This is church. It is imperfect. It does not capture the attention of those whose demand is to be entertained.
On Good Friday a sick little girl called Bek went into surgery. She was gaunt and yellow, and her long wait for a liver transplant seemed destined to end in a slow demise. But someone else died, and Bek – whom I have never met, but who goes to my sons’ school – was given the opportunity to live again.
These are the themes of life. Birth, struggle, death and life-beyond-life. The themes are universal, and they are captured within every religious tradition. Today we celebrate an event in history that we call Resurrection. Despite the beliefs of many fundamentalists, this event was never called Resuscitation – it was always more than about a person coming back to life. Whatever mysterious historical event inspired this celebration, its message is one of hope beyond hopelessness.
I’ll never forget the first time we travelled through the Black Spur to Marysville after Black Saturday 2009. It was Good Friday – months after the fires, but still long before the devastated ruins from the fires were finally cleared. The entire landscape was a blackened, charred ruin. Yet even in the midst of this devastation, bursts of bright green fronds emanated from the charred black stumps of tree-ferns. Death and life. Life and death. Hope that lies beyond hopelessness.
These are the themes of Easter. They are themes that lie at the core of what it means to exist. Yet they point to the age-old idea that our existence belongs to a deeper sense of existence itself.
And so we gathered with a small, elderly group of faithful folk in an insignificant valley of an insignificant country. Later we were to venture to a stunning natural feature appropriately known as Paradise Falls. But, for then, it was enough to acknowledge by our presence the proclamation of a young Jewish man who was executed at 33, but whose death was the start of something new that changed the course of human history.
