Russell’s Easter Newsletter
April 2021
Dear Friends,
A new day is dawning – thank God – even though this is the second Easter in a row we are having to celebrate in ‘lockdown’, unable to sing our Easter ‘Alleluias’ in church together. However, as we reflected last year, a lockdown Easter gives us an opportunity to identify a little more closely with the doubts and fears felt by the first disciples, and with their experience of resurrection depicted in the Gospels.
Like the disciples, we are marking Easter behind locked doors for fear of the potential danger posed by threats outside. As for them, so for us, so many of the everyday interactions, which we too easily took for
granted, are currently denied us, and the mundane but reliable routines of work and school, worship and meetings, appointments and activities, shopping and socialising are disrupted or unavailable. For the disciples, contact with the people outside carries the risk of injury or even death by mob violence; for us, such contact may lead to severe or even fatal illness.
Many of us have had to cancel plans and projects, or at the very least put them on hold. Eagerly awaited parties and holidays, matches and performances have been postponed at best, abandoned at worst. We may justifiably feel disappointed, depressed, devastated; and these emotions are pretty much what the disciples were feeling, too. We should not feel guilty about them.
But Easter comes anyway…
We can’t cancel it or put it on hold. We can’t postpone it or ask for a refund. There it is, fixed in our calendar: 4 April 2021. Like it or not, whether we were in the mood for it or not, Easter comes anyway.
Just like Jesus…
We may be locked in our homes for fear of a virus outside, but that doesn’t stop the risen Jesus from coming among us. We may find it hard to believe that he’s with us, especially in times like these; but so
did the disciples.
This year, unlike last year, we can know that a new day is dawning through the rollout of a vaccine that will save lives and protect us as we venture into the ‘new normal’. There can be no more powerful sign of resurrection hope than a sticker which says: ‘I’ve had my vaccine!’.
A new day is dawning. Thank God.
With love and prayers, Russell
Posted – 1 April 2021
