Looking back to Easter's past, I have some happy memories of this time of year. Some of these memories are connected with times away from home: a holiday in Budapest with Ruth in 1994 – our hotel window overlooked the churchyard of a yellow-painted church, clean, neat and serene. We returned on Good Friday – minus our luggage, which arrived the next day! A year or two later we had a holiday in the Lake District with Ruth’s family during Holy Week, surrounded by Wordsworth’s daffodils and bathed in the warmth of a very hot week. Three years ago, of course, we were in Australia, sharing with the people of St James church in their Holy Week and Easter services.
Other memories relate to particular acts of worship – Good Friday in the open air in an ecumenical witness with the churches of West Derby in Liverpool – we had the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool one year, and the Catholic Archbishop the next, then the President of the Methodist Conference in the subsequent year – the following year was my turn (I guess we had run out of senior figures to ask by then)! When the time comes for us to leave Cardiff, I will go away with memories of Easter mornings spent on Caerphilly mountain, but whether the memories will be more about wind, rain, sun or mist, who can say – I’ve seen all of them since being here!
Memory plays an important role in our lives – and also in our faith. One writer likens the importance of remembering as being like looking in the rear view mirror of a car – we are not doing it just
for old times sake, to see where we have been, but because we care about what is happening now and
ahead of us on the road. In other words, remembrance is as much about
the present and the future as the past.
There is a wonderful passage in Isaiah which is sometimes used in
services at this time of year, in preparation for Holy Week and Easter
(Isaiah 43.15-19). In it, the Lord reminds the people of the mighty
work of salvation he made to happen in the exodus from Egypt, when the
Israelites were rescued from slavery. But the passage goes on to say
that they should not dwell on the past, because the Lord is about to do
a new thing, and it is already happening. That new thing God has done
for us through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Each
time we share in Holy Communion we do so in remembrance of that Last
Supper which Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before he
died – ‘Do this in memory of me.’ But as we remember, we believe that
the risen Jesus meets us also in the here and now, and will continue to
be with us for ever. So this Easter let us give thanks for all that God
has done for us, and let us celebrate the presence and the promise of
the risen Christ.
Happy Easter!
Phil Drake