The Message of Easter

https://vimeo.com/1179438893

Hello, I’m Brendan Corr, Principal of Australian Christian College Marsden Park hoping I can share with you for a few minutes some thoughts about the importance and the meaning of Easter.

As a Christian School, Easter is of particular, even of precious, significance.

Even more so than Christmas, which marks the incarnation of the eternal God the Son in human form, Easter, which marks the sacred sacrifice of the Son of God in ransom for all those who would believe and place their trust in that provision, is the key note and high point of the Christian faith.

It is a staggeringly stark message; confronting all our natural inclinations and inherent expectations.

Christ crucified.

The raw, bloody, physicality of the Passion of Christ firmly stakes the claim of Christianity to being more than simply a promise of a divine encounter or of a transcendent experience.

Christ risen.

The mystery and the majesty of supernatural resurrection defies explanation and even reason and just as clearly marks Christianity as being more than simply an enduring moral tradition or a respected code of ethical principles that can be argued and advanced.

The two connected and complimentary events that combine in the Easter message hold equally in fullness and in tension both of these claims and resist all attempts at reduction to either alone.

Christianity is not just a religion of the mystical experience - an avenue to find God and connect with the divine.

It is neither just an alternative philosophy - an option in the smorgasbord of worldviews and perspectives.

It is actually something quite different.

A Christian School such as the one of which I am a part can easily be thought of in these binary categories, by outsiders and by insiders; by staff and by families. Families who value faith itself can value Christianity because it affirms the spiritual elements of life. Families who prioritise values and morality can value Christianity because it proposes clear principles for justice and set out cause and effect for success.

But the reality is that Christianity is something different to either alone - it simultaneously includes both and challenges both of these views.

It was the early church father Tertullian who is credited with first asking “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem” as a way of recognising the universal tension between faith and philosophy, religion and reason.

This is exactly the issue that the Apostle Paul was addressing in his first letter to the Corinthians. In that epistle, Paul contrasts the expectations of the Jews, devoutly religious people who he says were seeking a supernatural sign, with those of the Greeks, a philosophically oriented society who sought rationality, reasoning, and wisdom.

In challenging response to both, Paul says of his own ministry that he preached “Christ crucified” - a stumbling block to the religious Jews and foolishness to the intellectual Greeks.

It might be tempting to relegate this message of the Apostle to history, to dismiss it as addressing issues of a bygone era. Or alternatively to consider it an artefact of geographic divide relevant only to the context of a localised cultural clash.

But either would not be right because neither is the case at all.

The comments by Paul are as relevant and as challenging in our context today as they were 2000 years ago.

Those obstacles to understanding the full meaning and power of Christianity attributed specifically by Paul to the Jews and Greeks - religious hearts seeking a supernatural sign and intellectual minds seeking rational wisdom - remain the chief obstacles for people today.

Religious devotion of all kinds and people who seek to know truth via experience can still mean that the need to believe God more than to feel God becomes a stumbling block.

Intellectualised conceptualised ideologies, even those rooted in or expressing Christian doctrine, can dismiss the profound simplicity of the gospel of grace.

And Paul’s provocative answer of “preaching Christ crucified” remains the necessary counterpoint.

This is the enduring import and the impact of Easter. Beyond being a cultural celebration, beyond being a valued tradition, it still points to the Cross and the empty tomb and still challenges our expectations and assumptions.

If you allow it, the Easter messages of Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday will ground your faith in the naturalness of your human experience of life and will explode your concepts of what is true and good and beautiful.

My deep and earnest prayer as you engage in Easter celebrations in whatever way you do, that you encounter its central message of Christ crucified in the weakness of His flesh and then raised in power and majesty and that the truth of the message.

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If your family is not already connected to a local church, we encourage you to take a look at the this list of local church Easter services being held across the Easter weekend.