Last year a parishioner from my former parishes sent me a picture of the Easter Garden she had been caring for in church. The Garden was a miniature recreation of the scene at Calvary after the resurrection, made up of plants and things from a garden.
She had sent me the picture because when she had gone to water the plants she noticed the cross in the middle, made of twigs, was sprouting with a tiny shoot. That which had apparently been dead was alive. My former parishioner took this as a wonderful little picture of the resurrection. Better still a day or two later one of the other crosses also sprouted, so she could take that one to be the cross of the thief who had acknowledged both his own guilt and Jesus’ innocence. Jesus promised him, ‘this day you will be with me in paradise.’
I asked if I might use the picture next year, so here we are.
Now was that sprouting into new life an Easter miracle? Should we adopt a metropolitan scepticism towards the faith of a country woman in a small village church in rustic North Yorkshire?
It depends what you mean by ‘miracle’, if you mean a magical and inexplicable event, then no. But then that’s not exactly what a miracle is, it does annoy me when self proclaimed sceptics run through the tautological argument that as miracles are impossible occurrences they must therefore be impossible, or the fanciful who attribute everything unexplained to the miraculous and are then disappointed when an explanation is found – as if the boundaries of God could be rolled back by pointing out that which has become obvious.
The explanation of the twig sprouting was horticultural not supernatural, although apparently dead the twig had life in it like a cutting from a plant, still that was a picture of a greater truth, that the life in nature is not easily extinguished, and of the even greater truth that death and new life are a part of our existence, that much perhaps anyone can see, but then there is a greater truth than even these, the truth revealed at Easter. A miracle is a sign, whether explicable or not is irrelevant, the spectacular may draw our attention but miracles are not fireworks that go whizzBANG, they are moments of revelation.
God is not a conjurer, he is a sign writer.
The point is not to guess ‘how he did it?’ but what rather to ask ‘what does it mean?’
The tale of the crosses was reported to me with good humour, in that wit and wisdom that comes from finding yourself unexpectedly in a place where the transcendent present in everyday life has perhaps been made apparent, like God has winked at you. Such moments cannot be used as a measure to mark off the divine in feet and inches anymore than we can take hold of the light in our hands.
Easter is a miracle, a sign pointing to eternal truths, many meanings may be spoken about it with truth, but at its heart it is a sign of the love of God, as St Paul argued because Jesus died and was raised to life and is now at the right hand of God we can know that we cannot be separated from his love, he writes,
“I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That we are loved eternally and irrevocably by the author of life, that is worth knowing and celebrating.
The twigs that sprouted into leaf in that Easter garden may well be no more, but they were a sign of something eternal, the divine love which powers Creation.
Nature is full of such signs, Einstein reasoned that energy could not be destroyed but only be changed from one form to another. One might say that Easter shows that life cannot be destroyed but only be changed from one form to another. Nature is full of such signs because she is marked by the pattern of her creator.
On a personal note, this was the first Easter for ten years that I have not been in church leading the celebrations of the Easter victory of life and love. I am better than I have been of late but not well enough, although perhaps I might say the green shoots of returning health promise recovery.
Also on a personal note, my former parishioner did send me a picture of both crosses sprouting but for some reason I only seem to have kept the first picture sent to me, that of the middle cross in leaf. Thank goodness the Easter victory does not rely on Vicars being wholly well or reliably organised.
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