What difference does Easter honestly make today? 

It’s a question which during these days we hear being asked ever more insistently - on radio , on television, in newspapers.. but also from hospital beds and at grave-sides ..

Why should the supposed return of someone from the dead - and a temporary return at that, mind you! - the return of someone from the dead over nineteen and a half centuries ago make the slightest difference to the way we lead our lives, or to the way we face our death? Just what difference does Easter make, even to the believer?

Well, we have to say that there are certainly some things which Easter is not. 

It's not just a "true" ghost story. The New Testament writers make it quite clear that Jesus was in some strange and wonderful way NEW to them after the resurrection - he was not immediately recognisable. No, Christ definitely did not return to haunt the disciples, nor even Pilate or Caiaphas who might have deserved it..

Nor is Easter the story of someone being resuscitated. Through the Bible, a number of people returned from death - In the NT the son of a widow in Nain, Lazarus.. Later, a young man who had dropped asleep during one of St Paul’s sermons and fallen through a window. No, the resurrection of Christ was not a resuscitation. 

Well, for me, the overwhelming reason why I actually believe in the resurrection of Christ as something real, unique and of importance for all time, is centred entirely on the way those frightened, shattered failed disciples of Good Friday could now face the world with the news that Christ had risen, and furthermore they could demand that the world listen to that news.. The resurrection for them was not a collective hallucination - you recover from them.. 

The essential aspect of Easter is therefore that it is the resurrection of the crucified Chist. Easter only has relevance and importance as connected to Good Friday. Only as such, can Easter say anything at all to the complexities and contradictions of the puzzling life you and I have to live on earth... 

All those “whys” of life - .. Why, as the psalms ask more than once, and the prophet Job asks continuously, why should wicked people prosper and good people suffer? Why should we feel generosity towards people who are no use to us or to anyone else? Why should we forgive those who have taken advantage of us, or betrayed us, or destroyed our reputation?

I believe that what which can at least start us on a journey to understanding is Good Friday and Easter Day seen almost as a single event. 

The resurrection of the crucified Christ is the event which once turned this world upside down, and must always do so.

Because, yes, when we look back to Good Friday - Christ suffered appallingly at the hands of wickedness, he amazingly but truly forgave those who persecuted him, mocked him and crucified him.. but was that the end of the matter? 

Easter is surely the coup de grace - the victory of grace - for those of us who couldn’t see the reality of Good Friday in its own terms.. the reality that Christ had been right all the time..

The Easter event is the final conviction that, yes, Christ had actually been right - that the inequalities of the world, the injustices of the world, the cruelties of the world, the sufferings of the world - those are not the eternal truths, but rather the rotting fruits of a humanity which has become diseased. 

Christ’s resurrection can therefore be seen as nothing less than the drawing together of all the threads of what had gone before in Christ’s life and death.. a making sense, a harmonising, of the suffering, the misunderstandings, the betrayal, as well as the triumphs and the hopes. 

So Easter becomes for all time and for all people a door to hope which Christ holds open not only at the end of earthly life but right through life. 

Because at every point of life on earth we are going through doors of new and not always welcome experience - a door into life itself / door from childhood to adulthood / perhaps from single to married / perhaps from one home to another home / from work to retirement / perhaps from health to incapacity / perhaps from companionship to bereavement or separation / and then, most awesome of all, a door from life to death. 

And for you and me, those of us who try to follow in Christ's steps, falteringly and not very successfully at times, but who try to follow in Christ's steps - Easter is what suggests that all those tangled threads of our life can somehow be straightened out, drawn into a one-ness - that the doubts and the mistakes in our life, the unfulfilled promise, the unrealised hopes as well as the joys and the pleasures of life - they can each be given a shape and a meaning and a final destination in the love of God.

And so in the middle of opportunity, the middle of fear, the middle of confusion, in the middle of death itself - Easter and resurrection open the door on hope.. The hope that Christ is there, and therefore that opportunities for love are also there, and that that presence and that love, love itself, can turn any situation towards eternal consequence..