BISHOP’S EASTER MESSAGE

Our human lives are lives in time, from the time of our birth, through childhood and adolescence, to maturity, to years of energy and flourishing, to years of old age and our dying. In that pattern there are many variables, marriage and family, joys of fulfilment and achievement, and tragedies of illness and bereavement and broken relationships, warfare and natural disaster. Our personal lives are lived out against the backdrop of changing history and culture. The place and time of our birth, the wealth or poverty of our family, shape what and who we are, how we see the world, and the expectations we have of our human life. The scientist-priest, Teilhard de Chardin, saw the world as evolving, with an envelope of life, which he called the biosphere, enclosing the physical world, and he looked forward, in a remarkably prophetic way to a further envelope enclosing the world, which he called the no-osphere, the envelope of mind and communication, which is surely what has come to pass in a way which he did not anticipate in the internet, and the whole communications revolution which it signifies. Social networking, now so common, was unknown and unheard of for the greater part of my life as one born during the Second World War.

If we had been born at different times, we would have had different experiences. St Augustine in North Africa in the fourth century saw the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the invasions which destroyed so much of the civilisation taken for granted. Jews of Jesus’ day would live through the destruction of the Temple in AD70, when God seemed to have abandoned his people. In the Middle Ages the ravages of the Black Death decimated populations.

The Christian faith, as the Jewish faith from which it sprang, seeks to understand the deep meaning and purpose of the times and seasons of human history, and the history of our individual human lives. The Bible begins with creation ‘in the beginning God’. All that is, is brought into being by God, and is held and sustained in being by God – and that is true whether what is known is the limited world of those who first set down the accounts of creation in the book of Genesis, or whether it is the vastness of the galaxies and the infinitesimal patterns of energy that we know underlie seemingly solid matter. Within that creation in its ordered richness, is a story of human life, and a story of a people. It is a story of exploration into God, of who God is, and of our human identity as those made in his image and likeness. It is a story of the goodness of God, and of sin and evil, of turning away from that source of goodness. It is a story of slavery and exile, a story of unexpected grace and redemption. It is a story of longing hope for a kingdom of justice, love, and peace. That story has been the framework story which has spoken to a myriad human lives, as men and women wrestled with their personal purpose and experiences of wilderness, dying and abandonment.

That story funnels down and is concentrated in a single life, Jesus – ‘the one who saves’. It is a life interpreted by the purposes of God, and the longing of his people. He comes preaching the kingdom and rule of God; he challenges and confronts the abuses of the religion of his day; he brings ‘good news to the poor, and recovery of sight to the blind.’ Who he is challenges his closest followers – Peter confesses him as ‘the Christ, the Son of the Living God’, and then denies him; Judas, one of the Twelve, betrays him. And so the one who has ‘the words of eternal life’ ends as a scarecrow figure tortured on a cross, screaming at the darkened heavens My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ That death is not only the death of this God-bearing man, but the death of the hope and faith he had kindled in those whose hearts he had touched. The world on the day of this man’s dying, which echoes and fulfils the dying of so many crushed under the evil tyrannies of the world be they be past or present, leaves us hopeless and helpless. The sun of righteousness is blotted out.

Yet the story of Jesus that we tell, and go on telling, is not a story of darkness, despair and death, it is a story of victory and transformation and new creation. That dying was absolutely real; the evil encountered was no illusion. The God whose creative word called all things into being, is the living word who calls the new creation into being through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The story is now crucifixion-resurrection, a deep rhythm resonating in every situation of despair – in martyrdoms and persecutions down the ages; in the gulags of Stalin’s Russia; in our unique coming to the point of death. ‘Christ is risen and the demons are fallen! Christ is risen and hell has lost its prey! Christ is risen, and life reigns!’

As we come again this year to enter into the mystery of our Lord’s death and resurrection it is that we may be transformed by the sacrificial love which reaches into the heart of darkness, and catches us into new and eternal life. Pope Benedict in his remarkable new book Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week from the entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, writes of how ‘in the trials of life we are slowly burned clean; we can, as it were become bread, to the extent that the mystery of Christ is communicated through our life and our suffering, and to the extent that his loves makes us an offering to God and to our fellow men….In the message of the New Testament, and in the proof of the message in the lives of the saints, the great mystery has become radiant light.’ ‘In Jesus’ Resurrection a new possibility of human existence is attained, that affects everyone and that opens up a future, a new kind of future, for mankind.’

Good Friday-Easter is the heart of our Christian faith – a transforming mystery which catches us into the Divine Love, which will never let us down and will never let us go. It is indeed hope for the world – a hope grounded in a life and a death in history, and in a new life which blew human history open. As Sunday by Sunday, and at Easter above all, we come as the despairing disciples did to the supper table at Emmaus, to receive the Easter life of Christ, we know over and over again the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread, ‘the bread that comes down from heaven to give life to the world.’ May God bless you this Easter with an ever deeper knowledge of his love and grace, and may the life and energy of his new creation permeate your life, renew his church, and bring hope to the world. My brothers and sisters may the Lord bless you!

+GEOFFREY GIBRALTAR

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY