WINTER INTO SPRING
I don’t know about you, but January and February are my least favourite months of the year. The days are short, the nights are long, the weather is often wet and cold, and it seems like Spring and Summer will never come…but they always do don’t they? Eventually.
When you look at a garden in January all you see is brown and lifeless. Your garden and the trees around it may appear dead…but they’re not are they? They’re just waiting for the right moment to come before they burst out with renewed vigour and make the winter just a memory.
Christians at this time of year celebrate the fact that the Easter story has conflicting and widely different experiences within it. The lead up to Easter is like a spiritual winter, Jesus takes his disciples on a Passover journey to Jerusalem, he’s warmly received by the crowds on Palm Sunday but the cheers turn to jeers within a short week.
By the Friday evening of Easter, we see events have led to seemingly the worse possible outcome. Jesus, God’s son, love incarnate and co-creator of the world, is betrayed, humiliated, crucified and cut down and flung to the ground. He lies broken, and vanquished and finished…surely?
But no, it looks like “winter” but “spring” is just around the corner. There is no such thing as darkness really, darkness is just what you get when the light is temporarily removed from a place.
In his brilliant book, ‘God on Mute’ Pete Greig identifies with the disciples in the pain of the moment and depicts what they must have been going through, he mentions that they needed a word from Jesus but the only sound they heard on Easter Saturday was the sound of the flies buzzing around the corpse of the dead Christ. Everything was finished, their thoughts must have been about “what do we do now? Now that it’s all over”. Thing is, it wasn’t all over really. Was it?
In the Living Bible version, in Romans 14 verse 9 it says, “Christ died and rose again for this very purpose, so that he can be our Lord both while we live and when we die”.
As a kid our little concrete patch of front garden had a diamond shape concrete container for plants. My mum filled it with forget-me-nots and each summer it was a riot of little beautiful bluey purple flowers. One day our landlord sent in the builders to ‘make good’ our garden wall. In the process they broke up the diamond and covered the whole of the little garden in a layer of tarmac. ‘That’s a shame”, my Mum said, “We won’t have any forget-me-nots now!” She was wrong. The next year she called me excitedly me outside and pointed at little clumps of forget-me-nots popping through the layer of tarmac. The builders had not removed the soil underneath and the forget-me-nots just did what forget-me-nots do, burst into life at the right time and overcome any obstacle in their way.
We’re jumping ahead a bit in the Easter story but, spoiler alert, it involves a garden tomb, some very surprised mourners and an angel who explained it beautifully in a couple of sentences, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen!”
It’s true that winter is bad, but spring will come, enjoy the new life of this amazing season. Christ is risen, is risen indeed, Hallelujah!
by Fred Wright 7th April 2023
