Many of us think that Easter is but one day.

There we would be mistaken. Eastertide runs all the way to Pentecost Sunday, which comes 50 days later. Sunday Lectionary readings continue to point us to the holy mystery of Christ’s resurrection and the promise of eternal bodily resurrection on the Last Day.

On Easter Day, a number of articles appeared in the press discussing the most important feast in the Church calendar. If Christ had not risen from the dead, then our hope as Christians is in vain.

Christ’s disciples did not understand or believe that He would actually rise from the dead on the third day. It was incomprehensible to them, even though Jesus had said this would happen. Furthermore, He raised his good friend Lazarus from the dead several days beforehand. The Critic explored this in light of Mark’s Gospel, ‘This vision glorious’, concerning the women who found our Lord’s tomb empty (emphases mine):

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid (Mark 16:8)

This is the description in Saint Mark’s Gospel of the response of the women at the empty Tomb on the first Easter Day. It is, scholars think, the earliest of the four Gospel accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We might think that it lacks Easter joy. “Fled … trembled … amazed … afraid”: these are not words that immediately come to mind when wishing someone a “Happy Easter”. Indeed, the fact that these women were initially silent in the face of the empty Tomb — and, for good measure, an angelic vision declaring “he is risen; he is not here” — overturns any assumption that the Resurrection of Jesus was received as a straightforward “all is good, no need to worry” affirmation.

As we realise when reading Saint Mark’s account of the Resurrection of Jesus alongside those in the other gospels, there is nothing straightforward, easily comprehended about the Resurrection. The accounts by the four Evangelists do not at all neatly, comfortably sit beside each other. The timelines, the characters, the events cannot be straightforwardly pieced together, as if we were watching the concluding episode of a television series, or reading the final chapter of an airport novel. 

The various timelines, characters, and events in the accounts given of the Resurrection in the four Gospels are infinitely richer and more demanding. They are witnessing to and seeking to convey to us something of the explosion of divine presence, light, and life that occurred at that Tomb on the first Easter Day. Little wonder that the four Gospel accounts are anything but straightforward; little wonder that they can appear confused, even contradictory. Language, experience, recollection — all these are stretched far beyond what they can possibly contain on the first Easter Day. The One who is eternal Light and Life, the mighty Creator of all that is, touches and fills the Tomb with creative, life-giving power. 

Neat, comfortable, easily comprehended accounts of the empty Tomb would utterly fail to convey the explosive outpouring of this creative, life-giving power. No straightforward affirmation, the Resurrection of Jesus brings us, with those women at the Tomb, to be silenced in awe and reverence before the revelation of God’s life-giving presence and saving purposes …

The current — and long-running — trend to see Christianity as a social justice project undermines the Resurrection:

There is little that quite so undermines the proclamation of the Resurrection of Jesus, the Easter faith, than regarding it as an affirmation of a political or cultural project. Neatly fitting the Resurrection into political or cultural visions, as a convenient, helpful prop, is to profoundly misunderstand (if not deny) the faith of Easter. It is to entirely set aside Saint Mark’s account of the reaction of the women at the empty Tomb, rendering their reaction unnecessary and inappropriate rather than the authentic witness to God’s presence and act in the Resurrection. 

Let us reflect on this, not just on Easter, which seems an eternity ago for some, but during the rest of Eastertide:

… let us heed the response of the women at the empty Tomb, recognising in that response the witness to the out-pouring of Eternal Light and Life, bringing to humanity — broken, confused, and foolish as we are — participation in the Resurrection life, anticipated now and having its fullness in the life of the world to come …

May Easter Day renew us — amidst whatever tombs, whatever defeats and failures and fears we know — in this enduring hope, this vision glorious.

Another theme which runs from the Crucifixion through to the Resurrection is that of forgiveness, which is so difficult. It can be for me, anyway, particularly in serious situations when people who know how to help have been unhelpful.

It is easier to hold on to grudges against such people than it is to forgive them.

Another article in The Critic, ‘Try Christianity’, explores our difficulty in forgiving others, something that Jesus did so readily, yet He suffered much more hurt than we do.

Let’s start with apologies, something else few of us do:

… the pen of P. G. Wodehouse still manages to express a multitude of sentiments from the pews. On this occasion I’m thinking specifically of a line from The Man Upstairs: “It is a good rule of life never to apologise. The right sort of people don’t want apologies, and the wrong sort of people want to take a mean advantage of them.” In his narration, Wodehouse has summed up how many Anglicans, perhaps even many English Christians, think about God, sin, confession and forgiveness.

While Wodehouse has a point, I would venture that his view on apologies pertains to most people, not just English Christians.

Furthermore, our reluctance to forgive varies among cultures. For some, the mantra is, ‘Don’t get mad, get even’.

The article points us, using the words of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer in the first paragraph below, to our Lord’s example that we remember on Good Friday:

… we are confronted by this God-Man who allows himself to be vulnerable, who confidently demands contrition, and whose property is always to have mercy …

Many of us still believe and act on the conviction that contrition and forgiveness is really rather complicated and perhaps should be avoided. Or that it can only be extended when the one wronged has returned to a position of power and the enfeebled supplicant comes begging. Examples are superfluous here — you will know when your hackles are raised by injustice or snobbery or idiocy. 

The quality of mercy is so alien to the wounded creature that it simply must be a miracle. Today that quality is one which we see in the most maligned of persons, the Man of Nazareth, hanging on the cross. “A man of sorrows”, Isaiah called him, “acquainted with grief — despised and rejected.” When soldiers struck and mocked him he returned “Father, forgive them.” When the thief next to him asked for clemency, he granted it.

Even when we assent to a conceptual understanding of Christian forgiveness we qualify it. As Cosimo de Medici wryly put it, “We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.” However, Jesus’ business on earth was not finished until he had assured his friend Peter, the one who denied him, of his consistency.  

Today we remember that Jesus of Nazareth decided that forgiveness was worth dying for. And his life and death stand as an example and challenge to us still.

Well, one would not have seen either of these two themes in the media between Good Friday and Easter, March 29 and March 31, 2024.

A third article in The Critic examined the BBC’s online headlines on March 29:

… it is Good Friday, and the front page of the BBC website appears to have precisely no references to the occasion. The “culture” section contains articles about Beyoncé, the Oscars (that holy ceremony!), Godzilla x Kong and “What we know about the accusations against Diddy”. Stirring stuff. 

Buried deep on the site’s “Topics” section is a “Religion” page. Recent articles include “Rastafarian faith mentor dies, aged 73” (RIP to him) and “UK’s first Turkish mosque faces threat to its future”. Nothing about Easter — though there is a guide to celebrating Holi, which is nice.

A fourth article in The Critic points the finger of blame at the established Church for promoting social justice ideology, ‘The Church of England is practising a secular religion’:

Church attendance is of course declining. One in five worshippers has disappeared since 2019 alone. Is the Church of England spending more and more money on dubious forms of “anti-racism” under the delusion that it will attract young leftists to its services on Sundays? Or perhaps this quasi-theological endeavour is just a more winnable cause than encouraging religious belief and practice. Justin Welby cannot fill his churches but he can fill his heart with a sense of righteousness. 

This isn’t good enough — not for anyone. An obsessive interest in the sacred values of equality diversity and inclusion can distract believers from the divine, but it also threatens the social functions of the Church of England. The Church is one of the last major foundations of tradition left in the United Kingdom, along with the monarchy. The identitarian left has been tearing at the stitches holding us together for a number of years. To imitate its most fanatical tendencies is to encourage divisiveness rather than inclusion.

The Church of England should stop enabling these phenomena. Granted, to place the blame for its diminished status entirely on “woke Welby” would be naive. The problem predates the current Archbishop of Canterbury. A Telegraph analysis shows that church attendance has more than halved since 1987. However, the embrace of secular religion is exacerbating rather than ameliorating its decline.

This year, the Easter services at Canterbury Cathedral featured the Lord’s Prayer recited in Urdu or Swahili, led by native speakers of those languages. On the face of it, it’s something inclusive. Yet, people in every non-English speaking country recite the Lord’s Prayer in their own tongues. When, on holiday, I used to attend services at the Reformed Church of France, I joined everyone in reciting it in French. Therefore, what’s the big deal?

The Telegraph covered the story (as did GB News) in ‘Canterbury Cathedral reads Lord’s Prayer in Urdu and Swahili during Easter service’:

At the 10am service shown on the BBC, The Very Rev Dr David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, invited each member of the congregation to say the Lord’s Prayer in their own language, while it was led in Urdu on the microphone by a member from Pakistan. The subtitles on the screen were in English.

At an earlier service, aired on Radio 4, the prayer was led in Swahili.

The Dean said: “We invite congregations to say the Lord’s Prayer in their own first language at most of our communion services …

“From time to time, we invite someone to lead in their preferred language of prayer – today it’s in Congo Swahili as he was ordained in Zaire, and by a member of the Community of St Anselm from Pakistan …”

Then came Justin Welby’s sermon, which had nothing to do with the Resurrection, the core tenet of the Christian faith:

Shortly after the Lord’s Prayer was said, the Most Rev Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, used his Easter sermon at the cathedral to condemn “the evil of people smugglers” in the wake of a row over the Clapham chemical attacker being granted asylum.

The article also points out:

Several Church of England dioceses faced backlash after appointing individuals or teams to address racial inequality in their regions amid concerns they would alienate ordinary worshippers.

However, dissent is also present elsewhere in the world. Anglican church groupings outside the UK are at odds with Welby:

The Archbishop has been struggling to unite the Anglican Communion because of the row on same-sex blessings.

The conservative Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), which represents churches on every continent and the majority of Anglicans worldwide, has previously said that it expects the organisation to “formally disassociate” from both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England.

However, it was not only Justin Welby pulling the identity politics strings. In the United States, Joe Biden’s administration declared Easter Sunday, of all days, Trans Visibility Day.

And here I thought that Joe Biden was a Catholic.

The Telegraph had an article on the story, ‘Joe Biden has betrayed Christian America’. The most telling sentence was this one:

And certainly he had dozens of other dates on the transgender awareness calendar, including a whole week in November, he could have chosen instead.

Returning to the UK, on April 3, The Telegraph‘s Madeline Grant wrote about Richard Dawkins having his cake and eating it in ‘Christianity’s decline has unleashed terrible new gods’:

… Professor Dawkins’ admission that he considers himself a “cultural Christian”, who is, at the very least, ambivalent about Anglicanism’s decline is an undeniably contradictory position for a man who in the past campaigned relentlessly against any role for Christianity in public life, railing against faith schools and charitable status for churches.

Before we start preparing the baptismal font, it’s worth noting that Dawkins says he remains “happy” with the UK’s declining Christian faith, and that those beliefs are “nonsense”. But he also says that he enjoys living in a Christian society. This betrays a certain level of cultural free-riding. The survival of society’s Christian undercurrent depends on others buying into the “nonsense” even if he doesn’t.

Grant gives us an example of the ‘terrible new gods’ — Scotland’s new Hate Crime Act which came into force on April 1:

By the New Atheist logic, it ought to be the most rational place in the UK since de-Christianisation has occurred there at a faster rate. Membership of the national Church of Scotland has fallen by 35 per cent in 10 years and the Scottish Churches Trust warns that 700 Christian places of worship will probably close in the next few years. A Scottish friend recently explained that every place where he’d come to faith – where he was christened, where his father was buried – had been shut or sold. This is not only a national tragedy, but a personal one.

New Atheism assumed that, as people abandoned Christianity they would embrace a sort of enlightened, secular position. The death of Christian Scotland shows this was wrong. Faith there has been replaced by derangement and the birthplace of the Scottish enlightenment – which rose out of Christian principles – now worships intolerant new gods.

The SNP’s draconian hate crime legislation is a totemic example. Merely stating facts of biology might earn you a visit from the Scottish police. But perhaps Christianity has shaped even this. It cannot be a coincidence that Scotland, home of John Knox, is now at the forefront of the denigration of women. The SNP’s new blasphemy laws are just the latest blast of that trumpet … 

… Much of what atheists ascribed to vague concepts of “reason” emerged out of the faith which informed the West’s intellectual, moral, and, yes, scientific life – a cultural oxygen we breathe but never see …

… The world isn’t morally neutral, and never has been.

Recognising Christianity’s cultural impact is the first step. The bigger task facing the West is living out these values in an age when they are increasingly under threat.

On Easter Day, The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley, an agnostic turned Roman Catholic, wrote about the horror of what assisted dying — euthanasia — legislation could bring to the UK. At the end, he had this to say about the impact that widespread unbelief has had on Holy Week and Easter:

Christ died on Good Friday, but for much of the zeitgeist he has never risen again, setting the context for this debate that is minus the hope that once brightened the lives of Westerners even in war or plague.

I thank God I am a Christian. I would have to fake it if I weren’t. In an atheistic culture, beyond the here and now, there is little to live for – and when the here and now become unbearable, nowhere to turn but death.

It is up to us as individuals, with or without the help of the Church and the media, to keep the spirit of forgiveness and the hope of bodily resurrection alive. How do we do that? By studying the Bible, verse by verse.