Reflection for Easter 2025
By the Rev’d. Allison K. Dean
You can listen to this reflection here.
You can find the Holy Week message here.
You can find the Holy Saturday reflection here.
Up from the grave he arose, with a mighty power o’er his foes. He arose a victor from the dark domain, and he lives forever with his saints to reign. He arose! He arose! Hallelujah, Christ arose!
After a long Lent, and a long Holy Week, where we have traced Jesus’ footsteps through Passion and Crucifixion, we can shout, “Hallelujah, Christ arose!”
We celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ from the dead. Those who opposed him and plotted against him thought that they’d won. The troublemaker, the disrupter, the threat to their established order, had been killed and buried. What could be more final than that?
To be sure, those first disciples thought that that bloody and horrific death on the cross was final too. Jesus was crucified on the eve of the sabbath, meaning that there was no time to observe death and burial rituals, since no work of any kind could be done on the sabbath. That’s why the women went to the tomb on the morning of the first day to anoint Jesus’ dead body. I imagine that if they’d had even the slightest idea that he wouldn’t be there they would not have bothered.
Everyone – his enemies and his followers – believed that Jesus was dead.
In the desert Satan had tempted Jesus, trying to pull him away from God, trying to distract him from his God-given purpose. Jesus resisted that temptation, but as he hung there on the cross, it looked as if Satan had won the battle anyway. For a time, it looked as if evil had won. It looked as if the wickedness in the hearts of mankind had had the last laugh.
But “Hallelujah, Christ arose!”
And by his resurrection, hope is restored. Hope that all is not lost; hope that there are better days to come; hope that the darkness of our life in which we feel trapped will be dispelled by the light of Christ. Hope that though we suffer now, it will not last always. Hope that the evil in the world does not have the final say. Hope that though we may weep now, joy will come.
Hope, in the true biblical sense, is strong and fervent belief that the thing longed for and desired will happen because God has declared and decreed it. To have hope is to expect the will of the Lord to be accomplished in our life, in the Church, and in the world.
In the suffering and death of Jesus we learnt that God is with us. He is with us in our pain. With us in our grief and sorrow. With us in our distress. In the resurrection we find that God is with us still. But now, he doesn’t only walk the road that we walk, he doesn’t only endure what we endure. Now, he has overcome all of life’s troubles and trials, now he has beaten death itself, now he shows God’s power to save. And it is this on which we base our hope.
The hope that we have as Christians is built on an unshakeable foundation. For what does the hymn writer say? My hope is built on nothing less that Jesus’ blood and righteousness.
The disciples were able to hope because they remembered that the resurrection had been God’s plan all along. In John 2, when Jesus was driving the moneychangers and those selling animals out of the temple, he said to the Jews, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Nobody understood what he meant then. But we are told that “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”
In the face of persecution, intimidation, threats of being ostracized from their community, knowing that God’s will had been done in such a glorious and wonderful way, as it had been done in Jesus, gave the disciples confidence to go forward.
That is what hope – a firm belief in God and his power – does. It gives us confidence; it gives us endurance. Believing, as that old Sunday School song says, My God is so big, so strong, and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do. Paul, writing to the Romans, tells us that “… hope does not disappoint us.” He tells us that “Such hope is no fantasy because God’s love has flooded our hearts.” The love he has shown us in Jesus, he who died, and now is risen.
How often have we been so depressed that we could not see the future at all? How often have we suffered some injury or wrong and everything around us seemed to say that we’d never get any justice? How often have we felt lonely and isolated and felt that no one cared anything about us? How often have we cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Yet here we are at Easter time. We worship and praise the Lord, thank him for the gift of his Son, celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And in so doing to remind ourselves that because Jesus is alive, alive for evermore, that all will, all must, all shall be well.
On Good Friday we may have felt that all was lost, that evil had won, that suffering, and pain, and grief would always be our lot in life. But on this first day of the week, and every day after, we have hope, we have confidence, we have endurance, because “He arose. He arose. Hallelujah, Christ arose!”