Easter 2020

My dear friends,

The Easter story has a special resonance for those of us in St John. The Order of St John has its historical origins in the holy city Jerusalem. For Christians, the most sacred place in Jerusalem is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which contains the place where Jesus was crucified on Good Friday and the tomb from which he rose from the dead three days later in the Resurrection on Easter Day.

From about the fourth century AD Christian pilgrims began making their way to Jerusalem, and quite a few of them became ill on the journey or when they arrived. Next to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre there was a Benedictine monastery, and the monks found themselves nursing sick pilgrims in their infirmary. Nearly a thousand years ago a group of the monks led by Blessed Gerard committed themselves to spend their lives caring for the sick. They met to pray in a small chapel dedicated to St John the Baptist, and they adopted St John as their patron. From this beginning developed the Order of St John and we continue the work of caring for the sick today.

This has been a rather funny Holy Week and Easter. We have not been able to have our usual services in church because of the Coronavirus pandemic. I have kept Holy Week with some very simple services in my chapel in the vicarage and I have prayed for you and your vital work at this time. Perhaps because everything has necessarily been different and much simplified, we have focused afresh on the true meaning of the Easter story and the triumph of God’s love in Christ’s resurrection. In years to come, we may look back at Easter 2020 and realise it was a very precious time for us.

Thank you for all you are doing to care for the sick at this challenging time. Do please be assured of my prayers. May I wish you and your families a very happy and blessed Easter 2020.
With kindest regards,
                                                                             The Rev. Dr  ROBERT BEAKEN, County Chaplain
EASTER DAY – 12th APRIL 2020.
Some years ago, a party of infant school children visited a church of which I was the vicar. I showed them around, and tried to explain some of the things we have in a church, and to answer their questions. At one point I asked the class, “Does anyone know why we have Easter eggs at Easter?” Of course, I was hoping that someone would say something about Jesus and the Easter story.
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            Several hands went up, but my attention was drawn to one little boy with brown hair and tiny glasses, who jumped up and down in his seat, vigorously waved his hand in the air, and made noises like a puppy. “Yes,” I said to him, “why do we have Easter eggs at Easter?” He paused, delighted to have been chosen to answer, and then answered with great seriousness, “We have eggs at Easter because of the Easter Bunny.”

            ‘Dig yourself out of that one, Beaken,’ I thought to myself. I didn’t want to hurt the poor little chap’s feelings, and so I resorted to that great euphemism beloved of grown-ups: “Well, sort-of,” I replied.

            The idea of having special eggs at Easter is not found in the Bible. It originated a few centuries later in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, where Christians would decorate eggs at Easter by painting them blood red, and would then present them to each other. The idea spread. Today in the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church, elaborately painted eggs are very commonly exchanged at Easter – I’ve got a couple in the vicarage – and, of course, the brightly jewelled and enamelled Easter eggs made for the Tsar and the Russian Imperial Family by Fabergé are very well known to us. In the west, some bright spark of a confectioner invented chocolate Easter eggs about a century ago; and the rest, as they say, is history.

            The colour, blood red, on the very first Easter eggs symbolized Good Friday, when Jesus shed his blood for us at his crucifixion. The egg itself symbolized new life. These early Christians from Mesopotamia were mostly country folk, who worked in agriculture. They were familiar with eggs hatching and little baby birds emerging. It struck them that Easter was a little bit like that.
On the evening of Good Friday, things – on the surface at least – could not have seemed worse to Jesus’ disciples. Their Lord, Jesus Christ the Son of God, had been betrayed by one of his followers for thirty pieces of silver. Jesus had been beaten, humiliated, and finally barbarously executed by Crucifixion. Through the kindness of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, his dead body was given a hurried burial in a borrowed tomb. And that, thought the disciples and the Jewish authorities, was that.

            The disciples had forgotten all the times when Jesus taught that he would rise from the dead. We heard one example at Mattins yesterday:
 
Jesus answered the Jews in the Temple: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he spoke of the temple of his body. When, therefore, he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken.                (St John 2: 19-22)
 
Three days later, just as he promised, Jesus rose from the dead in the Resurrection. The power of evil had done its worst, and the love of God had proved greater still. Jesus, the Son of God, offered his life to God the Father, in sacrifice to take away our sins and to open to us the way to eternal life and the joys of Heaven. On Easter Day, to show that He had accepted that sacrifice, God the Father raised His Son Jesus from the dead in the Resurrection.

            The little baby bird emerges from the egg, blinking, trying to get used to its new surroundings. In one sense, we might say, it has already sort-of lived inside the egg. But its time inside the egg has been preparing it for this moment, and for the much greater life it experiences outside once it has been hatched.

            I suppose we might say something very similar about our life on earth. It is preparing us for the much greater life of Heaven.

            I sometimes reflect that one of the wonderful things about Christianity is that it doesn’t matter if you are a very clever professor at Cambridge, or an illiterate shepherd in the Andes: God loves you both, exactly the same. Jesus died and rose for you both. And he offers the same eternal life, the same Resurrection, to both of you. All we have to do, for our part, is to love him and trust in him.

            I’m sorry if I have disappointed small fans of the Easter Bunny. He appears largely to have been invented by the Brothers Grimm in their fairy stories. But do please enjoy your Easter eggs, and remember their true meaning: new life, for Jesus, and for you and me, because of the Resurrection.

May I wish you all a very happy Easter.