The Rector writes...
How the ways of God can brush away our most carefully laid plans
Easter Sunday. The most important day in the Christian calendar comes in the middle of the month.
One of the reports about the resurrection that tickles my imagination is that little picture in Matthew of the angel of the Lord coming to Our Lord's tomb, rolling the great stone aside that was intended to trap Jesus for all time, and sitting on it. It doesn't say that he sat there whistling and drumming his fingers on it, but it says everything!
It is a picture that encapsulates completely how the ways of God can brush away our most carefully laid plans. Herod's soldiers had thought that the fixing of the tomb would be a final end to Our Lord's intolerable probing questions. His rising on Easter day vindicated the process that states that there are no final solutions in this life about anything.
The only decisions we can make are provisional and will trigger another question requiring, in its turn, another decision.
But there is still a long way to go for the world. People are still locked into a mindset that says "Mine is the only answer and it will fix the problem."
We see it in Iraq - where factions are unwilling to commit to a staged advance. And we see it repeatedly in ordinary, everyday life, where families cannot move forward into better relationships or solve disputes because individuals are locked into that falsehood which says "I know what is right."
Knowing that everything is open-ended and needs continuous reassessment is the vital contribution Christ's Easter Resurrection makes to all our lives.