MAY HE EASTER IN US!

MAY HE EASTER IN US!

As the commercial world bends Easter to its use – Easter bargains and the like – perhaps some will pause and ask, ‘What is Easter?’ Perhaps a child will ask her mother, or a visitor from China will question a local. Easter is a seismic jump in the consciousness of the world. It shifts us out of a familiar life we can ‘manage’, where our expectations are conceivable, to another level we cannot imagine. It expands the human heart, exploring new terrain never even dreamt of. It pushes out the boundaries of what it is to be human until they touch the divine.

In many countries with a Christian heritage it is a holiday week-end and there are football matches and horse race meetings on Good Friday. There is nothing particularly ‘wrong’ with that. What does one do anyway when it is holiday time? Still the call remains for anyone touched by the Christian mystery to ponder for a moment what it is that we are celebrating.

There is a moment recorded in the Acts of the Apostles (11:15) when Peter was drawn to the house of a Roman army officer. He was reluctant to go as the man was not a Jew and Peter and his companions were still working on the assumption that the message of Jesus was for Jews only. Can we imagine how mind-blowing it was, then, when he arrived and ‘had scarcely begun to speak when the Holy Spirit came down on them in the same way as it came on us at the beginning’? Two thousand years of history cracked up in a moment.

This thing was now out of control! It had jumped the categories in which it was supposed to function. The beautiful thing to ponder is how the early church went along with it. ‘Who am I to stand in God’s way?’ Peter’s critics in Jerusalem were ‘satisfied’ and bent their thinking and hopes to the new situation. They opened up their plans to include the whole world.

The challenge to us today is to open up our minds to new opportunities. We know how we love the familiar ways, the ways we are accustomed to. But there are moments in history where our minds are blown open. One was the tearing down of the ‘iron curtain’ that divided east and west in 1989. Another was Nelson Mandela walking free from prison in 1990. A recent one only this week was the lifting of the cloud of hopelessness from Nigeria through their recent elections – the results of which were accepted by all sides. The country is now filled with hope for the future.

These are the great events we all share. The challenge is to welcome the personal events that knock on my door. Opportunities come all the time. The Lord always wants to ‘easter’ in us, to use the poet Hopkins’ expression. Only yesterday I found myself reacting unreasonably to a perfectly reasonable situation! It was quite hard to say to myself, ‘you are all worked up by something that just happened and has a simple explanation.’ Why do we cling to our comfortable views? Why do we resist Easter?  

Easter Day                                          5 April 2015

Acts 10:34-43                                     Colossians 3:1-4                                 John 20: 1-9