This is the script of this morning's Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4's Today programme:
When I got back from the Easter celebrations in Wakefield Cathedral yesterday I had no idea what was about to happen in Lahore with the deliberate targeting of Christians in a Taliban suicide bombing. The contrast between the celebrations here and the cost for those in Pakistan could not be stronger: death and resurrection are not just theological notions, but lived realities. However, what had been on my mind up to then was Karl Marx. He talked about the cost of turning people into commodities, making people and ideas into things.
What triggered this line of musing was the report that Easter is becoming the new Christmas. Apparently, increasing numbers of people are now sending Easter cards, buying and exchanging Easter gifts, and, while seeming to reject notions of resurrection or God, seem happy to deify a bunny rabbit with eggs in a basket. As they say, it's a funny old world.
What struck me about this was summed up in a media report I read following the Archbishop of Canterbury's statements about fixing the date of Easter itself. The responses seem to refer only to the impact that this might have on shopping and the sales of stuff. Everything has a price and everything ultimately gets reduced to its economic value or usefulness as a cog in the economic machine. I guess this is the final outworking of a language that replaces the social market with a market economy.
But, I am not sure this is ultimately helpful to us as individuals or as a society. People must surely be worth more than the mere economic value they represent either as producers or consumers, even if a couple of extra days holiday – perhaps even shopping – are welcome. Christians celebrate Easter as the day the promise of Christmas became surprisingly real: that the light that has come into the world cannot be extinguished even by death or violence or destruction. Yet, as I have walked with Jesus and his friends through Holy Week to death and resurrection, the light has looked pretty dim in a world in which the power brokers flex their military and economic muscles to keep the small people in check.
Easter is an invitation to face the darkness, to stare into the empty tomb to where death is supposed to be an end, and is the opposite of escapism or fantasy. Resurrection does not deny the power of destruction or evil; rather, it looks it in the eye and goes beyond it to new life. If Christmas represents – as one songwriter put it – “earth surprised by heaven”, then Easter surprises us with the whispered hint that there is more to life than death, and more to death than destruction.
Jesus objected to people being used as mere cogs in anyone's machine – even for their own theological purposes – and, so, met his bewildered friends in their abject darkness, met them where they were. They were surprised to find that their future was open, that they could be free even when oppressed. And that is what Christians call hope.
