Hot cross buns and Easter bunnies, chocolate eggs and thronged airports — these are the trace elements in our world that mark the greatest of the Christian festivals. Easter is far deeper than these superficial markers. It celebrates a life and death that plumbs the depths of what it is to be human and of the nature of God. “Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by?” cried the prophet Jeremiah in his Lamentations — words which became part of the Good Friday liturgy of the Church, and which still challenge our world.

In the earliest celebration of Easter, Good Friday and Easter were a single festival, the Christian Passover; the greater deliverance from sin and death transcending the earlier Passover marking deliverance from slavery in Egypt. At its heart is crucifixion — a vicious, bloody, tortured, judicial execution, mocking claims about Jesus that in this man it is God who acts and is present in the world in a unique and special way. The Roman governor’s ragged inscription pinned to the cross reads scornfully — “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”.

Religion, political power, disciples who flee, deny and betray are all judged and found wanting by this dying man nailed to a cross. Yet He enfolds their ignorance with his forgiveness. The lonely, scrubby hill called Golgotha, “the place of the skull”, is a killing field. What happens here counts against the possibility of any God whose nature and name is love. But it is only out of that darkness and such a dying that that truth is lived and won.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In this dreadful cry of dereliction and abandonment, Jesus identifies with and echoes human desolation in every age — the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the horrors of the Siberian Gulag camps, “ethnic cleansing”, be it in the Balkans or in Darfur, or lonely deaths from addiction or on garbage heaps. This cry of agony plumbs the depths. The Christian faith dares to say that here is God; here is the One who knows from the inside our human condition, and comes down to the lowest part of our human need. So it is “Good” Friday, where the lifting up of this scarecrow figure on a cross is enthronement and exaltation, the glory of a love “so amazing, so divine” that it demands “my soul, my life, my all”.

Jesus dies. His lifeless body is taken down from the cross. Painters and sculptors have strained their every nerve to portray the sorrow of Mary holding her lifeless son in her arms, as mothers today in Baghdad hold with the same anguish the bodies of their children. On Holy Saturday, or Easter Eve, God is dead, entering into the nothingness of human dying. The source of all being, the One who framed the vastness and the microscopic patterning of the Universe, the delicacy of petals and the scent of thyme, the musician’s melodies and the lover’s heart, is one with us in our mortality. In Jesus, God knows our dying from the inside.

How can these things be said, and sung, and celebrated, as they will be by countless millions this Easter? Only because the blotting out of life by death is not the horizon. The definitive line is not drawn there. From that nothingness and darkness and the seeming triumph of the darkest powers of evil, new life was born, a new creation came to be. On Easter morning a tomb was found empty, a stone rolled away, and a new order broke into the world. The Easter stories of the Gospels are not about “the resurrection of relics”, but about an amazing new life and transfiguration. It is not the resurrection of a principle but of a person, who calls us by name. In St John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene hears the calling of her name by the risen Christ, though blinded by her tears she thinks Him to be the gardener. Clutching his feet she tries to pin him down, to shut him up in the old order, but he tells her not to touch, not to seek to hold down his risen life. She is to go and tell the good news of resurrection, that all may be drawn into the ascending energy of the love of God.

Jesus breathes on His disciples His life-giving Spirit, the divine life of the new creation. “Go and live that life, live out that love”, for “Christ is risen and the demons are fallen”. The principalities and powers are dethroned. They have no ultimate control of our lives. From the nothingness of death and the absence of God and meaning, Christ rises in triumph and love’s redeeming work is done.