The people who met Jesus saw in him a way of life they had never seen before. He held out to them healing and freedom. He spoke liberating truth to them. It was so compelling that when they saw him they wanted to follow him and they saw stretching out ahead of them a way of life that seemed new and full of life in all its fullness.
So when he died, as they gathered around the cross, it seemed as if all of that had fallen apart. As if a sinkhole had opened up in this road that stretched ahead of them and suddenly there was nothing, there they were teetering on the edge of the abyss.
But on that first Easter day, when Jesus rose from the dead, all that hope came flooding back. It was like a solid bridge had been built into a certain future.
The first Christians realised nothing can stop us from inheriting that life that Jesus promised us. Nothing can ever again hold us back because even death can't keep us from the good and certain future that God has prepared for us.
Peter, one of those first disciples, wrote in the New Testament about this hope. He described it as a new birth into a living hope, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. In other words, he was saying the hope that Jesus gives us can never be taken away. We can't lose it. We can hold onto it, however much we might feel like we're teetering on the edge of the abyss.
What this means for us today as we celebrate Easter is that we have a hope for the future, which is like a solid bridge; bridging over all the uncertainties that we look at as we look around our world today. All the things we thought we could rely on. A stable political order in our nation, a geopolitical realm that relies on the observance of international laws, the weather doing roughly what we expect it to, the economy being by and large fairly stable. As all of these things shift and shake there is one unshakable hope because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
So as we celebrate this Easter let's hold on to that hope ourselves and hold it out to a world that desperately needs it. Happy Easter.