CLERGY LETTER FOR

APRIL 2010

The Revd June Knight writes....

 When I was a child!

‘When I was a child. . . .I  thought like a child . . .now I am an adult I have put childish ways behind me’. (1 Corinthians 13)

When I was a child, Easter for me meant chocolate eggs and freshly baked hot cross buns which my father bought from the village bakery on Good Friday mornings (they opened for just two hours to enable customers to collect their fresh buns).  At lunch time we enjoyed our Good Friday lunch treat; a tin of red salmon, new potatoes and salad.  The salad always included the first tomato and cucumber of the year.  After lunch we would go out into the countryside looking for ‘Pussy Willow’.

What are your childhood memories of Easter?

Now that I am an adult, Easter has taken on a very different meaning, oh yes I still enjoy hot cross buns, chocolate eggs and salmon, but the festival of Easter means so much more to me:

Maundy Thursday, which I once associated with the Queen’s gift of Maundy money to the poor, now takes on a much sadder and solemn note as I remember Jesus’ last hours on this earth.  That Last Supper when His disciple Judas Iscariot betrayed Him for the paltry sum of thirty pieces of silver, which lead to the intense agony in the garden of Gethsemane and culminating in His arrest and torture.

Good Friday and the ultimate shame and torture of crucifixion and His slow and agonising death. Instead of hunting for hours looking for ‘Pussy Willow’ branches, a solemn ‘Walk of Witness’ through the town followed by three hours ‘sitting at the foot of the cross’ meditating on the huge sacrifice Our Lord has paid on our behalf.

Easter Sunday the sheer joy of entering the church, which for the previous forty days had been bereft of flowers and was now revealing an explosion of colour and beauty resonating the triumph of the Risen Christ.

To have the reassurance that the crucified Christ has overcome death and is alive, and to know with all certainty that there really is life beyond the gate of death is what Easter means to me now that ‘I am an adult and have put away childish things’.

So what about you? Have you moved on from the childish notions of Easter and if you have perhaps we will see you in Church over the Easter weekend! Have A Very Happy Easter.                                 

June Knight