Good Friday - Easter Weekend.

At bible study last week we talked of our plans for the weekend. I have to confess that I am very glad that this is a four-day weekend. I am very glad for the break from work. And seriously, at this point it hasn't really entered into my mind _why_ we have this four days. I was not looking forward to Easter so that I might contemplate the reason for our hope.

:: Aside :: - Guan - a disease infected post is to come.. ;) :: End Aside ::

Deb posted a brief excerpt from an article that appeared in The Age during the week, about a church in Melbourne that was using an alternative worship styles to present the Easter Message. Thought I'd expand on my reflections a touch here, I think that there is perhaps some merit here - (IF, and only if it is framed properly)~ I think that emotion can play a valuable role in the expression and growth of our faith.

For example - the movie The Passion of the Christ, can provoke a deep a personal response to the death of Christ as an innocent. (Aside: If you were redoing the movie the Passion of the Christ - how would you emphasises the "spiritual/psychological" suffering of Christ to appease the Evangelicals?)

But there is a danger in not framing the emotional response, without giving a context, or a realisitic view of the struggles and pains of the Christian life?

Perhaps noone disputes that emotion can and should be used as servants, but if we are ruled, governed or lead solely by our emotion, this is a dangerous thing.

This was illustrated perhaps at the service I went to with my parents (at their church) this morning, didn't have a passage "preached on", or explained from the pulpit. John 19-20 was read, in stages. During the service, people came up to a wooden cross which had words - Hope, Joy, Faith, Love, and Peace, written on paper, and burned them, as they describes responses you could imagine the disciples would have had on that first Good Friday. I am sure that I couldn't sit through a service like this every Sunday, but I often think I need to hear the story afresh, anew, each Easter. Oh I intellectually know the story, but I think I need the Spirit to work that it might reasonate each year. That I would hear that wondrous story, that God became man, that God entered His creation and died, that we would not, as if for the first time.

Courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald, some reflections on Easter, and Good Friday.

Hugh Mackay.

The Radical Challenge of Easter - Editorial Good Friday, 2005.