This year Easter has had a special meaning for me, having rediscovered the sensual and intuitive side of the festivity. Living in a situation of confrontation, finding myself between opponents, looking for the wholesome and healing perspective, the dark and sad perspective weighs down like a week of thunderstorms. We need the sunrise after the long night that seemed to go on and on, one struggle after another.
My wife, our friend and I visited an “Easter Garden†and walked with the children to Jerusalem, climbing the stairs to Zion, witnessed the procession on Psalm Sunday, took part in the last supper, heard the songs of praise and the prayers of desperation. We unloaded our burdens at the cross, wept a few tears and prayed that the defeat, sadness, frustration and disappointment of the conflicts around the world and at home should ease, and the darkness be overcome. The children seemed to understand intuitively and a small child took the hand of our friend who knelt before the cross weeping.
We were out in the Easter night, reminding ourselves with a play of lights how on that early morning hope grew amongst uncertainty and confusion. We experienced how the light of anticipation was spread, how hope displaced insecurity and grew into an assuredness without knowing for certain. How memories showed the way, and words spoken in the past became so important on the way to expressing our own hope - “Christ has risen, he has most certainly risen!â€
Gradually it is clear that the living One is not to be found amongst mouldy corpses, and that the song of life perseveres in the sunrise of the third day. Defeat is always temporary where faith helps people back on their feet and love binds them together. Loss is always passing when we understand what riches we have been given. Death looses its sting when the hope of resurrection grows in a group of people who conspire “to proclaim good news to the poor, to heal the broken of heart, to proclaim to captives deliverance and to blind receiving of sight, to send away the bruised with deliverance and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.â€
Shalom