Easter is Coming
Dear Parents,
Easter is coming.
Lots of our MCC households are Christian households, but many are not. We have other religions among our MCC families. We also have families who acknowledge the goodness of God but haven’t yet moved towards organised religion.
So, to equip all our MCC parents to discuss Easter-specific topics with your children, I would like to explain the basics of the special part of Easter that we call Good Friday.
Like Christmas, Easter is all about Jesus. Jesus is the centre of the Christian faith because Christians believe Jesus to be the one and only incarnation of God. For Christians, there are no other incarnations; Jesus is God in human form.
The two main celebration days within Easter are Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. Good Friday is called ‘Good’ because Jesus did such a good thing for all of us on that day. Let me explain…
You know how in our hearts we feel a persistent sense of restlessness. I assume that you, like me, feel a sense of restlessness in your heart. Perhaps, like me, you are dissatisfied with your efforts to be good, and you feel like you could do better, be better, and live better. Perhaps, like me you feel like you let yourself down, let your family down, and do the wrong thing often. It is almost like the things that you want to do, you don’t do, and the very things that you don’t want to do are the things you end up doing. I feel the same. These feelings indicate our imperfection.
As Christians, we believe that because we are imperfect, God, who is perfect, is out of our reach. Furthermore, as Christians, we believe that our imperfection results in our lives ending sadly when we die, rather than our lives going on forever in joyful closeness with God. That is sad. We feel sad about that, and we want it to be different.
No matter how much I want it to be different, no matter how much I want to be better, I am unable to redeem myself. I cannot change myself. I stay stuck in my own selfishness and imperfection. As Christians we believe that sadly, death is the destiny that results from this imperfectness. We cannot live joyfully forever with God because God is perfect, and our imperfection means we just cannot get there no matter how hard we try. That’s pretty bad, but that is where the ‘Good’ in Good Friday comes in; you see, on Good Friday, Jesus took on our badness, and that was really good.
On Good Friday, Jesus allowed himself to be killed. Remember that Jesus is God in human form, so He died like any normal person would die, except that He didn’t have to die. He chose to die, and He did it for us.
He was perfect, and yet He died. We are imperfect, and so we die. Our imperfectness means there is a death to be done. But since Good Friday, even though our bodies will still die, now that Jesus has done death for us, we Christians believe that after our earthly death, we will live on, joyfully forever with God.
Resurrection Sunday is right after Good Friday. It is called that because even though Jesus died on Good Friday, He came back fully alive on Resurrection Sunday (resurrection means rising from the dead). Because Jesus died and came back to life, He is able to promise us that He can bring us to be with him forever in Heaven after we die.
I hope that knowing what Christians believe about Good Friday and why we call it ‘Good’ is helpful for everyone. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we get to live better now and to find completeness in joyful life with Jesus after we die.
David Gleeson
Principal