Another Bloody Easter

Or something clean and sanitised?
  
For the children Easter is fluffy chicks, Easter bonnet parades, chocolate eggs and daffodils.
  
Easter is not for children is it?   After all, how many of us have been to Easter plays at our children's schools? How many of us will have seen or heard about an innocent man dragged before puppet kings and rulers placed by occupying forces this year? How many of us will have seen the blood and the gore of a crucifixion? It's not like Christmas with the angels, wise men and stables is it?
  
Living the shortest life in history Jesus comes at Christmas and exits at Easter - job done. Many of us know nothing of the thirty-three years in between. We know nothing of the fact that we were all separated from God by the wrong things that we do, by the lives that put us first and the possessions that possess us until Jesus died in our place.
    
God wants to be part of our lives and wants to help us take the right paths and have the best we can in our lives and by the Cross, an instrument of torture, pain and death He beings for us peace, healing and eternal life.
  
Christians, like Jesus, seek to serve, restore and renew others, copying Christ, through programmes, interventions and good works. They give their time and money to bring relief, to show love and to bring healing but this is not enough. It's great to bring relief to troubles, but what the world cries out for is a cure, an end to the pain and the emptiness and confusion.
  
For all of humanity Easter is an invitation to have a relationship with the Creator of all that is. To find a peace that the world cannot take away and that never ends. For each of us, Jesus, the Christ, goes to the Cross and dies there for us. He takes the bullet for us and we, if we accept this reality, have a new life within us and before us.
  
Which will we choose - easter eggs and fluffy bunnies or a man upon a cross for us and life filled with God and good?
  
Hallelujah! Sunday's coming :)