EASTER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27057, 16 April 1949, Page 2

EASTER

A DIVINE INVASION For the Otago Daily Times,' by the Rev. Gardner Miller I don’t think it is possible to write anything new about Easter. And that can be said, I think, about most of the great things of life. Nothing new can be said about love, though poets will, to the end of time, tease and torture language to coin some fresh expression of this unmeasurable pulse of life. Love and life and death and duty are threads, not all coloured, woven into the fabric of our existence, and words are so feeble to express the emotions they evoke. Easter is something more than an amazing week-end that occured nearly 2000 years ago. The fact that that week-end is incorporated within our time-calendar is more an excuse for a holiday than it is for keeping a week-end holy. ’ The only valid thing to remember about Easter is that it has something wonderful to remind us about a most wonderful person. That person is Christ. The day is in the far distant past when men denied the existence of Christ. No serious critic to-day would deny the actuality of Christ. I know of men who deny there is a God, but would never dream of denying that Christ actually lived. That argument has always seemed strange to me. To accept Christ as real ought to lead men to accept the reality of God. For me, there could be no belief in God had not Christ come to show Him to me. I do not say that had there been no Christ that I would doubt the existence of a Divine Being Who had brought the world into physical fact, but I do say that Christ, and Christ only, has made that Divine Being human and proved to me that His nature is that of a father. And how has Christ done this? Because He Himself is Divine. Christ is God ;

That is the first thing that Easter should remind us of. It may be that it takes a leap of faith to accept Christ as Divine, but I candidly cannot see that the New Testament makes any sense unless He is Divine. Either He is Divine or else He is an impostor, or mad. If He was mad, then His madness is the only sanity worth having. That He was an impostor is incredible to any thinking person. There is only one valid explanation of Christ, and that is, He was, and is, God. When you look at Him in the Gospels you see God working. His humanity was not destroyed by His divinity, and His divinity was not lessened by His humanity. And this Jesus Who is more than the value of God, Who is very God, is still art work revealing the Divine purpose for men and their world.

Let Easter have the thought of the Divine Christ at its centre and Easter will be released from the trivialities that surround it to-day. I remember reading in a book by a distinguished Scottish professor the statement that, given such a person as Jesus, His resurrection was inevitable. And he was right in saying so. Death could not hold such a personality as the Divine Christ. Ana because it could not we have Easter. The Divine Invasion

The resurrection is the greatest event in world history. Not only did it mean the birth and the sustenance of the Early Christian Church, the writing of the New Testament, but it is also the fact upon which is based the modern world church. There is probably no faci better authenticated than that Jesus rose again. But even more than that, the resurrection is the Divine invasion into human life. A Christian is a person who has been invaded by the living Christ. Take that a little farther and you begin to see that it also means that new relationships have begun; relationships between the individual and God and between the individual and others. Upon that there rests the future of the world. Destroy these relationships and you have anarchy. It is not to be doubted that there is a determined attempt going on at the present time to destroy, and deliberately so, everything that savours of God. everything that savours of brotherhood.

It is because of this invasion, which every one of us may have renewed daily, that I pin my belief in the utter defeat of every attempt to destroy Christianity. The world may seem to be going to the devil, but it will’ never arrive there. God cannot be defeated. The power of darkness is jubilant just now, but we are hastening towards the dawn. The risen Christ is on His way, for the end of this age is nigh. Christianity is the only religion that has an Easter. Let us see to it that it is never made tawdry. Rejoice in what it means. Let us avail ourselves afresh of its power and vision and hope.