wfn.org | ACNS3414 Archbishop Peter Jensen's Easter Message

["Anglican Communion News Service" <acnslist@anglicancommunion.org>]

ACNS 3414     |     AUSTRALIA	  |	16 APRIL 2003 

Archbishop Peter Jensen's Easter Message

[Anglican Media Sydney] I have heard it said that Jesus was never in a trench
and that he never felt hot lead pass by his neck. He never lost a child to
war, and he was blissfully unaware of the complex worries of modern life. 
It's a common complaint that Jesus doesn't understand what some of us have
been through; that he would have little to offer those of us living with
today's conflicts, both global and personal.

But the Bible tells us quite the opposite about Jesus, and Easter provides an
ideal opportunity to clarify your thinking about who Jesus is and how he
matters in the here and now.

The Bible tells us that Jesus could sympathise with our weaknesses and that
he was 'tempted in every way, just as we are.' He also knew great suffering,
dying at the hands of a callous ruler of empire having been betrayed and
abandoned by those he called friends. Jesus saw great human tragedy, and he
mourned it and sought to reverse it. He healed the sick; he sought out the
lowly and oppressed; he fed the hungry. But all the while, he knew that to
find relief, the human predicament required a more radical intervention.

Not long ago, the Australian songwriter, Nick Cave, penned an extraordinary
lyric which began: "I don't believe in an interventionist God." Since my
early teenage years, I have believed the opposite and to me it has made all
the difference. God is a loving intervener - he gets involved in our lives,
for our good.

Easter convinces me that God does intervene in - in fact, he governs -
affairs on earth. He planned a spiritual intervention that restored our
fortunes. At a particular point in history, he sent Jesus to reveal God's
plan for the salvation of those he loves, to suffer and die, and then to rise
from the grave as the justified ruler of the universe.

In doing this, God gave history a shape that we can understand. He showed us
Jesus at the heart of the universe, the one who was God in the flesh, and the
one who assured us of God's love by becoming a sacrifice for sin. The death
and resurrection of Jesus - that is, the Easter message - makes sense of the
vast and tangled data of our own lives and the accumulated history of the
world.

It is not up to us to say when God is intervening in human affairs, whether
in war or peace. However, we can know with confidence that in Jesus Christ he
came into the world to save sinners, me and you, Australian, American,
Indonesian and Iraqi. This is what we celebrate at Easter, when we come
before God with joyful humility, to acknowledge that Jesus is saviour and
Lord. May this be your conviction and confession this Easter.

__________________________________
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