Easter Message 2025

A children’s poem says:

“Up with the sunrise
Excitement in the air,
Easter, Easter
Is finally here.

Hot cross buns and Easter eggs
Put a smile on my face
Going to Church to give thanks
For God’s grace.”

Easter may cause excitement in a child who thinks of Easter eggs, jellybeans, hot cross buns, and a picnic on Easter Monday. An adult with the scars and triumphs of real life may be more cyclical: “(groan) Not Easter again!”

Easter is not just a child’s excitement or an adult’s indifference. It is the most important Christian festival, celebrating what a God we believe in has done: He sent His son who put off divinity and took on humanity. Thereby, God connected with us in a way that no God had ever done before, and we connected with Him in a way that no human being could ever do before.

God did not do this because we asked, deserved, or were in any way qualified to have this opportunity, but because God so loved the world…” (John 3:16). This happened when we were actually in the worst of our human state; one translation says: God showed His great love for us in that while we were beyond our worst, Christ died FOR US (Romans 5:8).

Julia Johnston’s marvelous 20^th-century hymn, “Grace Greater than Our Sin,” puts it this way:

Marvelous grace of our loving Lord,
Grace that exceeds our sin and our guilt!
Yonder on Calvary’s mount outpoured,
There where the blood of the Lamb was spilled.

Grace, grace, God’s grace,
Grace that will pardon and cleanse within;
Grace, grace, God’s grace,
Grace that is greater than all our sins!

Easter is about God’s love and acceptance of us when we are at our worst, in spite of our biggest flaws and our countless times of straying away from Him. In the face of all this there is forgiveness and new life once we:

Repent, i.e. feel and express sincere regret and guilt for our wrongdoing. Seek forgiveness from God and from those we have wronged, and make a sincere and intentional effort to amend our lives – i.e., TO DO BETTER -in other words, TO CHANGE our mindset and behavior in positive ways.

In the human experience, we often limit our vision for ourselves and others because we cannot forgive ourselves and others. We conclude that we are all beyond God’s acceptance and forgiveness.

The Church and her representatives have reinforced this idea at times, making many people feel that they are not worthy and can never be worthy, that there was no way back for them from that “far place” through grace and acceptance. This is wrong and limits the effectiveness and outreach of the Gospel in the wider community. We should never limit God’s love by our diminished human understanding.

Raising Jesus from the dead was a simple and real-life example of the power of God to do good even amidst the worst of our bad. God is still in the business of newness, renewal and of turning the impossible around.

Frederick William Faber was a 19^th-century English priest who wrote 150 hymns himself. One hymn, entitled “There’s a wideness to God’s Mercy”, contains these words:

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in God’s justice,
Which is more than liberty.

But we make God’s love too narrow
By false limits of our own, And we magnify its own
And we magnify its strictness
With a zeal God will not own.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measures of the mind,
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

This Easter see the event as God’s infinite love and welcome to all. His love calls us to be the persons He has for us to be, our better and best selves. His love welcomes. It opens a pathway to life everlasting that begins with God’s infinite power to change the unchangeable and to overcome the downright insurmountable – like death and sin and human division.

May we feel that in the Church. May we live that in our lives. May we cause others to feel this element of God’s nature.

This meaning of Easter supersedes any Easter egg or jellybean, any cynical outlook, indifference, or disillusionment.

The Rt. Rev’d. Laish Z. Boyd