Easter is here, the Christian festival with half the fuss of Christmas, but perhaps double the message and thrice the power.
Over the centuries, Holy Week, the seven days from Jesus first entering Jerusalem, hailed as the Messiah, to his resurrection from death, has slipped from the centre of our national consciousness.
Christmas, with all its spectacle and sentiment, has eclipsed it. Yet this was not always so. Over the Easter holiday in 1926, there were said to be 10,000 Easter eggs on display in London. Families gathered on Hampstead Heath to celebrate the risen Lord. It was a moment of shared faith, of public joy, of collective meaning.
So why has Easter become the lesser of the two festivals?
When Easter is the crux of the faith, the single moment in time when everything changed. God did not merely confront evil, he triumphed over death itself. There can be nothing in the history of the world more significant than the message that death is not the end.
And yet we take this miracle of all miracles for granted.
Though many of us would not profess to be Christians, believers in Christ the Messiah, we nevertheless assume, almost instinctively, that when our loved ones die, they will go to heaven, that we will be reunited one day. It is a comforting thought, woven quietly into the fabric of our culture.
But without Easter there is no heaven. There is only death, a void, an emptiness, a final separation from God. The end.
God is the Alpha and the Omega. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” He said he is the light of the world. At Pentecost he poured out his spirit onto the disciples. The Holy Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, is not simply a matter of religion, it is everything. It is the answer to the deepest questions we can ask, the meaning of existence embodied in one man, Jesus Christ, sent to earth to teach us, to love us, to die for us, and to rise again, reconciling us with our maker. As Douglas Adams once joked, it is 42, the meaning of life, the universe and everything, only here the answer is not a punchline but a person.
There should be nothing to disturb your joy on Easter Day. The accomplishment of Christ is so immense that it reshapes everything. Eternal life means that the soul within you need never die.
We celebrate the day Christ rose from the dead, and to deepen that joy, we might revive some of the lost traditions and delightful absurdities once associated with Easter, for many of them are so eccentric, so joyfully ridiculous, that they cannot fail to lift the spirit.
Pancake tossing and pancake racing, for instance, are said to have begun when a housewife, hearing the church bells, feared she would be late, and ran out of her home, frying pan still in hand. In Leicestershire, there is the Hare Pie Scramble, where a great pie is baked and villagers scramble for pieces in a cheerful melee. If that sounds a little energetic after a hearty lunch, then an egg jarping contest may be more appealing, two players knocking hard boiled eggs together until one cracks. Or climb a hill and roll your eggs down, racing not only for speed but for survival. On Easter Monday there is the curious custom of heaving, men lifting the women in their lives, before the roles are reversed on Tuesday. Children, meanwhile, might perform Pace Egging plays, retelling tales of Saint George and the Dragon or King Arthur and his knights.
Whatever you do this Easter, remember the joy. Imagine the wonder of 10,000 Easter eggs set before the eyes of children, the delight, the astonishment, the sheer abundance of it all. Because of Easter there is hope, even in the darkest of days, and our joy, like the promise it celebrates, should know no bounds.
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Daily express politics- shocking cost of brexit betrayal- £3bn per year.
When I read the press release from the EU council I saw a figure of £3.5bn to £4bn per year to the Cohesion fund . Norway only pays £390m per year
Resurrection is not merely coming back to life after death. If one dies, then gets an electroshock or is cryogenized, and later comes back to life, is not resurrection in Christian sense. When Jesus resurrected, many did not recognise him immediately and later Jesus undergone transfiguration. Resurrection, like Pope Benedict XVI explained, is the moving into a different and higher level of existence, i.e. a rebirth into a superior being.
But this is neither reincarnation nor Karma, because Jesus saved us from these as well as the symbolic sins of Adam and Eve, by making Himself a shortcut for our own resurrection. Through his acts and passion, he taught us and demonstrate to us that Love is the key and trust or faith in God is the keyhole, which together open the door for our resurrection. To “love”, like loving one’s child or partner, is disregarding one’s feeling of self-interest, hence the “Thy will be done”. God is Love and to love gets you entangled with God.
As for the “Father”, meant “Creator” in the original Jewish prayer which Jesus adapted. And like Pope Benedict XVI also explained, should be understood as the Source of all things.
Regarding the Holy Trinity, we should not consider the three persons as separated. It’s like being a baby, toddler, child, teenager, student, young adult, single or married, parent, employee or employer, middle-age, retired, widow or widower, are all distinct versions of our same unseparated person. The three persons of the Holy Trinity are all of the same essence or consubstantial to the Source, i.e. God Himself.
By eternal life and heaven, again it means that by resurrection, we will be getting back and merge with our Source, the Source of everything, whatever the algorithm of the greater plan is.
The Catholic beliefs, both similar in Anglican or Roman, which matured on the Thomistic doctrine of “faith and reason are complementary path to truth” lead to a much more “cosmic” interpretation of the Christian faith than normally thought. And more in phase with the modern physics concept of “Entanglement”, and “Universe as a block” wrt eternity.
In anyway, the proofs that there is something are the “Officially Genuine Miracles” which are confirmed after passing certain well defined and stringent tests, sometimes lasting more than 10 years, as well as the “Eucharistic Miracles”.
All the comments above is to remind us that Easter is also the time when we renew our baptismal promises.
Happy Eater to all.
P.S.
Beware of the devil, a “bodiless intelligence” who acts by logically convincing us with perceived or non-perceived arguments to make us feel that the bad things we are tempted on, could somehow be right or excusable.
Pray that Chagos is returned back to the Chagossians under British sovereignty, not to evil minded Mauritian and Indian Hindutva Governments.