Thought for the Week by the Rev Steve Proudlove, curate at All Saints Church in Ilkley

by the Rev Steve Proudlove, curate at All Saints Church, Ilkley

AT THE time of writing this ‘Thought for the week’, we are in the middle of Holy week, with Easter still to come and the tragic bomb attacks on Brussels are on all the front pages. And I’ve been given the theme of ‘Celebrate’ on which to write – it happens to be our church’s theme of the month.

Difficult. How can we celebrate at a time like this?

Perhaps it is significant that it is Holy week; the week in which we remember that long ago, injustice was meted out, tragedy struck as a mother watched her son die, a man was betrayed by his friends, violence seemingly conquered peace and innocence was swallowed up in hate. It seems like the world is profoundly broken, and has been for quite some time.

And it’s not just in the big things. The cracks in our world are obvious in little things too; relationships strangled by lies, families exploded by infidelity, and communities dismembered by prejudice, disagreement or just plain old apathy.

Our world is broken and full of brokenness. And like someone walking bare-foot across broken glass, we pick our way through life, trying to keep to the safe areas and trying not to think too much about those caught up in the fractures. How can we celebrate? How can we learn to dance among the shards and shreds of life?

Back to Holy week and Easter. There can be no celebration amongst the meaningless shatterings unless somehow the shards are in themselves significant; unless they become valuable and important rather than simply wasted. At the first Easter, Jesus, the Saviour, took all the broken shards of his own life and all the shards of all our lives and he collected them, arranged them, and poured out his own life upon them. The world waited.

On Easter morning Jesus was raised from death. He danced among our collected shards, moulding them into a mosaic of infinite love. No longer do we hobble hopelessly among chaotic broken fragments, but we can dance and celebrate. There is no shard so small that it is lost to God and there is no shattering so big that it is excluded from the heavenly collage of divine love. Nothing is broken beyond redemption when we bring our shards to our loving God.