The Rt Rev Peter Price, Bishop of Bath and Wells points to the pain and hope people lived with.Bishop Peter writes:
During the Troubles in Northern Ireland small groups of people met from both sides of the divide to try and find ways to peace. At one such group someone remarked, ‘We live between Good Friday and Easter Day in our lives.’ It was a good way to describe both the pain and the hope that people felt during those troubled times.
In the West we tend to put emphasis on two days Good Friday and Easter Day. But there is another ‘day’ between – Easter Saturday. In the Orthodox Christian Church in places like Russia and Greece, this day is called ‘ The Great Saturday.’ It is called this because tradition has it that Jesus visited ‘hell’ or ‘ the place of the departed’ on ‘The Great Saturday.’ The phrase used to describe this visit is ‘The Harrowing of Hell.’ Farmers know that when fields are ‘harrowed’ they are being turned over in order that new life is possible.
Jesus reveals that there is no place where God cannot be – even in the ‘hell’ of people’s lives. Good Friday tells us of a God who understands and carries suffering from wrong doing, as a consequence of violence, war and much else besides. God wants humanity to experience forgiveness, healing and reconciliation. God wants people to live hopefully in a world in which life is difficult. The Great Saturday tells us that there is no place or person outside of God’s love. Easter Day reminds us that not only does God reach into the ‘hell’ of human experience, but also into the places where we want to find hope, peace, and new life.
Good Friday and Easter Day provide us with an opportunity to receive and to give God’s love. Such love is not a feeling. A genuinely loving person is someone who takes positive and caring action even towards people they do not like, and may actually have no feeling for. They do so because they recognise in the ‘other’ something of God. Sometimes the choices we make towards others are a bit like living between Good Friday and Easter Day in our lives. We don’t always feel good, loving or caring, but we act so because we hope for something better to come.