Weekly Reflection – The Point of Our Faith

It is a great joy to me that Easter feels so very different from Christmas, especially with the glorious sunshine of the last few days. The rest of the world might prefer Christmas with its tinsel-y lights and mulled wine and mince pies. But we who follow Jesus know the truth – it is Easter that is the beating heart of our faith.

It is because of Easter that we have a faith at all. Yes it is important that Jesus was born, that God became human. I get a good deal of glee out of reminding people, especially school kids, how God became a baby who burped and squealed and cried. Just before I remind them that Jesus wasn’t born on Christmas Day, there was no stable, and the three kings were neither kings nor wise nor were they three.

But that isn’t the core of the faith we inherited from the first followers of Jesus. They were not prepared to suffer social ostracism and the scorn of family and friends for the sake of a baby. Or for a son of God. Sons of gods were really dime a dozen in the ancient world. Nor was it all that important that Jesus had died for them. To be killed by the Romans happened rather frequently.

What the earliest Christians staked not only their social standing but often their very lives on was that Jesus had been resurrected. The point of our faith, and the point of Easter, is not primarily the cross, as far as I can tell. The point of Easter is that Jesus was raised to a whole new kind of life, a kind of life that is utterly different from the life we know now. And the promise for us is that as Jesus died our death with us, so we will be raised to his new life with him. Now that I find worth celebrating!

Canon Erik