Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 3-074 (General)

GOD’S PASSION OUR HOPE

Joel Edwards, General Director of Evangelical Alliance UK, has issued this call to remember the enduring Christian message of hope this Easter as lives continue to be overshadowed by international conflict and economic instability.

‘The Easter event stands at the very heart of Christian faith and with good reason, for it covers the entire spectrum of living relationships,’ he said.

‘In the Cross we encounter God’s passion for human beings, for the Cross embraces anger and justice, pain and healing, sin and forgiveness. Nothing is left out.

‘This Easter we will be exercised by world events such as the aftermath of the war in Iraq and the recent mass murders in the Congo. We are still faced with the global epidemic of AIDS and HIV, poverty and the growing levels of displaced persons. Racism, injustice and oppression are ever present with us.

‘But all of these human tragedies are essentially individual disasters. For within our corporate pain people are looking out beyond their single cells of incarceration for a better hope.

‘Christians have a right to take the Cross seriously. For the Cross has identified God in Christ, not as a ‘fair-weather friend’ but as a God who knows the way of despair. There is nothing on the television news to which the Cross is indifferent.

‘But Christians also have a responsibility to talk about the Cross. For the Cross is also God’s emblem of optimism. For at the highest point of his own suffering Jesus acknowledged just how completely God would vindicate his suffering. As Martin Luther King often said, ‘unearned suffering is redemptive’. Nowhere else has this been better demonstrated than on the Cross. Jesus dying on the Cross is God doing his best work of forgiving and healing. When Jesus said, ‘It is finished’ he had every human being in mind.’

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Evangelical Alliance <> http://www.eauk.org