THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST

HAPPY Easter! our feast of the Resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
But what does “resurrection” mean?
If I were to ask you to define it, how would you?

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...early on Sunday morning the women went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. 2 They found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. 3 So they went in, but they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. Luke 24:1-4- The Resurrection

Part of what makes resurrection so hard to talk about
is that it is an experience that transcends all logic,
rationality and common sense.
Dead people don’t come out of tombs.

The gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection
tell us is that the women who come to the tomb
find it empty.

We cannot really know exactly what happened.
What we can say is that the early Christians
who experienced the risen Christ
were so transformed by it that their lives
completely changed.

“He is not here, he is risen.”
Christ’s experience of resurrection is not just his own;
it is ours too,
for resurrection is an invitation to new life.
But the difficult and painful thing is,
resurrection is preceded by death.

To know resurrection before your physical death,
something in you has to die.
Maybe it’s the death of the false security of your career
that crashes down around you in a downsizing.
Maybe it’s the loss of your physical health
that you had hoped would go on forever.
Maybe it’s the death of a dream or someone you hold dear.

To know resurrection,
you have to experience this death
and deal with the loneliness of failure and grief,
the humiliation of defeat,
the soul-shattering reality of all you cannot control.

You have to let go of any illusion that life
as you once knew it is possible.
And this isn’t something we want or wish for anyone,
because the initial cost is so high.

But on the other side of death,
Christ is there with an invitation and a promise:
There is a path to a new and different life.
Resurrection makes living possible again
by forging a path of life given by God
who is the author of Life itself.

Christ is alive, and he is inviting you to a resurrected life.
Language will always fail to capture what this means;
the experience of resurrection is so much more
than mere words.
But the experience is what makes joy, life, serenity
and peace possible in an anxious and uncertain world.

The Lord Be with You!

With Blessings
Rev Jenny