Vicar's Letter
March 2013
Lent through to Easter
"Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me". These powerful words were spoken by Jesus to his disciples, his friends, as they were eating together and they replied one after the other, "Surely not I, Lord?"
Judas betrayed Christ to the Romans. Spies down the ages have similarly betrayed their fellow countrymen, a just cause or a confidence. How many of us have failed to keep a secret or unintentionally, in the way in which we have responded betrayed our contempt for an idea? I wonder too how many men, women or children are betrayed or let down by those they know, not only in the conflict ridden areas of the world, but here in our communities.
This is really cheerful, I hear you say! Why's she not writing about chocolate eggs, spring flowers and Easter bonnets? We've had a long, dark, cold winter surely we are due some light and joy.
Absolutely, but Lent is a good time for reflecting, for praying, for thinking about betrayal, the dark side of life and then considering ways of making changes in our lives. Change does not necessarily mean whole scale and demanding, sometimes it's just remembering to say thank you for the small things that make a difference.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a C20 theologian, executed for participating in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler wrote, Easter is not a battle between darkness and light that ultimately must end in the victory of light���. Rather it is a battle of guilty humanity against divine love or better: of divine love against guilty humanity, a battle in which God seems to be defeated on Good Friday, but in which God, in his very losing, wins on Easter Sunday����Good Friday is not the darkness that has to yield to light��it is the day on which the God who became human, the love that became a person, is killed by the people who want to be gods.
So what of Easter? Easter is puzzling. Nobody expected it to happen, not the women who went to the tomb or the disciples. Easter does not fit neatly or easily into our world views. The women who went to the tomb, the disciples, Peter were all confused, perplexed. Bonhoeffer says, Easter is not about immortality but a transcendent event that is something above and beyond the world.
Tom Wright says, Easter is about the new creation beginning at last, once death has done the worst that it can do.
What do you think? Enjoy the chocolate.
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About the Vicar's Letter
The Vicar's Letter has been appearing in the villages Focus magazine since August 2002.
The Rev. Peter Graham also used to publish The Vicar's Letter in the parish magazine of 1964. Please see the Vicar's Letter area for these.
