In an Easter message for Marlborough News Online readers, Marlborough’s Rector, the Rev Canon Andrew Studdert-Kennedy, invites you to play the game What If?
In an attempt to show the importance of key moments in the past, historians sometimes play a game in which they imagine what would have happened if the event in question had been different, he writes.
For instance, historians have speculated about what might have happened if the German Luftwaffe had ‘won’ the Battle of Britain in 1940. By looking at the possible consequences, the significance of the event is shown in sharper relief.
I sometimes think that this is a good way to start to think about Easter.
For Easter is so foundational for the Christian faith, that it can be hard to know quite where to begin. So let us imagine…. What if Jesus had not been raised from the dead?
If Jesus had not been raised from the dead, then the chances are that none of us would ever have heard of him today. For Jesus would have been just another failed Messiah, another of those to whom people looked for redemption but who had failed to deliver.
In short, Jesus would have been forgotten and all that we know about him would have been forgotten with him. We would have been deprived of Jesus’ entire ministry and never heard of his teaching, or his healing.
The entire pattern of his humanity would have been lost. Everything in the gospels stems from the resurrection and so does our entire Christian heritage. As it has been put:
The gospels don’t explain the resurrection, the resurrection explains the gospels.
So although Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, in effect it celebrates everything we know about him. For had there been no resurrection, there would have been no gospel to proclaim.
If imagining its opposite, is a helpful way of gauging the significance of Easter, logic can help us begin to consider some implications. Because Jesus is not dead, he must be alive; if he is alive we can get to know him. Jesus called people to follow him in the past; he calls us to follow him in the present.
But still we might wonder what this all means. By raising Jesus from the dead, God shows not just that love is stronger than death but also affirms all the values of inclusiveness, love and forgiveness that Jesus embodied. That’s what Christians try to follow.
A recent survey published in The Times newspaper suggested that 52 per cent of adults in Britain don’t know what the church celebrates at Easter. The short answer is that we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead; the slightly longer answer is that we celebrate that he is alive, that he is knowable and that he calls us to follow him.
Easter tells us that there is no part of human experience that God doesn’t already know (‘He descended into hell’) and that none of it can defeat him. As a character from a William Boyd novel once said, ‘My God, that’s some menu’!
Our Easter celebrations are thus the beginnings of a new response to this most generous of menus.
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