When I was little, one of my grandfathers would enchant us children at Easter by bringing a large wooden egg out of a glass-fronted cabinet, filled with many objects of mystery and wonder. The egg was painted a soft shiny orange-red. But it wasn’t just a painted egg: it was the outer layer of a nest of about 20 wooden eggs, each one a different colour and smaller than the last. The smallest little egg, painted bright yellow, was no bigger than a kernel of corn.
Another delight at Easter was painting the fragile shells of hen’s eggs. My mother would prick the more pointed end of the eggs with a strong needle to make a small hole and then make a slightly larger hole at the wider end. She would then let me blow hard through the smaller hole until the raw egg had come out of the larger hole. The eggs were saved for baking cakes or making scrambled eggs and we would lower the empty shells on spoons into little pots of gently boiling water tinted with different colours of food dye. When the shells had cooled and dried, we would place them carefully among fresh sprigs of Spring blossom on the dining table, ready for the Easter feast. I’m sure there must have been lots of broken shells and a great deal of mess but my memory is of the beautiful coloured egg shells.
For me, Easter was a magical time, happy and carefree, with all the beauty and freshness of an early Spring day. We would also go to church on Easter Sunday and sing the lovely Easter hymns, but it wasn’t until I was about nine or ten that I began to think about the real significance of Easter.
Since then, I have studied and read a great many books and now understand a lot more about what happened on that first Easter but if you were to ask me whether I understand exactly what happened at the Resurrection, and how it all ‘works’, I would have to disappoint you and say that I think it will always be something of a mystery.
What I understand and believe is that it was unprecedented and that it opened the possibility of a new kind of existence and experience for all people and, indeed, all of creation. Because of the Resurrection, the arc of the story of humanity and the rest of the created world takes us to a glorious and joyful ending. Only, with the Resurrection, there is no ending.
The Resurrection shows us the pattern of God’s world and of our own lives. It tells us that there is always life after death, that death is not the end. Death doesn’t win. Death, if you like, is a passing-through, a necessary phase in our lives. The Resurrection also tells us that love is stronger than death, a conviction expressed years before by Solomon in his Song of Songs. But the Resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, the human face and embodiment of God, tells us even more: love is not only stronger than death, it is the strongest power there is, transforming despair into hope, sorrow into joy and fear and hatred into love. In spite of our suffering and sadness, we are connected with the Source of all life and love. God’s Holy Spirit lives within each and every one of us and can be set on fire by our faith in the Risen Lord. The power that exploded Jesus out of the tomb lives on in us!
Happy Easter!
Rev’d Christina Rees