Easter day - a bit early!

“Yesterday was Friday but Sunday is coming!”
That, really, in essence, distils everything we believe, and all the promises made to us into just those five words.
“Yesterday was Friday but Sunday is coming!”
That could be said to be the whole Christian way and hope in just five words.
We live in a Friday world, but the promise is that Sunday is coming.
Well tomorrow IS that Sunday and couldn't happen without Friday.
We can't go from Thursday to Sunday without passing through Friday and Saturday.
It's that journey thing again – our faith seems to be one long journey! Jesus started his journey towards that total submission to the Fathers will, on Palm Sunday, an exact mirror and opposite procession to the one that the Roman governor Pilate was at that very moment in. Repressive conquering military Empire versus liberating pacifist Kingdom with it's message of freedom and salvation.

We have to go on that journey with him – in fact if we don't then we also reject him and become subsumed in the other world that is the Roman occupation – the world of oppression, of material slavery – of worshipping idols, not carved images like golden calves, which you remember that the Israelites made when Moses was up on Mt Sinai, but money, status, approbation of our peers.

We have to be first idolised by the crowd, then rejected, scourged, nailed to a cross with all our baggage, all our wounds in full view of a mocking public, the very ones who idolised us just a short while ago, and then finally to rise up into new life, the new life that is so different from our old selves, the selves that died on Friday with Christ and entered that rocky cave, the dark tomb where all our human fears abide. That dark hole in the rock where our most dreaded dreams are met is the very lowest of the low, the ebb of our emotions and feelings.

But then after Saturday, as the dawn breaks on that first day of the rest of our lives, the extraordinary wonder, the release, the excitement, the realisation that we have passed through the fire and not been burned, the waters haven't engulfed us, the dread darkness has NOT won, the tearing of the veil has allowed us to see, even if only for an instant, that light for which we are destined for and which we were made for, from the beginning of creation.

So although we live in a Good Friday world, with all its woes, the wars, the persecutions, the earthquakes, the diseases, the famines, AIDS, child and adult slavery, all the nasty things both human made and occurring naturally, we have this wonderful promise of the Sunday world, the new beginning, the new life that Jesus shows us.

And it's not just new life on earth that we have been given, but also the direct promise of Jesus himself that we shall see him in the face where he is gone.

No-one else in the whole history of the human race has given us that promise.

Friday was yesterday – Tomorrow IS Sunday – Easter Sunday. We are lucky. We are fortunate. The first disciples had no idea, no understanding of what Easter Sunday meant. They certainly knew what had happened, but it was a while before they knew what it MEANT.
Let us rejoice in the certain knowledge that we now have, that the resurrection is not just Jesus’ resurrection, it’s also OUR resurrection – the chance to start again.

May the joy and peace of the glorious
resurrection be with us all for ever. Amen.