April 16, 2003

Sydney - I have heard it said that Jesus was never in a trench and that he never felt hot lead pass by his neck. He never lost a child to war, and he was blissfully unaware of the complex worries of modern life. It's a common complaint that Jesus doesn't understand what some of us have been through; that he would have little to offer those of us living with today's conflicts, both global and personal.

But the Bible tells us quite the opposite about Jesus, and Easter provides an ideal opportunity to clarify your thinking about who Jesus is and how he matters in the here and now.

The Bible tells us that Jesus could sympathize with our weaknesses and that he was 'tempted in every way, just as we are.' He also knew great suffering, dying at the hands of a callous ruler of empire having been betrayed and abandoned by those he called friends. Jesus saw great human tragedy, and he mourned it and sought to reverse it. He healed the sick; he sought out the lowly and oppressed; he fed the hungry. But all the while, he knew that to find relief, the human predicament required a more radial intervention.

Not long ago, the Australian songwriter, Nick Cave, penned an extraordinary lyric which began: "I don't believe in an interventionist God." Since my early teenage years, I have believed the opposite and to me it has made all the difference. God is a loving intervener - he gets involved in our lives, for our good.

Easter convinces me that God does intervene in - in fact, he governs - affairs on earth. He planned a spiritual intervention that restored our fortunes. At a particular point in history, he sent Jesus to reveal God's plan for the salvation of those he loves, to suffer and die, and then to rise from the grave as the justified ruler of the universe.

In doing this, God gave history a shape that we can understand. He showed us Jesus at the heart of the universe, the one who was God in the flesh, and the one who assured us of God's love by becoming a sacrifice for sin. The death and resurrection of Jesus - that is, the Easter message - makes sense of the vast and tangled data of our own lives and the accumulated history of the world.

It is not up to us to say when God is intervening in human affairs, whether in war or peace. However, we can know with confidence that in Jesus Christ he came into the world to save sinners, me and you, Australian, American, Indonesian and Iraqi. This is what we celebrate at Easter, when we come before God with joyful humility, to acknowledge that Jesus is saviour and Lord. May this be your conviction and confession this Easter.

Anglican Communion News Service
from Anglican Media Sydney