Easter Day

Mark 16:1-8 Isaiah 25:6-9 Acts 10:34-43

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

The acclamation of the good news of the resurrection is ringing around the globe today – in different languages – in all churches and places where Christians meet. And what a wonderful bit of good news it is! Of course, we have known about this for a very long time already, about 2,000 years – but it never fails to move at the celebration of Easter, when we commemorate the wonderful event of that first Easter morning, when the tomb in which Jesus had been laid after his death was found to be empty. The witnesses to the resurrection were recorded in the accounts of the Gospels; the first being women which adds to the authority of the recordings by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Women, as we know, were not regarded as reliable in those days, but their words were backed up by the men who came to investigate and other appearances of Jesus – too numerous to count – passed on the truth of this remarkable event to many others. The life of the Church, then formed according to the directions that Jesus had given, began properly and has been a witness to the work of God, not just on that occasion, but ever since, through the Holy Spirit. For God’s plan did not end with the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ, but it continued to have an enormous effect in the world, through the work and witness of the third member of the Holy Trinity: the Holy Spirit. We shall come to talk about him later, when we focus on him at Pentecost.

The readings that we are looking at today apart from the Gospel passage, are Isaiah 25 and Acts 10. In these, we are finding prophecy before ‘all this happened’ and the effects and confirmation of the resurrection afterwards in Peter’s words about the remarkable work of the Lord. They are the sandwich that holds the Gospel message together, as it were. The promise that God will ‘swallow up death’ and ‘wipe away the tears from all faces’ in Isaiah – and the reference to the prophets who ‘testify about [Jesus] that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name’ in Acts. So what is the most wonderful story ever told in the resurrection and what followed?

Well, I am reminded of the old way of taking photographs, before digital cameras took over. The use of film that had to be exposed to light so that it would capture an image in fact. This film was a negative of the image that then had to be developed with the use of certain chemicals (don’t ask me about the details, I am just giving an outline here) so that a ‘positive’ of the image could be printed which was the actual ‘photograph’. I hope I am explaining it adequately enough – at least those who were born before the digital age will remember. And I like to see this as a metaphor of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came to save us from the power of sin and death, by dying on the cross and rising to life on the third day. For we in effect were ‘negatives’ in the ways bad things influenced our lives. We were not the real image of true human beings as God had intended for us to be. So we needed to be exposed to the light, the true light of Christ, in order to ‘develop’ into the positive that God wanted for us. In Jesus, the negative becomes the positive; hate turns into love, hurt is healed, our cry of pain is turned into joy. Our tears are wiped away by the very hand of God, who ‘did not want to let go the work of his hands’ and who loves us with an everlasting love. And that is good news!

Alleluia. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Happy Easter 🙂