Kristus er opstanden - vi er opstandne!

In the cross of Jesus the love of God comes down to the very lowest part of our human need. As St Paul knew and taught the cross is of course a scandal and an offence.

It is a scandal and offence to devout Muslims today, for how can the God who is the merciful and compassionate Creator and Lord of all be crucified?

It was an offence to philosophical Greeks in Paul's day, for the God who is the transcendent reason of all things, the unmoved mover, can surely not be the one who suffered and died on the cross?

In the early centuries Christians were mocked for worshipping this crucified God, and it is not surprising that there have been many modifications of Christianity which have sought to blunt the truth of the cross.

But sentimental easy religion which does not engage with the sin of the world - the distorted desires, the idolatries of money, sex and power, and the awful consequences that flow from them in personal lives and in the world in which we live - is not a saving faith.

'Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.' The language is the language of sacrifice, a language strange and shaped by the very different world of Old Testament temple worship, which was yet a language which enabled the first Christians to see in the judicial murder of an innocent victim, the God who provided a lamb for the sacrifice, who transformed the radical evil of political and religious power which sends the innocent to their death, into the redeeming love which reaches down to transform the darkest of situations.

Abuse and torture, murder and ethnic cleansing, betrayal of family and friends - all of these which we know so clearly in our world, and which touch in various ways the particularity of our own lives, is the 'sin of the world' - and the cross of Jesus is planted at the heart of that sin, part of that world from which God seems absent.

And the cry of dereliction - 'My God, My God , why have you forsaken me?' - is the darkest point of all. God in Christ chose to know the reality of a world from which God is absent, and entered into the nothingness of death.

But were that all that is to be said life would be dark indeed. We would be in a world without hope and without God. But we are not there for the God who went down to the depths of hell, but rather the God who bears new life for you and for me from the grave.

Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, that great seventeenth-century preacher, writes of Easter: 'His resurrection was a second birth, Easter a second Christmas. He was born again in the womb of the grave'.

And at Easter, as St John tells us, the risen Christ breathes on his disciples the Holy Spirit, the breath of life of the new creation. For Luke in the Acts of the Apostles the Spirit is given at Pentecost, for John on Easter day.

At Easter, as Bishop Andrewes says, 'His Father is now become our Father, to make us joint-heirs with Him of His Heavenly Kingdom; His God likewise become our God to make us 'partakers ' with them both 'of the Divine nature.'

As one of our Easter hymns puts it: 'Christ is risen, we are risen', for in keeping Easter (which is what we do for the whole of our Christian lives) it is at the heart of it all 'Christ eastering in us.'

In that triumphant love we have true joy, a joy which as Jesus promised, no one can take from us.

Every blessing to you all this Easter and always.

The Right Reverend Geoffrey Rowell
Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe
Easter message 2006