The Bishop's Easter Message 2002

At the heart of the dramatic Easter Liturgy of the Orthodox Churches an Easter homily from the early centuries of the Church is read to the assembled congregation. Its author is John, Bishop of Constantinople at the end of the fourth century, whose powerful preaching earned him the nickname Chrysostomos, meaning 'golden mouthed'. 'Christ is risen!' he proclaims, 'And the demons are fallen!' 'Christ is risen! And hell has lost its prey! Christ is risen! And life reigns!'

What a powerful proclamation that must have been when at the time of the collapse of Soviet Communism those words rang out again in the cathedrals and churches of the Kremlin. No political commentator at the height of the Cold War or during Stalin's tyranny could have imagined that the atheist ideology of the Soviet state would have imploded so dramatically. 'Christ is risen! And the demons are fallen!' And yet it happened, as it happened on the first Easter Day and has gone on happening.

The mystery of Cross and Resurrection that is at the heart of the Christian Gospel points us to a God who takes the suffering of the world upon himself, and whose outstretched arms, pinned to the wood of the Cross, embrace the world in sacrificial love. Good Friday seemed a defeat. Darkness blotted out the light; and even the one who hung and suffered there entered an inner darkness from which God seemed absent, crying out 'My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?' In the Creed we confess that he 'descended into hell', went to the place of apartness from God, to the place of the wraith-like existence of the departed. In Jesus God the Creator of life entered into our human experience of death and dying, and bore the weight of the terrible realities of betrayal and denial. Yet from that utter desolation he was raised to life, the first-fruits, as St Paul says, of God's new creation.

In our Baptism we are plunged into the life of this new creation. The Church is born from this saving victory of God's love, and the Spirit of the living God is poured into our hearts so that we live this new life, a life of love, of sacrifice, and of the hope of eternal life, a joy which Jesus promised us no one can take from us.

+Geoffrey