Happy Easter

Easter is (arguably) the most important season in the church year, more so than Christmas, yet we celebrate Christmas lavishly, with presents and traditional food, but Easter only a little.  Although I posted Easter greeting to my electronic friends on Facebook and exchanged ‘Happy Easters’ with my immediate family, we received only one Easter card - from the same person in Lancashire who sends us an Easter card every year. 

 In our multi-cultural country, we may feel anxious about giving Easter greetings.  I wanted to wish my Muslim colleague, who has been very helpful to me over the last few months, well for Easter, but how could I do this when, in his last email, he had mentioned celebrating Eid?  Well, I did, in a roundabout sort of way, saying that I was doing Easter and best wishes anyway.  He replied, thanking me.  It is important to mention, especially to people (we think – we never know for certain) are not Christians, that we hold church festivals.  It’s called sharing the good news.

Easter is not so easy to comprehend as Christmas.  (Birth of a baby – what’s not to like?)  So… Jesus actually rose from the dead?  Really?  Do you believe that?  The disciples struggled with this at the time.  Mary Magdalene recognised Jesus quite quickly, and called him ‘Rabboni’, but Peter and the male disciples discounted the women’s account as wishful thinking.  Only when they checked the tomb for themselves and saw that it was empty, did they believe and remember the three-day prophesy.  We observe them attempting to work it all out on the road to Emmaus… and then, of course, Jesus himself joined them and explained.  They might have recalled the raising of Jairus’s daughter and of Lazarus, but Jesus’s resurrection is of a different order.  By dying on the Cross, He paid for all our sins – not His, ours.  By rising again, He defeated death – the prison sentence that surely awaited us – and gave us the opportunity, not to carry on in our worldly ways, but to be with Him, work with Him and acknowledge Him as our saviour.

 Nine years ago, in 2016, we visited the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, the site of the Resurrection, according to General Gordon of Khartoum.  We saw many signs to it but, like many signs, they fade away as you get closer.  We were standing by the bus station in Jerusalem, about to give up looking, when I glanced up and above the buses and saw a cliff with caves.  I knew that this was it, that we had to get behind that cliff, and I was right.  Here was the Garden Tomb and the burial site where Jesus lay.  Having, by then, been in the Holy Land for over a week and seen many Biblical sites, this was the one which moved me to tears.

Rosemary Johnson
Member of congregation at St Andrew’s, Earls Colne