Do you love Easter Eggs?
A family tradition in our home is to give a large chocolate egg to each of our family on Easter Sunday followed by an Easter egg hunt, where I spend 15 minutes in the backyard trying to find every nook and cranny to hide a tiny Easter egg. Some eggs are placed on top of the water heater, the gap between the bricks in the wall, in the peg basket on the clothes line, a crack in the fence, or on top of a window sill, to name a few. Normally over 40 eggs get distributed around the place.
Then each member of our family comes out looking for the places to find their quota of eggs. Over the years a lot of the hidden places have become common and so it’s therefore hard for me to come up with new hiding places to surprise the family. They in turn have lost some of the wonder of searching and seeking out a new hidden place as they know where to look.
Easter for some can also be a bit like this, as we age, we can lose the wonder of Easter. We celebrate it by going to church perhaps on Easter Friday and/or Easter Sunday but because we have done it so often it becomes ordinary, common and therefore it is hard to see new perspectives in the meaning of Easter.
But because of Easter, mankind has been given a wonderful gift of eternal life, free from the eternal punishment we deserve, as Jesus died on the cross to take away the sins of the world. Not only did he die but he rose again on the third day, and that is why Easter Sunday is celebrated as a triumphant day of rejoicing. In John 20:17 we read ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’
Many in our society have lost the wonder and miracle of Jesus’s death and resurrection – the true meaning of Easter and that he had to die, as a sinless man in all respects, so that we could be united with God through his death.
"I have come that you might have life and have it to the full" – John 10:10
I recently received this author unknown poem from my pastor, which shares what Jesus did for us at Easter, which I would like to leave with you.
Jesus Our Advocate
In the darkness of Gethsemane
You wept for us
Shedding tears of blood
You shared our pain
Jesus Our Redeemer
On the way to the Cross
You suffered for us
Tortured, spat upon and despised
You carried our burdens
Jesus Our Saviour
On the hill of Calvary
You died for us
Crucified and hung upon a tree
You released us into freedom
Son of the Living God
Redeemer, Saviour, Advocate
Through the journey of suffering
In the place of darkness
You overcame death forever
And gave us new life.
May you see the wonder of the meaning of Easter afresh this year.
Michael Capon
Staff member of Focus on the Family Australia