Isn’t this just the biggest egg you’ve ever seen? What would hatch out of it? Maybe a huge dinosaur. Or if it were chocolate, how long would it take to eat? Maybe months! If someone gave you an Easter egg this big what would it mean? It would certainly be a very special present. I would like to give everyone an egg as big as this

 

Giving eggs at Easter is an ancient tradition celebrating God’s gift of new life, new hope, and forgiveness. In the orthodox church people hard boil real eggs and decorate them with wax and coloured dye; in the west our eggs have become chocolate but we still give them to each other as a sign of what God gives to all of us. Easter Day has gone now for this year but every Sunday all through the year Christians celebrate what God did through Jesus that first Easter morning. Jesus truly died on the cross – he was completely dead and remained dead for three whole days. But on the first Easter morning his friends discovered his tomb empty and then many people met him fully alive and truly himself. God had not just brought him back to life so that he would die again at some point – he raised him to a new sort of life where he would not ever die again. Not just back to old life – but forward to new and everlasting life.

 

This is the gift that God gives at Easter – and this is why Easter is the most important day of the church year, more important even than Christmas. And this is why Christians celebrate that gift together in church every Sunday. God’s gift is the promise for all of us of forgiveness for all our sins if we are truly sorry for them. There is nothing we have done that is so awful that God can’t forgive us if we come and ask him. It is the chance of a new and restored relationship with him right now, and the promise of everlasting resurrected life with him after death. Death is not the end – it is the beginning of a new chapter.

 

Many people promise us things that say will make us happy: cars, houses, holidays, beauty, promotion, income, special offers, clothes, status….. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things, but they’re not the end of the story and they are not the most important things in our lives. I have sat with many people at the end of their lives and no one has ever said to me that they wish they had spend longer in the office, or had got a bigger car……. At the end of our lives we realise the things that are important: relationships, people, forgiving others, being forgiven for our mistakes, and God.

 

So why the eggs? Out of a hard egg shell springs a new and amazing life. Every day God offers a chance to turn our lives around and start afresh in a new way. Every day he offers us forgiveness if we want to take him up on the offer. Every day he promises new hope, however hard and dark life may be. That is God’s gift to us. That is why I am a Christian. And that is why, if I could, I would give a great big egg like the one in the picture to everyone I know!

 

May God Bless you today and every day.

Felicity