From the Chaplains
The Resurrection
An Ending, or a New Beginning? God’s love, forgiveness and healing for all.
How was the long weekend for you?
I hope you got to relish the glorious autumn weather and had some downtime with your family.
The Pymble staff were definitely ready for some downtime and a break! It’s been a very busy term.
I spent a lot of time in my garden on the Easter long weekend which is very much my happy place. Pulling weeds and tending plants is, for me, a meditative and reflective act – in fact sometimes it feels very close to praying. And sometimes I do pray for people and situations, as I dig around in the soil.
There’s nothing more satisfying than successfully pulling out a whole weed by its roots, or than seeing a new shoot that has pushed its way up towards the light since the last time you visited that patch of the garden.
The other thing that has been making me happy is that this term, unlike previous years, we have had the opportunity to celebrate, pray about and talk about the climax of the Christian Easter story – the Resurrection!
It has been many moons (literally) since we could teach and reflect with the students about the whole Easter story – Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, without the end of term holiday cutting the story off before its actual main point – the new hope and new beginning that is offered to all of us in the resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
In chapel this week, we looked at photos of Christians from all around the world celebrating and commemorating this momentous and sacred Easter event.
In Bermuda, and some places in Spain, people fly kites on Easter Sunday to celebrate and symbolise Christ’s resurrection, new life and hope for all people.
Billions of people around the world (Google says 2.4 billion) celebrated Easter by praying, fasting, singing praise to God, gathering together and, finally, feasting if indeed they had enough food to do so.
For billions of people, this Easter event is the absolute beating heart and centre of their spirituality. This event is why they try to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, as they move through the complex, confusing and potentially joyful experience that is human existence.
Not only are Christians trying to follow the teachings of Christ, but they are actually putting their faith in God because of the transformative love that we see given to us in the crucified and risen Christ, and allowing God to enter and transform, bit by bit, over a entire lifetime, their hearts and their lives.
The resurrection message of hope for all people is called the ‘gospel’. Which literally means ‘good news’.
It’s the good news, or announcement, of love, forgiveness and healing for all people.
In Chapel this week, we read together the story from John’s gospel about Mary Magdalene (Mary, from a place called Magdala) coming early in the soft morning light to Jesus’ tomb.
Observing the Jewish Shabbat (Sabbath) laws, she had waited until early Sunday morning until she could finally and tenderly clean and wash her dear friend’s dead body, according to proper Jewish burial rituals.
She was heartbroken. Jesus, whom she and the other disciples had believed was the One they had been waiting for, the Saviour, God’s chosen One … had died.
Not only had he died, but he had been cruelly killed on a Roman cross to be publicly mocked, shamed and spat upon.
Mary had no doubt experienced many endings, deaths and disappointments in her life – it had not been an easy life, and she was a poor woman with no husband, a prior reputation and no social power – but the death of Jesus was not an ending that she felt prepared for.
John’s version of the story tells us that, instead of a tomb sealed with a heavy stone and guarded by Roman soldiers, Mary found the stone rolled away, the tomb empty and an angel seated on the stone, who told her that Jesus was not here; “He is risen”.
Which is why Christians around the world greet one another on Resurrection Sunday with the words:
“Christ is risen!”
“He is risen, indeed!”
This, to me, is fascinating.
In a first century world, a fiercely patriarchal world, in which women could not participate in politics or public life much at all, in which a Jewish woman like Mary had no Roman citizenship but was still subject to Roman oppression, in a world in which a woman’s witness or testimony was not considered trustworthy or authoritative –
In this world, God entrusts the most important message of all to a woman.
A poor, seemingly powerless woman.
A nobody.
What this tells me, and this is what I see time and time again when I read about God’s work in the world in the Scriptures, especially as expressed through the life and the teachings of Jesus, is that the God’s plan of love, forgiveness and healing is for everyone.
God’s love, forgiveness and healing leaves out no one.
No exceptions.
The arms of the risen Christ reach out to embrace every one and everything – the whole of Creation.
The Living God is completely counter-cultural and radical when the message of the Resurrection is first entrusted to a first century woman.
And in the story, as Mary turns away in bewilderment, amazement and confusion from the angel and the empty tomb, she meets Jesus. The risen Christ. He speaks to her. It is not the end.
It’s a new start, a new beginning.
On the cross, Christ took with him stars, and sky, land and sea, river, sandstone ridge and gully, and every human being that was or will ever be.
The Resurrection means a new beginning and hope for everyone and all creation.
God can use all things for good. Even things that seem like dead ends and endings.
Even death.
As I told the students in Chapel this week, God has good things planned for each one of them and each one of us.
That’s what the Resurrection is about. And the Resurrection message actually relates to our whole lives. Not just our Easter long weekend.
It’s about fresh hope, a new start and new beginnings for the whole of our lives.
Blessings and peace.
Edwina O’Brien
Assistant College Chaplain