A good number of years ago, I was involved in a Good Friday march of witness type event. The event culminated in a service in the centre of town at what used to be the bandstand. Most of the churches turned out for the event. High and low, charismatic and conservative evangelical could all be found gathering for a united witness to the Good Friday shoppers.
The service at the bandstand took the format most church services take. On one occasion the speaker made reference to the resurrection as well as the events of Good Friday. Some of the churches represented took exception to this – you can’t talk about the events of Easter Sunday on Good Friday! We’re not there yet!
I think as pastors we live with what you might call a “Good Friday / Easter Sunday tension” in more aspects of our ministry than we realise or of which we are always conscious. I hesitate to use that kind of terminology outside of the work of Christ when He laid down His life on the cross and rose again from the dead. There is something that is specific and exclusive to Christ’s work that makes one reticent to be quick in applying it as any kind of exemplary act or as a metaphor of the struggles and triumphs of ministry.
However, given that the apostle Paul used the Easter events quite unashamedly to describe his own spiritual pilgrimage (e.g., Philippians 3.10-11) and to express aspects of his ministry (e.g., Colossians 1.24), it is not inappropriate to consider life and ministry through the lens of the events of the first Easter.
Of course, we will never experience anything like the inordinate pressure that Christ experienced in Gethsemane. Or the pain of rejection experienced at the hands of the mob and the religious and political authorities. Nor the physical pain and spiritual agony as He hung on the cross, bearing the sins of the world. But we do experience pain in ministry.
We all do or will bear the scars of spiritual conflict that sometimes works itself out in the cruel words and actions of those who oppose us. We know the pressure that ministry brings on us and our families. We know the challenge of keeping going and hoping that His strength really is made perfect in weakness.
And we know too the moments of breakthrough and divine turnaround. Times of healing, restoration and joy. Seasons of refreshing and renewed hope.
As I travel around, I have sensed something of that “Easter tension”.
On the one hand, the blessing of God is evident. At the same time, it must be said, we have seen trends and currents emerge in our culture that are cause for concern, as much for the future shape of society as for the church.
It is too tempting to resign ourselves to living in almost parallel worlds of divine expectation and cultural anxiety. I am not sure how that leaves us in the end. Neither anxious expectation nor expectant anxiety sound like good results to me!
There might be a better approach, one that is more in line with the events at the heart of our faith. Placing a Paul like “Easter grid” over this mixture of expectation and anxiety, we cannot fail to find a picture of hope emerging.
At perhaps His darkest moment on the cross, Jesus experienced the absence of God, summed up in His agonising cry of dereliction “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27.46; Mark 15.34). However we understand those words, they reveal a soul ploughed with the pain of greatest loss.
Yet the bleak furrows of dereliction became the fertile seedbed of glorious resurrection. God did not, in the words of the Psalmist suffer His Holy One to see decay (Psalm 16.10). He raised Him from the dead, the first fruits of a new humanity. And a sign too of hope for anyone facing the challenge of spaces and places that God seems to have abandoned.
I pray this Easter that you will not be daunted by what might appear to be places where God is not present. That you will resist the temptation to disconnect Good Friday from Easter Sunday. That you will have the Easter inspired faith and hope to dare to see the dereliction in the landscape around us as a doorway to the resurrection life of Christ.
Have a great Easter.
James & Beryl
James Glass 