Bishop’s Easter Message 2019
Some things that happen are so bad they are beyond comprehension.
The massacre in Christchurch is one of them.
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is another.
“This is not us. He is not us,” the New Zealand Prime Minister said of the evil they had witnessed in Christchurch. It’s not who they, or we would want to be.
Good Friday was also an unjust and bloody awful event, and we would want to distance ourselves from what happened there too. How could ‘they’ do that to Jesus?
But when we look at Jesus, the innocent victim being crucified, we are meant to see that ‘he is us’. He represents all the hurt, hate and evil that has ever been done to us, and everything hurtful and hateful that we have ever thought, said or done to others. He chose to represent and suffer for all of us in his own tortured body on the cross.
On Easter Day we are meant to see in the resurrected Jesus that ‘this is us’ too – alive, forgiven, living a new life together now, and one day forever where there is no more hatred, racism, evil or dying. The crucified and now living Jesus breathes hope into our hopelessness, peace into our divisiveness and life into our deaths. Love triumphs over hate. Suffering can have meaning. Evil doesn’t win in the end and death doesn’t have the last word.
Some things that happen are so bad they are beyond comprehension.
Some things that happen are so good they are beyond comprehension.
Easter is both.
