Easter message from the bishop of Horsham

How often, I wonder, do we judge some unhappy or difficult event ‘a blessing in disguise?
Some events in our lives, can be very painful, disappointing and even seem disastrous. We experience these as utter desolation.
Only some time afterwards do we discover the hardship was necessary in order for something wonderful, enriching or perhaps liberating to come about.
The story of Joseph, in the Book of Genesis, is a good example:
Selling Joseph into slavery was traumatic not only for him, but for his adoring father and for the brothers who came to regret their treachery.
Disaster all round!……and yet this disaster turned out to be a well-disguised blessing. It turned out to be their salvation when Joseph’s family turned to Egypt for what they needed to survive.
Easter celebrates the blessing, the salvation, which had been disguised in the tragedy of Good Friday.
Easter isn’t simply a happy ending but God making human failure and the seeming disaster of death into the very seed of wonderful new and eternal life.
Easter celebrates the hope that God will take the tragic failures and desolation of our personal Good Fridays and make them the very seeds of something life-giving.
Happy Eastertide!
+Mark