4th May 2025
Rejoicing in God's New Creation...
Walking around the Kent coast and countryside during my holiday last week, the new life of spring was very clearly visible. The blues of the sky (sometimes!) and sea. The different shades of green leaves, plants and grasses. The sound of birds singing. Our celebration of Christ's resurrection at Easter seems to be mirrored, in the northern hemisphere at least, by new life springing up all around us.
During the same week, I visited an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate, entitled Resistance. In a series of photographs spanning over 100 years, we see the history of protest in the UK - suffragettes, the Jarrow marches, protests against racism in New Cross and Brixton, Greenham Common, Stop the War... One thing that struck me is how often protest is so often linked with celebration. Amidst very real injustice and pain, people danced, sang, ate together.
In raising Jesus from the dead, God is both doing something completely new in the world and continuing his plan from the very beginning, to love the humans he has made and for them to love and trust him in return. In raising Jesus from the dead, God is proving beyond doubt that by his death on the cross, Jesus has comprehensively defeated the evils that invaded the old creation - aggression and violence, injustice and cruelty, arrogance, pride, envy - in order to bring into being God's reign of justice, mercy and peace.
And yet, despite the beauty of springtime, aggression and violence, injustice and cruelty, arrogance, pride, envy seem to continue to flourish in the world. We only have to turn on the news to find them. God's new creation has been inaugurated, but it is not yet fully here. We live in the overlap between the old and the new - when the ending is guaranteed, but when and how it will unfold is still uncertain.
How are we to live in such a world as people of a risen King? Perhaps the mixture of protest and celebration gives us a starting place. We lament the injustice and pain of the world, and bring it to the God of Resurrection, the God of new life in prayer. And, in the midst of that, we celebrate - for the resurrection proves that injustice, cruelty, violence, suffering, pain, even death will never have the last word. We rejoice, as the introduction to the Lord's Prayer says in this season, in God's new creation... and then we pray "your kingdom come".
