Better than Easter Eggs

This past week is known, in Christian calendar, as holy week starting from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday and through these seven days, five holy days will be celebrated including Palm Sunday, Holy Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Each holy day marks a significant event or celebration in the Christian calendar. Leading up to this was the lent when many believers fasted or gave up something for 40 days.

Growing up with an Anglican grandmother and mother, I saw the significance of each one played out in church, at home when food is shared with neighbours and on Easter Monday when picnics would happen as we hoped to run into Jesus at some point.

This year the Ramadan fast coincided with the lent and so our Muslim brothers and sisters are also celebrating. I was watching the news during the week and it featured clashes in one of the holiest sites in Jerusalem as people who came to pray at the wailing wall and those who came to pray at the mosque were attacked by those who chose to throw stones to disrupt what should have been a great experience for worshippers.

A young man was in tears as he helped with the clean up because he travelled 80 miles to pray at the holy site. The site of the clash is significant to the Jews, Christians and Muslims; it has always been a reason for conflict although none of these religions will say that their God is a violent and wicked God.

So it begs the question, how can people proclaim they serve a good, loving and merciful God and yet commit these atrocities on one another in the name of that ‘God’. Surely something isn’t right. All faiths will argue for how powerful God is, so why do some think they need to defend God by dominating, crushing, killing and destroying others on his behalf?

As a Christian, Easter is a reminder of victory over evil, good trumping bad and signaling eternal hope for all.

Today people in Ukraine want victory; and it looks like parents wanting safe streets, no shelling of their homes, children playing outside, food on the table and a warm home. They all want the ‘evil’ to stop and for them this means they and Russian parents want to stop burying their children, colleagues, family members and neighbours.

As we celebrate another Easter, I can’t help but ponder on some hard questions and events happening all around the world, knowing that the evil we see is because of ‘mankind’ or rather man being ‘unkind’. Many are unkind to the environment, unkind to others, we are unkind to ourselves, and, nations and their leaders are unkind to other nations and their people.

So the cycle of wickedness goes on; sadly this will only get worse unless we wake up, challenge ourselves and others to take actions.

In the last week and a bit, the Nigerian media was awash with news of a popular and phenomenally gifted Christian singer who was battered to death by her husband. This is a woman who sang of the goodness of her God, her husband went to church and heard messages about the good God that his wife sang about and sang for. But she went home to a level of abuse that can never be linked to God.

Sadly she allegedly hid the abuse though some would argue there were enough tell tale signs if people were willing to see and help her. Unfortunately there are still those who would rather people endured all manners of abuse because divorce is a worse look for the person given the societal and religious pressures.

In the UK, we have grappled with leaders who partied while people died alone, said final goodbyes over zoom or buried their loved ones without being there. A student was fined and expelled from University because he partied like the leaders did. In the same week we also had a leader defending another leader convicted of a sexual offence. Everywhere we look, we see unkindness across different levels.

So for this Easter, I am not asking for much. I don’t need Easter eggs or roast lamb dinner although they are nice. All I want and pray for, this Easter, is for mankind to make a choice to be kind to one another. We can choose to showcase goodness and speak up within every sphere of influence, we can mentor that young person, befriend the homeless person or volunteer to make a difference. We can write to our Members of parliament on critical issues that will have positive impacts.

So as I wish you a Happy Easter, I hope as we go through life, we will make a choice to be kind towards ourselves and others regardless of their faith, ethnicity, race or other distinguishing characteristics. Choose to be and do good to others. I am sure that is the bare minimum that your ‘God’ would want and expect.

Thanks for reading and sharing my post and I wish you a fantastic week.