Reflections

"The Easter story answers their questions about the spiritual aspects of humanity. It changes people's lives because it helps us understand that we, like Jesus, are born as spiritual beings.

Every inner prompting of conscience, every glimmering sense of beauty, every response we make to music, every experience we have of love - whether of physical love, sexual love, family love or the love of friends - and every experience of bereavement, reminds us of this fact about ourselves.

The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are".

A N Wilson on the relevance of Christianity today.

There are moments in a year when what might be termed the 'spiritual' dimension of life seems to become truly interlocked with the natural. Easter is a key example of this. The beginnings of Spring had commonly been revered as a point of devotion in the ancient world, generally to some personified deification of nature due to the miracle we encounter at this time of year - the regeneration of the land after the 'death' of winter. It is hardly surprising that we mark such a moment - the harbinger of longer, warmer days, when creation is adorned and enabled to bring about a richness of fruits which, when harvested, allow us to live.

The seasons are no accident. They speak to us of deeper truths - the redemption that is only made ours by the death and raising of Christ Himself, which brings about the new 'day' foretold in the forming of the heavens and earth itself (Genesis 2:1, Hebrews 4:1), to be fulfilled in the 'day' which is fast approaching.
As the re-birth of Spring is at the heart of the natural world, so the Redemption of that Creation through the work of Jesus Christ is at the core of our existence - the one who holds together the very fiber of every particle in the universe is the one who overcame the power of sin and death for every one of us. This allows a new life, an 'alien' righteousness, to justify the lost (we who are dead in sin) and to redeem us that we may become adopted into the wonder of the new day, when we are truly new creations, which is coming.

When our lives are furnished by such richness, then so much will 'speak' (resonate) of the great reality - that we are indeed the work of His hands, and as such, are honored with this day, this moment, to look to the depth of care and love that has been bestowed upon us, by the living Creator and Redeemer.