Sunday 4 April 2010

Christ is risen!


We've had a wonderful Holy Week and Easter Day at St. Cuthbert's. Thanks to so many whose hard work and skill has made it all possible. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of the church which has been beautifully decorated. This is part of the Homily - and you can find the whole thing here (if the page looks empty, scroll down and the text should appear).

... Easter faith is a faith which goes deep down. To declare ‘Christ is risen’ is not just to be bold, brash and optimistic. It is faith which wrestles with the harsh realities of life, faith which grows from the experience even of the cold touch of death. Before Easter Day, there is Good Friday. Before the Resurrection, there is the Passion and Death of Christ upon the Cross. And Easter Day itself begins only as the darkness begins to recede - at early dawn, St. Luke tells us. That’s when the women who had seen Jesus buried now return to visit his tomb. They come with spices to do for his lifeless body what they had not been able to do at his burial as the Sabbath approached. They come to find a grave which they know to have been sealed with a stone, its coldness guarding a corpse from which life has been extinguished. And they find... nothing. They find the stone rolled away from the tomb - and no body… only men who tell them, “he is not here, he has risen.”

It has to be said that this is not a clincher in terms of evidence for the Resurrection. There could be a number of reasons why the body has gone...