This will be the last Black and White article from me prior to Easter and therefore I want to offer an Easter thought. Just a few weeks ago Jeremy Clarkson, and the Top Gear team, were in my home country New Zealand. They were there to film a show on Ninety Mile beach, the last strip of the West Coast just before the tip of the North Island.

According to reports Clarkson really fell in love with Aotearoa (The Land of the Long White Cloud) and made the audacious proclamation that God should have had his son born in New Zealand and not Bethlehem – somewhere really beautiful and nice. This is interesting amateur theology and, well, high praise for my country of origin, and yes I do realise that he’s not being that serious.

As much as I love Top Gear dear Mr Clarkson misses the point of the whole “God sending his son” bit – which is at the real heart of the Easter (and Christmas message). Such a message is that in Jesus, God comes to the common, and insignificant, and difficult places like Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Golgotha (the place of Christ’s crucifixion). These are not particularly nice or touristy locations, but Easter is like that – God getting involved in unexpected places doing unexpected things.

So where is God this Easter?

A recent speaker at Newington talked about the traditional idea of God, as a Personal Caring Creator, being pretty much “out of fashion” Down Under. Certainly there does seem to be an exodus away from the old style of doing “church”, which I personally have great sympathy for. Interestingly though, more and more people are thirsting for a spiritual reality in their lives. In countries with vast populations and burgeoning technologies like China (recent demographics indicate there are 60 million Christians in China – more than in the whole of Europe), Korea, Africa and South America there is massive growth in commitment the real Easter story. We do not hear much about this in our press. Nor do the trendy philosophers and sociologists at our universities pay much attention to these present day realities.

Maybe it is us, in Australasia, who are the ones out of step with what God is really doing in the world. God may not be especially on Ninety Mile beach in New Zealand, but the message of Easter is that the mystery of the Almighty means that God does not march to our tune. God does not conform to our expectations. God is not a “tame” God – as C.S.Lewis indicated in his Narnian Chronicles through that masterful metaphor of Aslan the untamed yet incredible Lion.

And so I guess my challenge this Easter is, for all of us, to look for the unexpected in the Easter message that we hear and see. Let’s give ourselves a chance to catch a glimpse of the majesty and wonder of the true Easter story. That may indeed mean going to a Good Friday service or the Resurrection Sunday worship somewhere, or it may mean watching some of the special programming on this theme on television.

May you all have a holy and restful Easter weekend.

David N Williams
Newington College Chaplain