Fr Digby Samuels, our Diocesan Youth Chaplain explores The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ Our Saviour

Whether your Easter egg is Cadbury’s, Fair-trade (hopefully!), chocolate or one of the beautifully painted type often associated with Eastern Europe and beyond, it contains food for the soul as well as the body.  Let the egg be a ‘visual aid’.

The hard shell: the tomb (an obvious one)
The breaking open: the brokenness of Christ then his bursting forth from darkness and death into New Life, the Resurrection on the third day.
The elliptical roundness: the womb, Mary, the Church, rebirth.
The egg itself: the life cycle, regeneration; strong and protective but can be crushed.

Take time to ponder your own experience of this symbol of Easter; allow the senses space to be part of your Easter meditation.  One of the Lenten graces can often be a sharpening of our senses as we let go of what numbs them – the felt hunger of fasting, the felt poverty of deeper prayer, the cry of the poor heard more loudly via almsgiving, the humiliation of admitting that maybe all these hardly got a look in throughout lent!

Maybe some of our ways of relating had become a bit like that hardened egg shell and the protective defences had needed dismantling – a Lenten penance indeed – the vulnerable fledgling emerging from the shell has no choice but to be vulnerable.  Look to Jesus, though, wasn’t the amazing impact he made as he faced his persecutors precisely through vulnerability, powerlessness?  No real love without that.

Keep him company in what he went through for you…’ all for you’.
Keep him company in his anguish in the garden, his being betrayed, his experience of abandonment even by his Father.  Look to him as he stands silent before Pilate having been stripped, scourged, crowned with thorns, mocked and treated with utter contempt.
Stay with him on that journey to Calvary staggering under the weight of the cross.
Kneel at the foot of the cross with the Mary’s and John and allow Love to melt hardness, to burn away indifference.
Weep with Mary his mother, with the Magdalene with those who loved him and heard with deep compunction of heart his seven last words.
Allow the deposition from the cross, the lying in the tomb, the decent into hell to be moments that touch your reality and that of all humanity, as well as being truths of the Creed.

Already we are risen with him (at our baptism) so keep company with Mary Magdalene in the joy of her coming to recognise the Risen Christ.  Allow yourself to receive his Love as you contemplate…. The Lord is Risen! The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

Through the gift of the Holy Spirit let him live a New Life in you and through you to others.  Rejoice that your betrayals are forgiven and like Peter you are restored because you can say from the heart yes, ‘Lord you know I love you.’

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