Easter is about life. That's why we make so much noise

Sunday Telegraph

Today is a day for noisy celebrations. In churches throughout the land, bells will ring and choirs will sing those great Easter hymns of joy in celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This afternoon in York I will be baptising 20 people in an open-air baptistry as part of a day long Easter celebration before returning home to celebrate with my family.

There are those who might wish that we were a little quieter in our celebrations or were a little less public in our joy. The problem with such a request is that it ignores the fact that in the resurrection of Christ, God is speaking to the world, and when God speaks you can't ignore Him.

Our faith is one of prayer and parties, of justice and joy, of love and life.

Thirty-five years ago I was a Stipendiary Grade I Magistrate in the northern part of Uganda: a region that had suffered the worst of Idi Amin's brutalities. While I was there, a widow arrived at the court, carrying her new-born son in a rather tattered suitcase pierced with four breathing holes.

She had walked 30 miles through the jungle the day after the birth, for she realised her son was dangerously ill. She had gone first to the church to ask the local priest to baptise her child. To her sadness, he had been brutally murdered two months before.

A young woman who was my interpreter at the court told her: "The new magistrate is a Christian, he may agree to baptise your son, even though he isn't a priest. Take him to the court – but don't say I told you to."

So she arrived at court and asked to see me. Yes, the new baby boy was seriously ill. And being acquainted with the rules of the Church of Uganda, I agreed to baptise the little fellow, and got her to agree to take him to the hospital a few yards away.

As the child was lowered over the basin of water a big black cat jumped through the window. "Heavens, what an unlucky child!" muttered my English court clerk. But the local people broke into cheers and clapping, for they know well such animals do not come where death is. The baby lived.


And that, for me, is the Easter message. Easter is life: new living life, the reason why the disciples were transformed from terrified, defeated and scattered individuals to a confident and joyful body of believers.

Life is magnetic. Life is the Lord's. Good Friday and Easter are death turned to life. That, too, is why I believe people rush to football matches: they are after life. That is why they choose their sports heroes, their movie stars. Why they congregate in pubs and discos. They are after life. They want to be touched by the Lord of Life, though they would not put it like that!

That is why many hunger for self-fulfilment and sadly end up with self-assertiveness with little self-examination. This has created a culture of cynicism, of blaming someone else, and the constant endeavour to pull him or her down.

So I beseech those inside and outside the churches: choose life this Easter! Choose that exciting new life that risks and gives. "I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance," says Our Lord. And it is there gloriously offered this Easter.

The reality of faith is the reality of love. You can't smell, touch, taste or hear love, but you can see its effects in the acts born from it, in the relationships built upon it, the art inspired by it and in the lives transformed by its goodness. So it is with faith. The reality of faith is visible in those millions of daily acts of kindness and love that are borne from it. Acts done not in self-interest, not as a down payment for a ticket to the life eternal. These are the selfless, costly, grace-filled, Christ-inspired acts that make our lives richer than that of any number of lottery winners.

In Christ we see the ultimate expression of a love turned outwards, facing the whole of humanity in a self-giving act made real on the Cross. The challenge is in our response to this act: whether to also turn our love outwards to the world or to turn love in on itself, to become self-obsessed. The aria of "Me! Me!" and "I! I!" has become the most unattractive opera of our time.
It is a sad paradox borne of the "me" generation that those who turn their love in on themselves are often also the unhappiest.

Coerced by the culture around them, our young people in particular are at risk of becoming spiritually empty vessels, transfixed by a drug-induced narcissism. The beauty industry that turns our teenagers into anorexics, where a perversion of physical perfection is more important than health; our celebrity-obsessed media that elevates notoriety above worth, and the unending pursuit of wealth, while our children rank among the unhappiest in Europe: these are some of the symptoms of a society that needs to re-discover the beauty of the mystical and the joy of the spiritual.

But make no mistake. Inviting God into your life means being open to the possibility of renewal and change. Sometimes this can be costly. As the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Zimbabwe has recently reminded us, faith contains an imperative to challenge injustice and dictatorship. In the words of Archbishop Oscar Romero – gunned down whilst celebrating mass – "Peace will flower when love and justice pervade our environment."

The Cross and the Resurrection show us that the call, the invitation of God, powerfully present in Jesus Christ, cannot be silenced by anything. Easter is a call to accept God's invitation to become one of his friends.

So come and pray with me and party with me this Easter, come to the tomb where the stone has been rolled away, to where life is and where the Spirit moves.