The Dean

Anyone who has visited the war graves of World War 1 battle fields cannot but be moved by the row upon row of crosses marking the graves of thousands upon thousands of mainly young men who were butchered by other young men who in their turn died in the most horrible circumstances. It is a truly mind-numbing experience. Tragically this is not a phenomenon of the past. Today it is not just young people but men of all ages, women and children, who are being butchered in the conflicts of this relatively new century. Iraq, Darfur, Kenya, Gaza, Jerusalem, Pakistan, to name but a few. Death can be a very depressing reality today as well as yesterday. The irony seems to be that as fast as we discover ways of

extending and enhancing human life us we seem to take it away in ever more horrible ways. How perverse can it be to be human?

Another irony is that as Christians our faith is based on the death of another young man in the prime of his life - Jesus! He was a young preacher from Nazareth, in his early thirties, dragged off into military custody, interrogated, tortured, falsely accused and executed. It was all part of the good politics of the day and all sides seemed to get satisfaction. We've heard it all before. The world doesn't change. How cruel can human beings be?

Such cruelty and destructiveness, past and present, ought to be enough to make pessimists of us all. It should make us give up in despair. But it doesn't.

You may remember a few years ago a photograph appeared in the world press of a little girl in bomb blasted Beirut carrying a shiny new brick out of the rubble of a street in order to start building again. Life is stronger than death. We refust to allow death to destroy us. We are going to live. That is what life is for - living. And that is why Jesus came in the first place - to give life, life in all its fullness.

On the first Easter morning the two disciples, Peter and John, were in the depths of misery and despair, saddened beyond words at the death of Jesus. Now they are to understand that his body has been taken away. So they run to see for themselves. Imagine how they felt. The slim hope they held on to was the half understood word of Jesus that he was the Son of God, whatever that meant. It would have been eminently reasonable and understandable for those disciples to opt for the rational explanation - that the body of Jesus had been snatched away. Jesus had died. The dream was over. Many are still vainly labouring to prove that theory.

If those first disciples had decided that, their eyes would have been closed to the reality of the risen Christ. Instead they took a leap of faith even before they had seen him. As they followed the way of faith they were rewarded with a reality of life that must have taken their breath away especially as they began to realize the implications of what had happened.

Faith can be a challenge for us all. It is not always ease and sad to say sometimes our religion gets in the way of our faith. Today we face the same choice the disciples faced: we can opt for a logical explanation and follow the way of death as too many seem to do. Or we can open our eyes, however tentatively, to see something of the reality that extends far beyond the material world. Life in God goes on and on. It is beyond our comprehension and there is no stopping it. Jesus is risen from the dead, and so are we! Easter challenges us to open the eye of our inner being and experience the wonder of life that lies behind the frail experience we too easily accept as the only way.

May you know the real blessing of Easter which is God's sublime gift of eternal life through Jesus.

Alan Hayday