It’s been a frustratingly long wait for the new life of Spring this year especially for most of us who cannot simply get away to a tropical beach. Snow has been falling in Lichfield, and also in Canterbury where I was last week with my brother and sister bishops from here, from across England and also from around the world at the joyous installation of our new Archbishop, Sarah, which just made the wait feel longer.
It has been a long and patient wait for the start of the Archbishop’s ministry, but coming as it did just ahead of Easter, her arrival makes me reflect that the three day wait between Good Friday and Easter Sunday must have felt much, much longer to early followers of Jesus. They didn’t know what they were waiting for, they didn’t even know that they were waiting. They didn’t all know the good news that we now know from the Bible. How could they? It hadn’t been written down and almost everybody that we know Jesus revealed his identity as the Christ the Saviour to, he told in secret.
We do know that early followers had the Old Testament prophecy about Jesus, foretelling his character and his role. What the scriptures written later recorded was the disciples recognising him as the Messiah and that he had to die and rise again.
There was speculation, expectation and controversy about who Jesus was, what he had come to do and whether he was a wicked fraud or the real thing throughout his life. There were those who wanted God’s saviour to be a conquering hero who would sweep all before him. There was speculation that he had not really died, but had merely gone far away - two mediaeval myths found in both England and India.
The story which two billion follow throughout the world, told in the catholic creeds shared across the churches, was hard fought for and has survived the myths and blips. Christian faith has influenced our common life and is our heritage. How do we now protect its authenticity, all too aware of the need to stand against distortions of what we have shared for centuries? For example, claiming that the heritage of centuries of Christianity allows us to dominate and exclude others in public is jarringly out of step with who we are. Were our Easter walks of witness or the beating of the bounds to be acts asserting that only Christian enjoyed such privileges, they would be acts of domination themselves; but that is not at all what Easter is about.
The freedoms to practise in public the Christian faith come from our understanding of ourselves as a nation, informed by Christian faith, wrought over centuries. Our freedom of belief and conscience arises out of our understanding of the value of each individual to live their life and live it fully because it is of infinite value and they are infinitely loved by God. The freedom arises from our deep understanding of who we are, not from the application of an identity label.
We express a generous faith in which we see that our freedoms guarantee the freedoms of others too. To do otherwise would place us in the position of asserting that some people are of greater value than others. That would be the opposite of what Christ died and rose again for. I wish you, as you reflect on that, the joy of the resurrection this Easter.
The Rt Revd Michael Ipgrave,
Bishop of Lichfield