Easter provides hope

FOR THOSE with ears to hear the groaning of creation has become a roar: environmental degradation, inequitable access of the worlds people to life’s basic necessities, violence and terror – so many people have reason to echo Jesus’ gut-wrenching cry from the cross: ‘My God, why have you abandoned me?’

This Easter, as always, Christians will inhabit the core story of the faith: empty tomb, puzzlement, fear, hope, remembrance, disbelief, amazement.

Easter provides the distinctive basis for hope in the Christian faith – the faithfulness of God who not only ‘bears our sorrows and is acquainted with our grief’, but who works to bring life out of death and hope from despair.

The vocabulary of Easter precludes denial about the depth of the world’s brokenness and yet saves us from despair. It is the great ‘nevertheless’ that affirms that ultimately the last word in life and death belongs to a gracious God.

The church is called and empowered to bear witness in its worship, in its justice-seeking, in its service, to the God who makes all things new.