Friends in Christ,
Christ is Risen, He is risen indeed!
This Easter Sunday we are awakened to a gift in the Resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Friends, this is good news! Resurrection is a gift that keeps unfolding, challenging every assumption that tells us this is just the way it is.
When I greet you with the familiar words ‘Christ is risen, He is risen indeed’ I do so recognising the momentousness of what Christ’s rising truly means every day that follows Easter Sunday. Resurrection is God’s realm breaking into the here and now. It is an event that presents us with opportunities to reshape our understanding of God’s revolutionary commitment to loving us, embodied hope, and what it means to follow Christ. Therefore, it is fitting that it begins with celebration. And if we confine resurrection to the empty tomb, we risk missing the revolutionary horizon it opens before us.
We are called into resurrection and as resurrection people, who live in a world where far too many of God’s children know rejection more than welcome, silence more than dignity, neglect more than care, we do not have the luxury of viewing the empty tomb as the conclusion to a well-told story. It begins the story of what ’doing a new thing’ looks like.
It tells us that the world as we know it, with its systems of exclusion, its economies of abandonment, and its hierarchies of worth, is not the world as it has to be. Jesus was not raised into comfort, as evidenced by the wounds that were still in his hands. The trauma had not magically vanished—it was transfigured.
The call to be resurrection people summons us to involve ourselves in this unfolding event with our whole selves—flawed, fractured, different, yet made new. And this is an opportune moment to challenge ourselves and reflect inwardly on what kind of people we are becoming, and outwardly, on the character we are forming in our households, in our churches, and on our streets.
Resurrection is a movement that calls us to participate in our own transformation towards mercy that is costly, justice that is disruptive, and love that is not afraid to touch what others deem untouchable. To be resurrection people in this world of ours, is to live in a way that enables us to truly notice the rough sleeping figure outside the station, the asylum-seeking neighbour unsure of their welcome, the teenager whose hunger is masked by anger. It is to refuse to walk past, and to stop believing that these realities are someone else’s concern.
The Resurrection movement insists that even death-dealing systems cannot contain the life God brings forth. And so we cannot be content with just being polite disciples. For, we are called to be bold reflections of the One who dismantled barriers by his very presence. The One whose Resurrection was not a retreat into safety, but a commissioning into a risen way of life.
Friends, Easter is more than a celebration, it is a time to confront who and what we are becoming, and to recommit to a discipleship that embodies love fiercely, and seeks justice relentlessly.
And so, may we be transformed by the Resurrection in the lived witness of our lives.
Christ is risen—and so we must rise and be transformed. For He is risen, indeed!
Yours in Christ
Tessa
Revd Dr Tessa Henry-Robinson
Moderator of the Free Churches Group
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay