Easter Sunday

Yesterday I was coming out of the airport on the last leg of my trip to see my Mum.   Luton airport is quite a big place and there were a lot of people jostling about.  Suddenly from behind me I heard a high pitched squeal  ' DADDY! '  and a child came charging past me running for all her life.  She was closely followed by a smaller boy who was also yelling ' DADDY DADDY DADDY!'   .  I looked up ahead and there coming towards them and me was a slightly pudgy, slightly bald bespectacled bloke wearing the biggest smile.  The children threw themselves into his arms, and he was almost in tears except that his smile was so wide it wouldnt let him cry.



It reminded me of the closing credits in the film Love Actually - the scene with all the reunions between all the different people at the airport arrival gate.   Id like to think that they actually just filmed real people saying real hellos to their loved ones and not that they were all actors paid to kiss and hug each other .😍




One day, maybe very soon, we are going to find ourselves on the threshold of heaven.  I have no idea what that moment is going to be like, but I do hope it is something like the scene I witnessed yesterday.   I do hope I get to charge towards God with all my might, yelling His name at the top of my voice in unashamed and completely abandoned excitement.  I hope I get to throw myself into His arms and that He picks me up and spins me round and that He is laughing.   And I hope that Jesus is there watching, feeling incredible joy that the sacrifice that He made for me has enabled me to enjoy this amazing moment of homecoming and completion and love.



This is what Easter is all about. 

Thank you Jesus.   

Lent day 46 - Where did He go?

I haven't really given a massive amount of thought to Easter Saturday before.  I suppose I imagined Jesus going down into Satan's territory to take the keys of death and hell from Him ( possibly doing a modicum of gloating whilst Satan was doing a modicum of withering and screeching and despairing).  And then I think I envisaged Jesus toddling off to find those people who drowned in the great flood - who didn't have the time to repent of their sins etc , and Jesus preaching to them and most of them repenting and believing, thereby qualifying them to get to heaven.

But yesterday I did a bit of reading around the whole subject of what Jesus was doing during the day and a half He was dead.  And it appears that it's not quite as simple as I imagined.  😊

There seems to be some debate about the various scriptures which mention Easter Saturday.  There is agreement that the concept of ' hell' is a relatively modern one and that the better translation is that He descended to the place of the dead.  Possibly a ' holding bay' for souls before judgement.   Then some people think that the spirits that he preached to were not people at all but angelic spirits - those angels who fell and intermarried with people around the time of Noah.  And yet others point to the fact that Jesus told the thief on the cross ' Today you will be with me in paradise'  ie  Jesus was in paradise at least on Friday.      It's all very interesting , you should read up on it.

But the thing that I really wanted to know was why did God wait so long to raise Jesus from the dead?   If Jesus was pronounced dead sometime on Friday afternoon and was in a tomb before sun down on Friday evening then why didn't the resurrection happen on Saturday morning?   If you've got the best news in the history of the universe ever why wait an extra 24 hours to deliver it?  If I was God I'd have been itching to play my ace and roll the stone away.

Here's something I read yesterday which sheds a whole new light on the three days.

According to Jewish tradition, a person’s soul/spirit remained with his/her dead body for three days. After three days, the soul/spirit departed. If Jesus’ resurrection had occurred on the same day or even the next day, it would have been easier for His enemies to argue He had never truly died. Significantly, Jesus waited several days after Lazarus had died before He came to resurrect Lazarus so that no one could deny the miracle (John 11:38–44).

I didnt know that that's what Jews believed about death.  It makes perfect sense of the delay in getting to Lazarus and the distress of Mary and Martha ( Lord if you had only come earlier..... even two days after he had died and his soul would still have been here and you could have done something but now it is too late, his spirit has gone)  It also makes perfect sense of the resurrection.  To the Jewish mind by the Sunday Jesus's spirit would have departed and He would have been truly and eternally gone.  A resurrection miracle is only possible when all possible hope of life is completely extinguished.

Three days also fulfilled Biblical prophecy

 He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.  (Hosea 6:2)

Jesus died on the day the Passover Lamb was traditionally slaughtered.  His resurrection happened on the first day of a new week.  Perhaps even in that there is symbolism of the perfect sacrifice leading to a new beginning.

Maybe we wont fully know what it was that Jesus was doing on Easter Saturday and why, until we get to heaven.  All I know is that God never does anything by accident.  There was a perfect reason and purpose behind the ' down time' in the resurrection story.   When it looked to the disciples and the world at large as though nothing was happening there were things of eternal significance going on.  In the moment of greatest despair and hopelessness God was working on His most spectacular move.  Jesus had told His friends what was going to happen but even in the middle of it they couldn't see it and didn't believe it!   The surface looked like death and irreparable tragedy.  Underneath resurrection power was building.

Lent day 45 - suffering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0xEOy5EC2I

super super tired last night so cheating somewhat and posting this instead of the usual wordy post :)
It is only 5 minutes long.  And really rather beautiful.

lent day 44 - new birth

I was driving past fields of new born lambs yesterday.  The sun was shining.  The grass was green. Daffodils are starting to peek out of the hedgerows.  It's beginning to look alot like springtime 🌞 The whole new birth thing can be a bit of a cliche, but it was on my mind because at the weekend I got to spend a few minutes with a newborn baby who was 5lb 11 at birth and now, two months on is still not quite 9lbs.   He is tiny.  He is still nowhere near the size my three boys were when they were born!

I felt the God thought go through my mind ' the bigger the baby the harder the birth'. 


This was most certainly true for me giving birth to my huge 9 lb 12 boys.  Sam got stuck and had to be yanked out with forceps.  I lost so much blood that I technically should have had a blood transfusion but somehow, thankfully, managed to avoid it by promising to lie still and do nothing for 24 hours.  I wasnt up to doing anything except breathe and look at my baby to be honest.  However having a big baby does have its advantages.  There's a saying in Northern Ireland that big babies come out ' half reared'   😊  My boys all slept and fed well, were robust and not prone to sniffles or wheezes or allergies or infections.  They have all grown from being huge babies to being huge young men with enormous feet and gigantic appetites. 

Im currently working for a charity which has some big dreams.   I go to a church which has big dreams.   Big dreams can be pretty tricky to bring to birth.  The bigger the dream the harder the delivery.   Sometimes it can feel as though the birthing is going to kill you and that neither you or the dream is going to make it out alive.   But God is an excellent midwife.  He hold the times and the seasons in His hands and He was the one who formed the idea and grew it from a tiny seed to something which is ready to take on a life of its own.

I remember my three pregnancies as being times of interminable waiting.  Especially the last couple of weeks.  And the waiting was tinged with both excitement and dread.  I couldn't wait to meet my babies and yet I really didn't want to go through the experience of giving birth ( especially the second time, it having been pretty gruesome the first time round).  It is tiring and boring and frustrating because there is nothing you can do to make it happen any quicker.  You don't sleep much towards the end of a pregnancy.  Sometimes everything aches, you are getting braxton hicks contractions..... its a wonder anyone ever does it more than once!!!


But of course it is all worth it in the end.   So, if you are pregnant with a dream and are waiting, if you are suffering the pain of contractions, if everything is difficult and dangerous and it feels like it is going to kill you - then maybe you are giving birth to a big baby.  A big dream.  Something bigger than you had anticipated or thought possible.  Perhaps when the dream is born it will already be ' half reared' and will need less tender nurturing that you think before it is up and running.

Easter is a time of new life.  Of the impossible becoming possible.  Of resurrection power coming to bring life where there was death and victory where there was apparent defeat.  Lets dream big and not be afraid of the birth process.  If it didn't kill Jesus it won't kill us!

lent day 43 - debates and arguments

I was most heartened yesterday when listening to a debate on radio 4 to hear an audience of young people ( mostly university students I think) talking extremely intelligently about the morals of citizenship.   The arguments went back and forth - is it more important to look after those known to you than strangers? - who is our neighbour? - what is society?  etc.  Each argument had its own inherent logic and was presented clearly and with passion.   It made for good listening and it cheered me to know that critical thinking and debating skills are still alive and kicking in our educational institutions.  And indeed in society at large - whatever you conceive ' society' to be.

It reminded me of my student days.  I was fortunate enough to be a student when we all got grants and there were no fees and nobody ended up with £40k debt.   I did learn lots of useful things from my two degree courses, but what I remember most about those days was sitting up till the wee small hours arguing heatedly with people who had radically different views from mine about all sorts of subjects.  Not only did those discussions help me to realise that not everyone thought like I did, and that some of them might be just as right in their views as I was in mine, but they provided me with some of the enduring friendships of my life.  Learning how to debate, and challenge and be challenged and disagree and yet remain friends is a vital life lesson.  Part of my concern about the increasing cost of a university education is that fewer people will opt to study this way.  And I have no doubt they can learn what they need to learn in better, less expensive and more productive ways in order to get jobs.  But there is something about the community of young thinkers which a university so often is, the space and time it provides for intense and meaningful relationships to develop which is valuable and quite possibly unique.

I remember going to tutorials where we were all supposed to be discussing some principles of economics ( yes I actually studied economics as part of my Management degree - bet you didn't know that eh?) and ending up talking about where the universe was expanding into and if that presupposed the existence of God!  Critical thinking was encouraged and expected and was normal.  Tangents were OK.  Give and take was the order of the day.

Jesus cultivated a community of disciples around Him and challenged their thinking in every conceivable way.  They must have debated and argued and talked and questioned late into the night on many many occasions.  We see in the gospels that the disciples quite often argued amongst themselves and fell out with each other over their differing interpretations of Jesus's teaching.  This is partly because Jesus called twelve people who would never normally have crossed paths, let alone lived in community together.    Somewhat like a cohort in college or uni, the disciples were a diverse bunch.   Mostly in life we tend to congregate round people who are very similar to ourselves.  I know that in higher education we are congregating with people with a similar academic ability to us, but in other ways we are getting to rub alongside people we would not get the chance to meet in any other setting.    Tax collectors and fishermen and doctors and carpenters and women. 

 The disciples theology was dismantled and reconstructed during their three years on the road with Jesus.  Their minds were blown time after time by miracles and parables.   And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had many many laughs together because Jesus is the warmest, kindest, funniest , wittiest person ever to have lived.   He knew how to diffuse an argument.   But He seems to have allowed arguments to arise every now and again because theres nothing actually wrong with a bit of healthy debate. 

One of the things which concerns me about the technology generation to which my kids belong is that they might lose the ability to debate and argue and wrestle with ideas in community with others.  If you look to Google for all your answers..... well..... that's a bit depressing isnt it?  And if all your conversation is remotely conducted through screens....  ( says the woman who is talking to her friends via a blog  😉)  If Jesus thought it was important to gather a small, diverse group around Him and talk to them for three years then maybe that dynamic should be important to us too.  It's interesting to note that for all their differences in learning and culture and experience and for all the petty rivalries which had surfaced in the group over the course of three years, when it came to the crunch the disciples stuck together, defended each other, worked as a team and ultimately were prepared to die for their common understanding of who Jesus was.    Their love for Him was greater.  His death and resurrection put all their differences into perspective. 

The lesson for today - get round people who challenge you and make you think. Make sure those people arent all like you.   Embrace difference.   Put down your gadgets and take the time to talk face to face and think out loud.  Dont be afraid to debate and disagree and listen and modify and stand firm and be passionate.  Keep your love for Jesus as the main thing.  And you might just find that together we are all stronger than apart and that the gates of hell will not prevail against us.
                                

Lent day 42 - holy week

 I came across this image earlier in the week and I really really liked it.   How can something as complex as the story of Jesus's last week on earth be expressed so simply and clearly in six little line drawings?  Whoever designed this ( and it doesnt seem to be ascribed to anyone I can discover but it looks like the drawings used in the Good News Bible doesnt it?) has been clever in the details.  I like the fact that the first and last people are dressed in blue.  Celebration and joy.  And the second picture shows Jesus with a purple sash - for royalty.  It is a great thumbnail.  It was a great week.

I dont suppose any of us will ever have a week which starts with the paparazzi following us and the news channels wanting interviews and our fans camping out on the street outside out house just to get a glimpse of us and end with us being sentenced to death.  It's pretty extreme. It must have been bewildering and exhausting for Jesus.  It is tempting to think that because He was God then He was somehow unaffected by the intense emotions of Holy Week.  But He was fully human.  How did He really feel about being paraded into town on Palm Sunday with everyone wanting a piece of Him?  How did He feel about the weight of expectation which was on Him as people clearly hoped and demanded He would overthrow the regime.  How intense was the battle in His head as He wrestled with what He knew God had called Him to do?  How sad did He feel about His beloved disciples that week - knowing that when it came to the crunch they would not be able to stand with Him and that one would ultimately betray Him for money?  How torn did He feel when he realised that His mother would have to watch Him die?  When the crowd were shouting ' Free Bar-Abbas ( free the son of the father) was every fibre in His being longing to shout and yell and tell them they were being blind and misguided?   The emotions of Holy week are super intense.  And all of it was playing out in the heat of the middle east at the height of an occupation.    It can be hard for us to get anywhere close to understanding what it must have been like for Jesus and His disciples from the written accounts over the distance of centuries.

That is one of the reasons that Lent is a good idea.  It gives us a framework for thinking about the small details of a story we know really well.  It encourages us to ponder and look from different angles and to put ourselves in the story, using our imaginations to see past the words on the page into the reality of what was going on.  If we linger in the story we can start to smell and hear and feel the  crowds,  the upper room and Pilates courtyard.  It is not a comfortable place to be - and as the week goes on it becomes less and less comfortable until, by Friday, it is unbearable.   But the more we can immerse ourselves in Holy Week the more we can celebrate on Easter Sunday.   The more we understand and feel the pain of Sunday to Friday the deeper our appreciation of the victory Jesus has won for us, and the greater the rejoicing on Sunday.

I pray that this Easter God will do deeper things in you.  That He will show you more of what He was doing that week over 2000 years ago.  And that your rejoicing on Sunday will be more profound because of it.

Lent day 41 - clickbait

Clickbait - one of those silly new made up words we have had to invent to describe something which didn't exist five years ago.  Clickbait is what they call those adverts and quizzes and surveys which come up on the side of Facebook homepages and say things like ' 9 out of 10 people can't answer this'  or  Only the top 1% of the population get these right'.   Sometimes they look like a news article and have an attention grabbing headline.  But when you click on these things they are never quite what they seem.  They are usually just a tool to get you to look at yet more adverts or to download something or give your details. Marketing.  That's what its all about.


Knowing this, I still find myself clicking through some of these things.  Yesterday it was a Bible quiz.  9 out of 10 people cant answer these questions about books of the Bible.  Oh yeah?  I'll show em.  So I start taking the test and of course it is so very basic and the alternative answers they give are so ridiculous that it would be almost impossible NOT to get them all right.   And then we post on Facebook the fact that we have beaten the ' odds' and have proved ourselves to be the top 1% in the world at Bible knowledge even though we all really know that its a load of nonsense.

So why do we do that?  Why do we go for the bait?  The marketing companies know that we will do it - that's how they make their money and they are very good at it.  What is it that they tap into in us which they know will work and increase their chances of selling stuff to us?


Firstly they lie.  They just tell us what they think we want to hear to reel us in.   They look credible and sound credible and we all know that you can fool some of the people some of the time....

Secondly they tap into our pride.  They tell us that you have to be really bright and smart and clever to beat the odds on this test/quiz/survey.  And of course we all want to be bright and smart and clever.  Answering all the questions correctly makes us feel good - even when we know the whole thing is a load of nonsense.

Then they tap into our sense of competition.  We can do better than most.  We want to win. It is a powerful urge in many of us.

As I was thinking about this yesterday I started wondering what the Church's clickbait is.  Both literally and metaphorically.  In a social media obsessed, technology driven society the church needs to have an online presence every bit as powerful and attractive as everything else that's out there - if not more so. Let's face it, we are 'selling' community, family, life changing encounter, help hope and healing.  What we have is true.  It doesn't promise what it can't deliver.  And it is not a competition. If we can't get people to click on that then we need to change the marketing department!

Except that we are not out to compete with what the world has to offer - not really.  Because what we have doesn't compare.  It is so far above and beyond any offer anyone else could make.  However there are still huge swathes of the world who don't know anything about the life and love and hope we have found and which is free to all.  How do you and I become God's clickbait to the world round us?  How do we get people to want to spend time with us, talk to us, touch our lives in a way that moves them past our presenting headline page and gets them to our hearts?


I think the principle is the same - we need to appeal to something in people which makes them want to know more.  Jesus was the master of this.  He appealed to everyone He met. He appealed to the poor and the rich, the ruling class and servants.  He appealed to women and men,  Jews and Samaritans.  Everywhere He went people wanted to touch Him and know Him and follow Him.  He was filled full to the brim with God and with the fruits of the spirit.  Jesus was the most attractive man who has ever walked the earth .  Even though the Bible makes it clear that there was nothing in particular about His physical appearance which made Him stand out from the crowd.  He was just irresistible.   And we are too.  The more filled with godliness we are the more people will want to click on us to find out more.  (Being constantly clicked on might not always be fun but it will always be productive)

I have met a few really Christlike people in my life.  They were people who had an almost magnetic quality about them.  They were fascinating to talk to , extremely good fun, wise, kind and life changing in their ability to show me Jesus.  I want to be like that.  Im sure you do too.