Reflection for April 2025

The Season of Easter

 In this month’s Reflection we must speak about Holy Week and the importance of Easter to all Christians of every denomination and background.  The death and resurrection of Jesus is unique to the Christian faith.  Through our personal belief that Jesus has taken the punishment for our sins in His own body on the tree, and rose again, conquering death, this becomes our passport into Christian faith and eternal life.

I can well recount as a nine-year-old singing the following hymn and understanding the Good News that Jesus had died for me and everyone who chooses to believe.  A few months later I asked Jesus into my life to be my Saviour.

Alas, and did my Saviour bleed?
  And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
  For such a worm as I?

At the cross, at the cross where
  I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away,
It was there by faith I received my sight,
  And now I am happy all the day!

Was it for sins that I had done
  He groaned upon the tree?

 Amazing pity! grace unknown!
  And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide,
  And shut His glories in,
When Christ, the mighty Maker, died
  For man, His creature’s sin.

But drops of grief can ne’er repay
  The debt of love I owe;
Here, Lord, I give myself away,
  ’Tis all that I can do.

Isaac Watts 1707

In every communion service, through taking the bread and wine, we recall the pain and suffering of our Saviour Jesus and the love and grace that led Father God to send his Son to us.  Penitence and thankfulness should be our attitude; it is the person who hung on the cross who is our Saviour, not the cross itself.  Perhaps this is why the Catholic tradition has an image of our Lord hanging on a cross as it vividly portrays His anguish and suffering.

But we do not have to live our lives continually at the foot of the cross.  There is the resurrection to celebrate, the Holy Spirit to embrace, the Word of God to understand, baptism to experience, a righteous life to live, Good News to share and people to bless.  So, will each one of us take the first steps of faith by accepting and believing in the Son of God who died on a cross to gain our forgiveness, and continue our journey into Christian maturity?

John Miller