‘Oh to be in England, now that April’s there’, famously wrote Robert Browning in his poem Home Thoughts from Abroad.  Nostalgically, he remembered how the trees began to green and how the birds sang in the orchards.  He could have remembered too how life springs from apparently dead bulbs and lifeless roots, in response to warmth and light.  We think of spring as a time when new life appears and we give chocolate eggs as a symbol of life and resurrection.

Of course, Jesus’s resurrection is a completely different kind of new life from what we experience in the cycle of the seasons.  A daffodil bulb, planted in November, may look completely dead, but it’s merely dormant.  For months trees may show no sign of life, but they’re just resting.  The soldiers who crucified Jesus knew that He was truly dead.  So did those who buried Him, and so did the disciples, who couldn’t understand how their hopes and dreams could have come to such a tragic conclusion.  

But when Jesus was raised to life that spring 2000 years ago, the disciples recognised that someone who had died was now alive again for ever.  They saw and heard Him, they ate with Him and they enjoyed His company.  Before He ascended back to heaven, He made them an important promise, which is a promise for us too:  ‘Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20).  The living Jesus is always with us and nothing can separate us from His love – ‘neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation . . .’ (Romans 8:38-9).