Bishop’s Easter message 2022
“I no longer believe in your God”
16-year-old Katya wrote that in her diary after watching her mother die in the basement of their home in Ukraine, “three days before our evacuation.”
Her grief, like that of Mary in the garden on Easter morning, makes God hard to see.
Easter’s comfort is that in the lonely, helpless, lifeless, brutalised figure of Jesus dying on Good Friday, God meets us in the “basement” of life. Even he cried out “My God why have you forsaken me?” Jesus has been to the depths of the grave and promises to be with us in our depths today.
The third day, Easter Day, promises that the worst that can happen or be done to us isn’t the end. As painful as life can be, at the end of it all awaits a resurrection, just as it did for Jesus, and it is a resurrection to a life with no more grief, crying or pain, lived in perfect peace, forever.
The God of Easter longs to be the God Katya can’t see right now through her tears, the God who feels her pain, who longs to dry her tears, and to restore her joy in living.
