Easter Hope

Our feature also includes artworks from the 2022 Stations of the Cross, an annual art exhibition co-hosted by Northmead Uniting Church and Northmead Creative and Performing Arts High School, with thanks to Rev. Dr Doug Purnell for granting permission for their use in the following pages.

At Easter, with Christians across the globe and with Christians throughout the centuries before us, we celebrate that when the man Jesus of Nazareth lay dead in a tomb near Jerusalem, God chose to share God’s own life with him in order that he be raised from the dead. In the mystery of that astonishing event, life became promising for each one of us. We may say with Peter, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope though the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!”

Yet notwithstanding that confident hope, we are wise to proceed humbly when speaking of the resurrection. And we are in good company if we do so because surprisingly little is attempted even in the New Testament by way of an explanation for the resurrection. We have appearance stories. Testimony also enters the record about an empty tomb. Yet it lends integrity to these limited accounts that there has been no attempt to describe or ‘make up’ what happened between God and Jesus in that tomb.

One thing not to be missed in the biblical record is that the resurrection is God’s doing. It is especially Peter (preaching at Acts 10:34-43) who declares that it was God who was proclaiming the message of peace through Jesus Christ; God who anointed Jesus at his baptism; God who raised him on the third day; and God who ordained Jesus to be Lord of the living and the dead. The resurrection was the culmination, but not the end, of an extraordinary drama in which these two characters, God and Jesus, were so interwoven the early church began to confess that if you have seen the Son, then you have also seen the Father. It is a wonderfully straightforward expression of the central conviction of the Christian Church: Jesus’s work is God’s work; Jesus’ life is God’s life.

Yet it’s not true to speak of only ‘two characters.’ There is a way of understanding the resurrection that arose before Paul wrote his letters (beginning in the early 50s) and which he incorporates into his own thinking. It is located at the start of Romans. The tradition is this: that Christ’s resurrection from the dead was an activity of the “spirit of holiness” (Romans 1:4).

Pre-dating Paul, this is a very early attempt indeed to grasp what lay behind the mystery of the resurrection. The Spirit, which the Hebrew scriptures refer to as ‘breath’, ‘wind’, ‘storm’, and the ‘power of creation’, is the quake of energy that brought Jesus from death to life. According to this early understanding, God the Spirit is the power of resurrection life.

And if speaking of the Spirit as the power of resurrection life isn’t interesting enough, also intriguing is the fact that the New Testament speaks of the same Spirit as creating the church, as a counsellor, guide, and inspiration to believers, and the instinct that leads into truth.