“… we ask You graciously to look down on this Your family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed and given up into the hands of sinful men...” Good Friday Collect.
In these momentous times we are having daily dealings with thousands upon thousands of refugees fleeing evil and repressive regimes or suffering the mental and physical carnage caused by bitter and unrelenting warfare, not just in Ukraine and Afghanistan, but in Hong Kong, Sub-Saharan Africa, Myanmar and too many other places to mention. At this Easter season this huge catalogue of human catastrophe drives us once again to ask what is the focus of our Christian Faith and why we have a sure and certain hope of eternal life in a completely new universe of utter perfection in company with our Blessed Lord, His saints and the hosts of heaven.
Our entire Faith revolves around the happenings of Good Friday and Easter Day. Every one of us is estranged from God because of our sins – some of them major, some of them minor – but all of them sins nonetheless. God cannot live with sin. It would wreck the peace and joy of heaven and it has already happened once before when the devil thought he could rule the roost. It will never happen again.
Thus the evil one continues his malevolent campaign here on earth, where sadly, he has a ready audience. Jesus voluntarily gave up the honours and joys of heaven and was Himself content to become a mere human being just like us, so that He could conquer sin as a human being on behalf of all other human beings.
On Good Friday outside the city of Jerusalem on the hill called Calvary, wearing the crown of thorns, He stretched out His divine hands nailed to the cross and shed his divine life blood so that it could wash away our sins, and the filthy rags of our misdeeds and miscalculations could be replaced by the spotlessly clean robe of His righteousness – that of the only perfect human being who ever lived. What an amazing swap! His good for our bad, His hope for our despair and His future for our past. This is the Gospel and there is no other.
If the Church of God stuck to the Lord’s final instructions to His disciples and proclaimed this Gospel to every creature – its core message – people would inevitably be touched by the Holy Spirit and seek eternal life in this world and the next. We are not helped by a great number of bishops who do not believe this message or do not understand the implications of it. No amount of creating mission areas, tinkering with liturgy, making semi-political utterances or surrendering to the demands of a rebellious and godless world will ever do the Church any good. The pews will continue to be empty, the collections will still be be merely small change and the Body of Christ will carry on shooting itself in the foot and converting nobody.
Easter Day proves that Jesus has completed the task he came on earth to achieve. He carried the sin of the whole world on His innocent shoulders and it died with him on the cross. And by dying, he also broke the final human curse of death. The empty tomb is God the Father’s seal of approval. We now await the coming of God the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to give us all the power to be the risen Saviour’s witnesses anywhere and everywhere in this sad, broken and evil world.
