Good?

With the smell of passover bread on the breeze, today there are nails in the air. It's a curious mixture of death and life. We celebrate the one who used to be dead. We stack models of the atonement - death conquered, evil defeated, sin overcome, suffering shared, service demonstrated - and bring them in to land until we realise there is nothing that the cross didn't do. All our hopes have arrived.

How strange that Christians fall out over what the cross achieved. Stupidity is the only weapon of mass destruction I fear.

Also, what a crazy-mixed up world is the church's year. Striving for a pattern we can forget Jesus is alive on Good Friday and have to keep him dead until the chocolate is unwrapped. Then on Sunday we can over-celebrate, forgetting that others have still lost their dead.

This side of the heavenly tear-wiping ceremony St John anticipated, I believe that wandering around in awe-struck confusion amongst the crowds is the best way to live Holy Week. Many of the people have no idea what has happened to them, in them, with them; for them.

I never send Easter cards. No way could I commercialise this. A member of my family, who sticks up for the absence of God most times we meet, always sends me one. It's all I can do not to rip it up.

Have this as my Easter greeting. Ponder if you dare.