14th April, 2006

ANN WOJCZUK

Well, here we are. All over the world in this Easter season, our Jesus family come together in the awesome reality of a perfectly holy and wonderfully powerful Creator King who stepped into His Creation as a flesh and blood human and brought together a rescue plan. The Divine Rescue - for a cosmos stained and staggering under the sin of man's turning from God.

Easter is truly a season for Christ's people - to focus on and speak of His love, His life, His death, and ultimately His plan to pull all things back together in His hands and 'reverse the curse'. But saying that, Jesus came for all people. It is so important that from Him, our gaze and action turn outward to the millions who do not yet know of His love for them.

PICTURE: Steve Cohen (www.sxc.hu) "When Jesus gathered himself and cried out 'It is finished!', the full weight of our sinful and selfish mismanagement passed over into the hands of a sacrificial King. Everything that separated humankind from our Creator, our Father, was taken from us and into Him. He bridged the rip through the heart of creation by taking the sin and laying across the gap. This is the something wonderful."

When He walked the earth and showed us God's character, when He wielded love and justice with such conviction and graceful strength, when He moved so naturally in the spiritual, He showed us our Divine Origin, the One who is and always has been Our Father. Jesus reconnected people with God's true personality and as He died by the hands of men, He held the weight of the world in His broken body - full of a vision streaming from the throne of His Father, of a cosmos regained, of a people once again moving in the will, heart and hands of their Creator.

Oh Jesus, I strain to understand Your love and what You see...and in the blurring smallness of my understanding, I love you deeply for your vision of us all.

You know I look at the state He was reduced to on the cross - ragged and torn, bleeding, vulnerable and exposed - and can't help but think of the state of Creation now. Our world itself is ragged and torn, vulnerable and exposed, many of its population suffer the same. Yet in the midst of the mire of consequence we suffer through humanities’ wilfulness and Satan's deceptive schemes, there is something powerful, hopeful and wonderful at work.

Why? Because when Jesus gathered himself and cried out 'It is finished!', the full weight of our sinful and selfish mismanagement passed over into the hands of a sacrificial King. Everything that separated humankind from our Creator, our Father, was taken from us and into Him. He bridged the rip through the heart of creation by taking the sin and laying across the gap. This is the something wonderful.

This one life, death and resurrection is literally the crossroad of time. Jesus cried out 'It is finished!', breathed His last, gave His spirit up to His waiting Father and creative power was released. One death and...sonic boom! Power comes forth into the earth realm, a rock-shattering earthquake. The great heavy curtain of the Jewish temple, separating sinful man from the holy glory of God tore spontaneously in two from top to bottom and the earth and man met God Himself in a shout of triumph - 'No more separation!'

When Jesus made that last profound cry and gave up His life for us, He split time in two. Now, what was lost in the garden of Eden - that deep connection with God, Father and children together - could begin again. And though a great enemy had seen the fruit of his destructions roll on century upon century, carving a chasm of sin through the ages, with one prophecy-fulfilling life, sacrificed and raised, the Son of God had signalled Satan's eviction and shattered his plan to rule.

Jesus Christ did not stay on the cross, He didn't stay in the grip of death. He was raised in the power of God to restore the Life squeezed out of the universe. We celebrate the greatest reconciliation, the greatest restoration, eternity will ever see. At Easter, we celebrate the passionate heart of God for His children, for what He has made - distilled in the human life of His Son and completed in the ruling love of that same Son, seated as King over all time and all creation.

Though as yet we see that glory break through in part, we know resurrection power is at work in this universe. There is a great and glorious hope alive in the hearts of many around the globe, each one of us holds within our spirit, the very reality and presence of our Creator and Saviour. We carry His passion and His power.

Easter is not just an annual moment, it is an eternity working steadily towards the fullness of all things, held in the fragile lives of human beings by a determined and victorious Christ.

YOUR SAY

How will you be celebrating Easter and what does it mean to you?

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