What a year! With Easter falling close to ANZAC day you can take three days annual leave and get 10 days off. I suspect many workplaces will be quiet in the week after the Easter long-weekend.
So why would you bother going to an Easter church service or even giving “the reason for the Easter season” a second thought during a holiday period?
I’d like to propose a reason: Everyone knows something is broken but no-one knows how to fix it. That was the title of a recent great article by Chris Uhlmann in the Sydney Morning Herald. The climate, the banks and even the church are all broken (we could add the attacks in Christchurch as further evidence).
So where do we look for answers? It’s a big question.
Uhlmann suggests;
“the starting point is trying to find the list of things we all agree on, if that is still possible. Things like parliamentary democracy, the rule of secular law and equality of opportunity for all.”
Those things are good. But I wonder if we need to start one step back – working out why things are broken in the first place?
The answer Jesus gives is that we are broken.
It might be strange to consider what Jesus says, after all, isn’t he part of the church that let us down? What with the conviction of Cardinal Pell and outcomes of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse. But, here’s the thing: when you read Jesus’ teaching, he reserves his most stinging rebukes for the religious leaders.
The reason the climate, the banks, political systems and the church are broken - is that humans are broken.
So how do you fix humans?
There’s no simple answer to that, not even from Jesus.
What you find is that it starts not with what you do to fix things but with what Jesus has done for you. And what has Jesus done? It all centres around his death by crucifixion on what we now call Good Friday. It’s good because it’s the beginning of Jesus making all things new. His death (and resurrection on Easter Sunday) is how to fix all of the brokenness that is so obvious to everyone.
All of this takes some unpacking to get your head around. One way to do that is to get along to somewhere that is going to explain it over Easter weekend, or have a look at the life of Jesus for yourself.
