Don't Settle for a Chocolate Egg
Dear Friends,
This month we celebrate Easter. The feast of the Resurrection. A celebration of life. One of this country’s best-known hymns reflects on the first Easter morning:
Morning has broken. Like the first morning. Blackbird has spoken. Like the first bird […] Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven. Like the first dewfall on the first grass. Praise for the sweetness of the wet gar-den. Sprung in completeness where his feet pass.
The garden is the garden where Jesus’ tomb was located. The feet are the feet of the risen Christ.
In that same garden on that same morning, a woman stands mourning by the empty grave. It is Mary Magdalene who, days before Jesus’ death, had knelt at his feet extravagantly anointing them with expen-sive perfume. The costly imported nard had dripped off his feet. Imme-diately she had been criticised by Jesus disciples: Such a waste of re-sources – a year’s worth of wages! But Jesus had defended her. Love is never ever wasted.
Now she spots a man. Now she turns to him. But with her tear-filled eyes, she doesn’t recognise Jesus. Not even when he asks her: ‘Why are you crying?’ She thinks he is the gardener and begs him to tell her the truth about the missing body. He responds with a single word: ‘Mary’. Mine is the sunlight. Mine is the morning. Born of the one light Eden saw play.
To be mourning. To be heart-broken. And then to be called by name. To be smiled at by God. To be drawn out of darkness, and into the tan-gible reality of God's recreation of the new day. That’s what Easter is about. Don’t settle for a chocolate egg.
Love and prayers
