April 2025
By James Woodward
Easter Day is the occasion when, year on year, Christian people throughout the world celebrate the good news of Jesus’s resurrection. It is an awesome mystery as well as conviction that we should share and show others of the wonder and love of God made real in Christ. The disciples and successive generations of Christians after them have responded to Christ’s own command to go out and show the love of God.
This mission is no narrowly “spiritual message”. Rather it is a message about God’s continuing work in His world: to heal, to reconcile, to restore. It is a challenge to us in the Church that we should be out in God’s world showing His love, His truth, His justice and His righteousness.
This is a beacon of light and hope in times of darkness and despair. It is for those communities torn apart by strife and war. It for those neighbours who live with grief and anguish. It is for those who wait for test results. It is for those who worry about our younger generation.
We live in a complex and fragile world. Looking back over the events of the past year or so lead us to ask all kinds of questions. There are questions about the world scene, how that what happens in one place affects us all. Questions about priorities in our own land and the risks to civic life; questions about dangers to ourselves and our families.
I think we should do well to stay with some of these questions which in one form or another are as old as humanity itself, yet questions which are inescapable in every age for they are part of the fragility, frailty and finiteness and our humanness, in the context of God’s order and creation.
The religion that we celebrate is no escape or fantasy. Far from shirking such questions, it faces them head on and always tries to set them in a larger and wider context. It transforms them and us into the context of the overarching purposes of God from beginning to end: His purposes of creation, redemption and salvation. Here in Christ who is risen is the touchstone of light in darkness, of hope in despair, of triumph in tragedy. Here is the truth that the God who in Jesus Christ has entered our deepest darkness is the one who also gives us hope for ourselves and our world, who leads us into the light, into the bright beams of His endless day.
Happy Easter. Look upwards and forwards. May you know the love and peace of Christ.
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The Revd Canon Professor James Woodward is Principal of Sarum College
On July 1st, James is leading a half-day online session on assisted dying, details via the link below.
Exploring the Assisted Dying Debate course
This article appeared in the Footnotes column of the Salisbury Journal.
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