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| Wildflowers in Scawby churchyard |
Spring has sprung and in the natural world we are seeing signs of new life, and with them brings hope that the cold winter days are past and the warm (and maybe even hot!) days of summer are on their way. But it's not just in nature that hope is springing: with the government 'road map' we have a hope that the dark days of the pandemic are coming to an end and the bright days of 'normality' are getting closer. Although hope is a powerful emotion that can keep us going through difficult times, it is good to question what the grounds of our hope are.
As we emerge from the shadow of COVID-19, the obvious grounds for our hope is in the vaccines, and then (as it has been throughout the pandemic) in the NHS to treat us if we fall ill. But these aren't solid grounds for hope. With each variant that appears there is concern that the vaccines won't be effective against that strain of the virus. With each rise in cases there is concern that the NHS will not be able to cope with demand – it is not surprising that one of the constant slogans has been to 'Protect the NHS'. The development of the vaccines is something to be celebrated and the NHS do fantastic work with all sorts of medical needs, but vaccines and the NHS are not solid foundations on which to build our hope of overcoming this plague, still less are they solid foundations on which to build our hope of overcoming the root cause of our fears about the virus.
We are desperate for protection against the virus because ultimately we fear death. To those who believe that the physical world is all that there is, death makes all our lives ultimately meaningless. As it says in Ecclesiastes 5:15 “We leave this world just as we entered it—with nothing. In spite of all our work there is nothing we can take with us” (Good News Translation). To those who do believe in a supernatural afterlife, death brings the uncertainty of eternal existence – uncertain because of not knowing what the outcome will be. The general sense that if you're good enough you'll have a nice eternal existence sounds reassuring until you ask the question of what 'good enough' means, and if we're honest, we don't even come up to our own standards! Death then is something to be feared and therefore our only hope is to delay it as much as possible. Unless there is a better and more solid ground for hope.
Thankfully, there is a better hope – the new life of spring overcoming the death of winter is one way God points us towards the good news of Easter; that Jesus' death and resurrection mean that death is no longer something to be feared. Our lives have meaning because they don't stop at death, and we can be forgiven for our constant failure to be 'good enough' because Jesus took our punishment on the cross. Just as we benefit from the work of many scientists by having the vaccine so we can benefit from Jesus' sacrifice by putting our faith and trust in him. So this Easter, live hopefully!
