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LETTER FROM THE RECTORY
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LLYTHYR O'R RHEITHORDY

April 2013


Rector of Llandudno
Last month I wrote about the lovely spring weather we were having at the end of  February. Since then we've had the coldest March for many years and as I write  this letter the Rectory lawn is covered with snow! With Easter only a week away everyone is longing for spring.

But whatever the temperature over the holiday weekend surely nothing will suppress the warmth of Easter for us.As we light the Easter Candle in the darkness of the early morning Vigil in St Tudno; or sing 'Jesus Christ is risen today, alleluia!' in a hopefully crowded and bright Holy Trinity Church later in the day - the risen Christ will surely seem very real to us. Although we will not see Him with our eyes as the disciples did on the first Easter day, we will be no less aware of his risen presence. It will be easy for us to imagine ourselves in the upper room as Christ greets the disciples with his 'Peace be with you'.

But what do we actually believe about the resurrection of the Lord? What do we think actually happened? In recent weeks questions people have put to me have made me stop and think about this crucial matter. At the end of the 'Stations of the Cross' with a group of children from Ysgol San Sior when we had just reflected upon the final station 'Jesus is risen',one of the boys began to question how it could be that someone who had died a terrible death on the cross could really have come to life again. I don't think he was expressing disbelief so much a simply trying to understand what we were claiming happened to Jesus. On another occasion, an adult member of our parish asked me if I actually believed that Jesus had risen bodily on the first Easter Day.

Well, what do I believe? Did Christ truly rise in his body? And if so is this something that a 21 st century person can really accept? Or did the disciples simply have a powerful sense of his spiritual presence which they expressed in terms of resurrection? That would perhaps be easier for people of our age to take on board.

It seems to me that the truth lies between, on the one hand, a belief on that the Lord's dead body somehow just came to life again; and on the other that the whole thing was just based on the disciples' feeling that he was somehow still with them despite his violent death. For the Christian faith to be true there must have been a proper resurrection; the Christ that the disciples claimed to have seen must have been real- after all according to Stjohn's Gospel he invited Thomas to touch him. But the body of the risen Lord could not just have been a resuscitated corpse.This would have indeed been something miraculous indeed but it would have meant very little and achieved nothing.

What the disciples saw - and could have touched - was the real Christ, the person they had known and loved and who had died on the cross. He bore in his hands and feet the marks of the nails. But it was much more than just Jesus' earthly body brought to life again. This was a body transformed, a body of the resurrection rather than just a corpse raised up again. It was a spiritual as well as a physical body, for we read in the Gospels that the risen Jesus could apparently walk through closed doors, remain unrecognised and appear and disappear at will.

I can't believe that the Christian faith was based on the disciples simply feeling that Jesus was still with them or that they believed they had seen him in a vision. It must indeed have been the real Jesus that they saw, but a Jesus transformed with the body of his resurrection.
 
On Easter Day it will be the radiance of Christ's presence which will be important and the 'theology' of his resurrection won't be in the forefront of our minds.And in any case the resurrection is indeed a mystery beyond our human reasoning. Nevertheless our experience of the risen Lord needs to be underpinned with an attempt to make sense of the experience as far as we are able - 'faith seeking understanding'.

May I wish you the joy of the risen Lord this Easter, that you may know his risen presence in your hearts, and that you may able to give an account of your faith to any who may ask.

Fr. John


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January 2013
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