In the northeast, this has been a winter to remember - record low temperatures, persistent cold, and mounds of frozen snow along walkways and roadsides. It is hard to believe that beneath the cold, the seeds of life await the invitation to rise and bring forth the beauty of spring. This annual cycle of birth, death and rebirth is a gift to us, a sign of hope and a reminder of God's promise to be with us always… to make all things new.

The challenge is to trust those words during the various winters each of us experiences, whether personal or collective, in our lives. This is what we mean by Resurrection. We are a Good Friday people and we will never deny the tragedies of time. But we are also a Resurrection people. We believe that the great mystery of Christ's dying points beyond itself, beyond death to Eternal Life.

You cannot come into a church without seeing the cross somewhere as the great central symbol of our faith; you cannot even be a Christian without having the cross marked on your forehead at baptism. We are signed with it forever.

Many and various are the ways that suffering touches us and is required of us. We can immediately think of forms of physical suffering like the persecution spoken of by Jesus in the Gospels and forms of mental suffering like Jeremiah's terrible moments of doubt when he wonders whether all his preaching was mistaken and God has deceived him. There is plenty of it around and we are always hearing about the worst examples.

This is where I think the portrayals of the suffering of the martyrs, so beloved by the medievals, and which surround us, for example, in this church in many places in the stained and painted glass, actually do us all a disservice. They concentrate the idea of suffering on those forms that are physically nearest to the suffering of Christ himself on the cross. It makes us think that the cross with which we have been signed dedicates us to that kind of suffering if we want to have part with Christ. If suffering like that does not come to us, or we do not seek it, have we failed our vocation?

Jesus did not seek the cross - he sought to do the will of God, and doing it was of greater importance to him than any consequence of doing it might be. For him, in first century Israel, striving to do the will of God by preaching and living his kingdom meant crucifixion, because that cut across the interests of the status quo in both religion and politics. Many of his disciples and perhaps he himself at sometimes, felt that confrontation could be avoided by toning down the sharpness of the challenge.

That is the temptation and he did not fall for it, hence that form of suffering. But the aim, the intention, was not to get crucified, and that I think must control our attitude to the symbolic cross with which we are all signed. The goal of our pilgrimage is not the cross but it may be the way there.

During the Easter Season, be close to Christ. Rest like the Beloved Disciple at the Last Supper, close to Jesus. My Easter prayer for each of you is the wish of Saint Paul for the Christians of Rome: "May the God of hope fill you with all the joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope" (Rom 15:13).

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