Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.

Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.

It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it's not a Reformation thing), all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.

If you read 1 John you'll see that love of God and neighbour are very closely tied together. Partly this is because all humans are made in God's image, so that when you love another human you are loving someone who is reflecting God himself. Of course there is a distinction but the minute you try to drive a wedge between the two things start to fall apart.

God has taken us utterly seriously. How can we not do the same with him?

Perhaps art can help us to look beyond the immediate beauty with all its puzzles, and to glimpse that new creation which makes sense not only of beauty but of the world as a whole, and ourselves within it ... The artist can then join forces with those who work for justice and those who struggle for redemptive relationships, and together encourage and sustain those who are reaching out for a genuine, redemptive spirituality.

What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.