Bishop Harold – ‘Easter can never be sentimentalised’
The message of Easter is one which is absolutely true to our life experience – the good alongside the bad. Easter can never be sentimentalised in the way we manage to sentimentalize Christmas, because there is a cruel Cross at the very centre of it.
On that Cross, on that first Good Friday, Jesus speaks seven times, and lets us in to the very heart of what he is doing. Here he speaks words of forgiveness to those who are cruelly opposing him. Here he brings a criminal, possibly a terrorist, breathing his last breaths, into his Kingdom. Here he creates a family of love, which is the starting–point and essential purpose of the church; and here he completes all that is necessary to bring each one of us into a living relationship with God.
In other words, no one is beyond the love of Christ, and no one is too far gone to make a new start in him.