HOPE for Easter Sunday 

It’s a fair claim that 2020 united governments, organisations, faiths and people in hope.

We all hoped the virus wouldn’t reach our shores, that our health care provision would be enough, and that a vaccine would be discovered. As we reached the end of the year, we hoped that 2021 would be better. Surely 1st January would signal a new chapter.  But New Year’s Day isn’t a switch that can be flicked to change everything. It’s just another 24-hour period.

Today we celebrate an event that is the greatest moment of hope within the Christian calendar. The grief of Good Friday is over, the waiting of Holy Saturday is complete, and now we rejoice in the new possibilities that Resurrection brings. Hope is here!

Yet is it just another 24-hour period? Is it a religious ‘New Year’s Day’ where nothing essentially changes?

In one sense the answer is yes. The world faces the same questions today as we did yesterday. But the crucial difference between New Year’s Day and Resurrection Sunday is what is at the centre of the celebration.  

Today we celebrate a hope that, as the American scholar Revd Walter Brueggemann says, ‘is the religious conviction that God has not quit.’
Humans are not the centre of the story today, God is. It’s a day where all the tenses come together.

We look back and remember the resurrection event. We look forward to the day when tears and suffering are no more. And we live between these two moments with a hope that is secure because God has not quit making all things new.

Andrew Grinnell, Urban Life.

Photo by Bruno van der Kraan on Unsplash