sherry in the narthex. Just a naked dying man on a cross unable to even fold his hands to pray. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) That is the good news of the Gospel, that’s the good news of Easter Sunday and it was given first to the thief on the cross – that, to me, is the basis of our hope in the resurrection and the focus of our faith.

Easter is a time of the breaking and remaking of our human condition, of a broken body on a tree becoming the Body of Christ incorporating all believers through the world (and that the body still thrives and grows is even more wonderful than the actual resurrection itself, when we pause to think) and when we can contemplate the eternal mystery that God chose to call us to Him, and to take the thief who knew Him not until his last breath with Him first. This extract from ‘The Wasteland’ by TS Eliot speaks of an apocalyptic event about to happen when the cities of the world are summed up in the sign of the ‘city over the mountains’ that cracks – terrifyingly, the cities of the world crack and somehow hold themselves together by love maybe of themselves and money and power, before bursting forth into chaos and destruction, leaving an unreality of life without the cities and habitations that we have created, just earth and dust and the memory of there once having been what passes for ‘us’;

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

And within this, we learn our place, at the side of Christ, unrelated to the buildings and systems of the earth, but related to Him and part of Him as He is part of us. He is risen, and we are risen with Him, out of the dust of the earth and through the cross, and Alleluia is our song – not because there is nothing else for us to say, but because that word contains everything that matters.

Have a blessed Easter.