Arminghall

Easter’s coming early

It can’t just be the vicars who have noticed that Easter is coming early this year. A quick online search shows that between 2015 and 2030, Easter Sunday is only falling in March on three occasions. So the diary definitely agrees: early it is.

But is Easter really that early?

The Bible has two ways of looking at it. First of all, it would seem the opposite is true. There are centuries of longing through the Old Testament that the Messiah will come. Over and over comes the haunting question, “How long?” Here’s one of them: “We are given no signs from God; no prophets are left, and none of us knows how long this will be.”

Perhaps you have known times of great longing, or are in one now. You might long for something, or someone. No sign of it happening, no-one seems any the wiser, you don’t know how long it might be. But I wonder if you are aware of longing for God, and for Easter?

Lots of those people in the Old Testament didn’t have a very clear idea that their longing would end up at Easter, but we get some hints. Isaiah writes about the Lamb who was slain, bearing the sin of many, and about the idea of death being swallowed up forever. The two great promises of Easter, Jesus’s death and resurrection, were glimpsed even then. One day, longing would be fulfilled.

Of course, there’s another way of looking at it. Looking back at Easter, instead of forward, Paul has a different perspective: “at just the right time, while we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” So we have the same idea, in some ways – longing feels like powerlessness, doesn’t it? – but at the same time something different and extraordinary. The time has come. The object of the deepest of human longing has arrived, and arrived for the powerless, and the ungodly. Jesus does not look for our strength, or our goodness: only our longing. 

Except not only our longing. When you look at the times in the bible that someone asks, “How long”, you notice something unexpected. Time and again, it’s God’s voice, not ours. His longing for a wandering and wayward people to come back to a Father who loves them beyond understanding. A God who has searched for us since way before we searched for him; who looks at us and asks, “How long?”

For God too, it was time. Time for his longing and the longing of all his people to meet at the first Easter, when Jesus died and rose again for all of us at just the right time.

Next year, Easter will be three weeks later. But that won’t mean we will have even more time to long for its coming than this year. It will already have come, already be done; for us, by Jesus, at just the right time.

Happy Easter everyone 

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