Dear Friends, I hope you have all had a wonderful and blessed Easter, it was good to be able to celebrate Lent, Holy Week and Easter in a way that felt a bit more normal, and it was wonderful to see so many of you at our services in person and on Zoom. Easter is such a special time of year for Christians, being at the heart of our beliefs and at the centre of the Church’s year.
A while back, I was talking to a friend and colleague about our experiences of bereavement. Both of us had lost people who were very special to us in our lives, and we concluded that we couldn’t believe that for two people who had lived such full lives and given so much to others, this could be the end. There must be more, after all that is the heart of the Christian message and the Easter story, and what we both preached Sunday by Sunday.
The resurrection of Jesus is not an optional extra tacked on to the end of the Christian story. Without it, the whole story is meaningless, and Jesus is just another person like the rest of us. But his resurrection did take place on that first Easter Sunday morning, and when God raised Jesus from death it was much, much more than one single, mighty act of power and deliverance to rescue his son from the grip of death.
It did much more than that, through Jesus’ resurrection and that first Easter morning everything was changed for all of us, and for all time. From that moment on, death’s hold on the human race was broken. Jesus was the first, but he is by no means the last, of those who will pass through death into eternal life.
This is the true message of comfort for all those of us who mourn the loss of loved ones; yes it still hurts, that’s the price of loving, but alongside our pain we also have the promise, and in Jesus the proof, of a new life which offers far more than we can ever imagine or dream of. With all my love and God’s blessings. Jeremy