SUNDAY COLUMN

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 69, Issue 158, 16 April 1949, Page 3

SUNDAY COLUMN

The Deliverance of Easter

(CONDUCTED BY THE ASHBURTON MINISTERS’ ASSOCIATION).

If the apostles were to come amongst us at our Easter services they might feel a certain strangeness, something lacking. They would find the joy of the assurance that “because He lives we shall live also,” that the sting has been taken from death; and they would understand and share that. But, like all pioneers, they would surely say to themselves that this victory in which we rejoice has become much less tremendous, much less overpowering and awesome than it was for them. They had known torn minds. They had seen the perfect life, which the life of the world could not receive, going slowly on to the inevitable conflict. They had felt, as every one of us is tempted to feel and say about religion, that such ideals must not he “carried too far in a world like this. And He had carried them as far as they could go, till they were left hanging before men in a broken body. They knew that He had wondered Himself if He was going'too far—but for a different reason. His doubt was whether He was laying upon the Father’s heart something “beyond hearing.” And they had heard that last cry of His questioning: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”—and, with that cry, all the sin and evil of the world borne up into the heart of God, God the Father knowing, through the Son, “what was in men.” And then the silence. * * * * When the miracle of Easter morning broke upon them there must have been something more than amazed joy in their hearts. There must have been an awed sense that this was an answer: something wrung from the heart of God. something that could not he withheld, though it shook heaven and earth, the heart of a Father leaping to assure His Son that He would not have had Him spared, that He had borne Himself as His Father, would have wished; that the forgiveness pleaded for on the Cross was indeed the Father’s forgiveness too; that the sins of men, seen in the Son’s sufferings, could be borne, and were forgiven. And in that moment, the moment of a new creation, the old creation rocked, and its laws were rent asunder, and He who was dead was raised.

As they saw into this that had come from the heart of God they cried outin beAvilder,ment as well as in wonder. A new world had been born out of the Son’s cry and the Father’s answer. The old world was,dead for ever. All things were become new, The life they had watched in their Master was not, even in the sarcifice of the Gross, a life that had gone too far for a world of men like this; it was not an ideal pushed beyond the bounds of the practical. It was the real world of God’s Kingdom, the life men had lost, bursting in upon them. This was not just something ror quiet, unquestioning thanksiving. It was, as Paul knew later, something to throw them to the ground, something to blind them before it opened their eyes, something to throw them into bewilderment, a. shock to their Whole beings.- Were they really able to live in such a world? Could they breathe its air? Could they hope to escape from the old World which was. still in their blood, in their very breathing? “What shall we do?” * * * # And when they went out, after Pentecost, with another miracle answering their cry, to declare amongst men that the whole world was dead, tliis world of men’s fear and striving, dead With Christ, and that the new world was horn, risen with Christ, and all men could live in it, the same words echoed from the lips of those who believed: “What shall T do?”—“What must I do?”—“What shall we do?” the same shock of realising that the world of which they were still part, body and soul, was dead,and obsolete and condemned —yet how were they to he delivered from it?

Though they learned to cry "Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory,” though they found the peace and gladness that this would cannot give, they never lost that sense .of being daily delivered and saved by this ever-re-newed miracle of God, this second creation.

That sense of miraculous deliverance, of being saved out of a dead W orld —isn’t that what the apostles might miss in us to-day? —Prom “Life and Work.