Easter message 2023

This week, Christians around the world will mark Holy Week, and tell the stories that were first spoken and written by the earliest communities of Jesus believers. Our various traditions and rituals will move through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday and we will reflect on the suffering and courage, violence and peace, loss and hope that were very raw and very real for Jesus and his followers.

On Easter Sunday – we will celebrate the love and hope that God revealed in Jesus. It is a day we acknowledge a new power of love – God within us and around us, inviting us to live fully, love fully.

It is strange for me to be writing, and you to be reading, about Easter Sunday before we have marked Good Friday. Holy Week is our journey through the sacred, challenging, and life-giving moments that are central to what it means to be Christian. During the weeks of Lent leading up to this week, many will have engaged in a time of deep inner reflection, of spiritual practice, of connection to God, the Divine, the Mystery and Sacred.

And now, at Easter Sunday, we witness God’s love revealed to us through Jesus, the Christ, and we celebrate with joy-filled heart. We know this day, not as a magical moment that says ‘pain will be no longer.’ On this day, we embody pain, and hope, courage and life, and we receive again the grace of love that overcomes all fear. May you know yourself as loved and blessed, and live the words of the late John O’Donohue:

‘May you live this day compassionate of heart, clear in word, gracious in awareness, courageous in thought, and generous in love.’

Banner image: The Grotto – between Port Campbell and Peterborough (Great Ocean Road) Victoria.

A local Southern Hemisphere context for an Easter image. We build our lives – shaped by family, friends, land and community. During Lent we enter a time of deep reflection. The stillness of the water that allows for seeing what is beneath the surface, weather worn stone holding its own beauty. The shape of the rock, a thin ridge above to be navigated with care, almost tomb-like; and beyond, Easter Day, the expansive ocean, vision beyond measure, and the fullness of God’s love and creation.