Bishop John's Easter Message

When I was a parish priest in Holywell, exiting out of the vicarage drive was always a trial. The footpath had been repaired so many times it resembled an old patchwork quilt coming apart at the seams. There was as much grass as footpath and, every spring, a big bunch of daffodils would arrive just by the gate making navigation even more difficult.

My wife, who could not bear the thought that they had gone to so much effort to flower, would watch to make sure I didn't crush them. What happened to my car chassis as a result of trying to avoid them, she couldn't have cared less.

I was delighted when the council finally decided to lay a brand-new Tarmac footpath the length of the Fron Park Road. Negotiating potholes was no longer necessary, instead a smooth pristine runway led me to the main road. I and my long-suffering car breathed a sigh of relief.

It doesn't take long to adapt to new things. I very soon forgot about the navigational difficulties of the past and got on with barely a thought as to what life used to be like. However, come early spring the following year, I noticed a bump forming in my new footpath just by the gate. The bump grew over a few days, finally bursting apart to make way for a bunch of daffodils that if anything looked even more spectacular than before, the bright yellow and green of flower and stem against the black Tarmac of the footpath.

The council had done their best, but life had won out over a neat path.

I admit that neat paths are easier to navigate but sometimes life just gets in the way. The question is, what do we do about that?

Easter is a disturbing business, thoughts at that first Easter ran counter to each other. The prevalent mood appeared to be,

Keeping it neat and simple was Caiaphas the high priest's solution to a complicated problem and lots of people agreed with him. Something dead and buried would go away and be forgotten about in time — people would go about their lives navigating the world without a Jesus of Nazareth.

Others were not so sure. What they had seen and what they had heard would not go away. They were left uncomfortable, and rightly so. There was way too much life in Jesus for him to simply disappear. He healed the sick, raised the dead, challenged the status quo. He had the unique ability to speak directly to the individual heart and to a nation.

We are all in danger of losing ourselves to busy lives that simply go through the motions in the day to day of our existence. When we are harassed and too time starved to think of anything but getting on to the "next thing", a smooth path easily navigated and void of trip hazards is a very attractive prospect.

I remember how the daffodils surprised me. I'd forgotten how beautiful they were and, despite my grumbling about them being in the way, how careful I had been not to crush that beauty. My heart gave a little cheer for the life that broke through the pristine path and reminded me about a different world just beneath the surface.

For those who loved Jesus, on the day that he died, it was the fading of a dream, a bleak image of a cross, of death and desolate landscape and the ache that comes with grief at the thought of something gone forever.

Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, with great reverence, laid to rest a man they thought they would never see again. The women, going to the tomb before it was yet light arrived to say goodbye, and certainly not hello.

At that point only half the story was understood, so where else was there to look but backwards? Death had overcome their world, what could be left to do but lament? Caiaphas had triumphed, the untidy Jesus revolution patted down flat and sanity restored.

This is the moment the world's story and ours part company. The world's promise of ease of foot, a comfortable sleepwalk into nothingness, is eclipsed by all the chaotic, death-defying beauty of the risen Christ. We are called to walk with him — to navigate a world, untidy and glorious, bursting with life, promise, love and opportunity.

We are called to choose life.

The truth is that in this dark world, a light shines, bright and lovely, contrasting against the poverty of our existence. A light shines and the world cannot overcome it.

Taking time to appear doesn't mean that life is absent; rather, as we now realise, it means a story is unfolding. The waiting and watching is not in vain, it's all part of this great Easter message. The path that we walk in faith and hope through Lent is, at the perfect moment, unveiled. Planned before the world was made, it shines in all its glory, and our faces, illuminated by its light, at last see what we have longed to see and we are made whole.

Once lost, now found, once blind but now seeing, the disciples too burst into life, their world and now ours through this Risen Christ becomes alive with sound and ablaze with colour.

Mary shouts to disciples who are hiding from death that:

John proclaims it as true that:

Paul tells us:

Countless saints through the ages proclaim this Easter story as not a moment in time to be remembered, but rather a moment encompassing all time to be lived out and experienced forever.

Happy Easter! Beauty and life has won out and the world has not, cannot, overcome it.

+John

Bishop John will preside at the Easter Eucharist at Brecon Cathedral on Easter Sunday, 20 April, at 11am. All are welcome.