Christianity is realistic about the way things are. Life brings us many joys, but also many sorrows. Joys can be exhilarating, empowering, transformative. Sorrows can be dark, deep and destructive. A friend of mine, now long since departed this life, experienced many terrible things in her life. Born in Eastern Europe before the first world war, she was away from home the night Stalin’s soldiers rounded up her parents and took them to the Gulag. She never saw her father again. He was shot because he would not give up his faith. She moved to Poland and was a young married woman when German troops invaded. The family had to evacuate their house. Someone left a note for the soldiers: “Please water the plants”.
After appalling journeys during which she carried her infant child in her arms and was often told that he was dead, although she was sure that he still lived, she found herself in terrible conditions in a prisoner-of-war camp. She became a believer there. She said to herself: “There must be more than this!” In her innermost being she knew that the horrors around her did not represent the last word on reality.
For Christians the ultimate reality is God. We don’t believe that God is an abstract idea, but a person – in fact a union of three persons united in the ultimate joy of loving each other. This joyful love spills out beyond itself. (Theologians say that it is ecstatic – meaning that it bursts out beyond itself.) It spilt out in the act of creating the universe and everything in it, which includes you and me. We believe that God wants to share this joyful, ecstatic love with us, and will go to any lengths to do that.
Any lengths? Really? To what lengths can God go to share his love with us? When you love someone, the worst thing that can happen is for the relationship to be broken – to feel in the depths of your being that the person’s love is not there anymore. The God who is a union of three persons in love accepted that one of them would come on a mission to us to the unimaginable point where one would cry to the other: “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?”
The Cross was the moment when God reached down into the depths of human suffering in order to be with us in it. The Cross tells us that there is absolutely nothing that God will not do to be with us. The Cross tells us that in the fiery furnace of our lives, God walks with us. The Cross tells us that darkness and evil are not ignored by God and that ultimately “there is more than this”. God’s love is greater than evil. It is stronger than death.
From the first century up to the present day, although no strangers to suffering, Christians have been characterised by a great joy, the joy of Easter. They know in their guts, in the depths of their hearts, that God will do anything, absolutely anything, to share his love with us and that this love is stronger than death.
Happy Easter! Christ is Risen! Alleluia!
Mother Sarah
PS... The friend mentioned above ended her days in a flat in Bath. Many people visited her and often would pour out their troubles. Most would leave her consoled, encouraged, touched by her wisdom and her faith.
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