Easter 2009

It's all doom and gloom at the moment, isn't it?

The Pope speaks about the terrible loss of life in Italy through the Earthquake.
The Archbishop of Canterbury speaks of the need to use the recession as a lesson in anti-materialism. The first item of News in Blighty is about the Labour Party Spin Doctor attempting to slur the Conservative Party leaders.

So what's different from this age from the time of the Resurrection?

It seems mainly to be the technology we use, and the breadth of our ability to communicate our ideas. We are certainly no more enlightened than those who have gone before us. Our political and economic situations don't hold up much hope for the future; the crumbling fabric of our society in a culture of "grab what you can" certainly doesn't fill us up with hope; and the militant atheists seek to drum up more support with their happy and uplifting slogan of "dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return" - it's such a comforting thought that will win many a person over(!)

And into this hot-pot of Pharisaism and Sadducaism, political unrest, hedonism, barbarity and sadness, one little man does something amazing - He rises from the dead. Not ostentatiously, no big bang that shakes Jerusalem and Rome to their very foundations, no rout of the foreign power, He just appears to those who love Him to show them that their faith is not misplaced.

And suddenly, we realise that life is worth living, even though depressions do assail us and that there is something more. Sure, we have nothing to show for it, nothing that will prove that our hope is well-placed, we just have that hope, and our faith and our love that will confound the philosophers and scientists and the cynics of this day and age, just as it always had confounded them in ages past. The problem is that Truth is bigger than the Human Mind and always will be. Only the Church possesses the fulness of Truth and even then I'm not convinced that she possesses it fully in any one particular instant of Time, but cumulatively the truth discovered in each age piling up upon that discovered previously.

But there is work to be done, for I do not believe that the Church is living out her hope as well she might, for many of her congregations are getting choked by the cares of this world. So what is it that we have to do? Pray! Yes, then what?