04/04/2021
“Don’t be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead!” (Mark 16:5)
On Easter Sunday, everything changes. We know what it feels like for the world to change overnight. We have faced the threat of death in a new way, faced the loneliness of isolation, of economic ruin, the confusion of a whole new way of living. Had someone warned us it was going to happen, we would scarcely have believed it. If someone had told me at Christmas last year: ‘in a few months, you will be spending all your time at home. The world will be gripped by a new plague. People will stop going to their offices, no one will see their families. Wearing masks and staying away from each other will become normal, and the pandemic will be at the centre of all of our lives around the world’, I’m not sure I would have believed it.
How much more must the women at the tomb have felt disbelieving, shocked and confused when they were told ‘he is not here, he is risen’! And yet Jesus had told his disciples: ‘the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.’ [Mk 8:31]
Some things we have to experience, to see for ourselves, to truly believe they are possible. Even the disciples, after all they had seen and heard, struggled to believe the truth – that Jesus had indeed resurrected and come back from the dead.
We believe in the resurrected God because of the testimony of these first witnesses, the change this brings to them and the reality that we see and feel His presence every day. We feel His forgiveness and we hear His voice. It might be a story which feels too good to be true – the greatest ever told – but we know it is real because we live with, and in response to, the reality of it. In his resurrection, Jesus reveals the Truth: He is Lord, conqueror of death and forgiver of sins. Alleluia – Christ is risen!
And this is the pivot on which the world turns. As formative as this year has been for the world, we do not split our time into BC and AC before and after Covid. Rather we live in God’s time - turning ultimately not by any pandemic that grips us, but by the more defining event of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Today a new world dawns.
