The Hope of Easter

By the time you read this I will be on Sabbatical.  It’s not the Sabbatical I had planned.  I had intended to start with a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, leaving appropriately on Easter Monday, but Covid-19 has made that an impossibility.  Part of my Sabbatical was based around developing a hobby, in my case starting to build a model railway.  As I’m moving this summer to take up a Circuit Superintendency (subject to Methodist Conference) I won’t be starting to build a model railway in my present Manse. 

I will be staying on Lindisfarne towards the end of my Sabbatical, which I’m looking forward to as a form of pilgrimage, I will be doing some theological reading and I will be building model railway kits in preparation for building the model railway, but it’s not what I hoped for or planned. 

I think it’s fair to say that Covid-19 has disrupted al our lives and plans in the past year or so.  We couldn’t even worship in our churches on Easter Day last year and we have been out of our church buildings on Sundays more than we have been in them. 

Fortunately the Covid-19 vaccines have brought us some hope for the future, hope that, by the summer, our society will be approaching something like normal, or at least a new normal.  Hope that we may even be able to sing together in church and enjoy tea or coffee together after the service.  Hope that our social activities can re-start and we can enjoy the fellowship we have missed so much. 

Hope!  Hope is a very good word for this time of Easter. 

Just before the first Easter Day the world seemed to be a very dark place indeed.  Jesus, the Light of the World, has apparently been murdered on a Roman cross, his light snuffed out.  It seemed that the forces of darkness had won. 

Then, on that first Easter Day, light blazed from the tomb where Jesus dead body had been laid: because Jesus was dead no longer: he had been raised from the dead in great power and glory, the hope of the world who would be with us always. 

The resurrection of Jesus is our hope that we too will one day receive the eternal life promised by Jesus.  Jesus resurrection demonstrates the truth that for those who believe in him death is not the end but the transition from our limited mortal lives to unlimited eternal lives.  We have the hope that our lives do not end with death but go on forever if we place our faith, trust and hope in Jesus as our Saviour and Lord.

We have hope for the future because Jesus rose from death and is alive.  That is what all the Resurrection accounts in the four gospels tell us: that somehow by the power of God Jesus who was dead was raised from death in a new way. 

Yet we still have our fears.  Perhaps the fear of catching Covid-19 and becoming seriously ill, or even dying, has diminished or even passed, but there are others.  We are, perhaps, fearful of what will happen when the Coronavirus has passed, and restrictions eased.  Many lives will have been lost, jobs will have disappeared, companies will have folded, churches will have closed and some hopes for the future will have come to nothing. 

Jesus’ disciples would have had similar fears, fears about what the future would bring.  Then Jesus came and stood amongst them, gloriously alive, proving who he was by showing them his hands and his side, still bearing the marks of crucifixion. 

Jesus had been raised from the dead.  He was standing before them, leaving them in no doubt. 

Even Thomas, who was not with them the first time Jesus appeared to them, did not doubt when he saw Jesus standing before them, falling on his knees and crying out, “My Lord and my God.” 

Sometimes people ask me how I can be so sure that Jesus physically rose from the dead to glorious resurrection life.  I always point to the change in the disciples, who were more or less overnight transformed from men crippled by fear of death to men who went out onto the streets of Jerusalem, risking their lives to proclaim that Jesus had risen.  These were men who bravely went to their own deaths as martyrs, convinced that even death itself was no barrier to the promises and love of God. 

On the evening of that first Easter Day a situation of apparent hopelessness was turned into one of immense hope as fear was replaced by joy and confidence. 

Eventually the Coronavirus crisis will be over and life will return to a new state of normal.  The challenge for us as Christians right now is to see beyond our present worries and concerns about coronavirus and what happens immediately when the crisis is over and to focus on the infinite, to see in the resurrection of Jesus a hope that transcends our current situation and rejoice in the ultimate victory of hope over despair, light over darkness and life over death which Easter brought. 

John’s gospel ends with these words, “there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”  Jesus story continues this day, through our lives and the lives of our sisters and brothers in Christ.  Jesus resurrection is an absolute assurance that his story will continue for eternity and that, as his disciples, our stories too will go on forever.