Editorial: When hope is the victor over despair

Easter Saturday is a kind of no-man's land - the day between two days of profound religious and historical importance and between two extremes of human experience, grief and hope.

If yesterday felt less like a holiday and more like a day of observance, that is how Good Friday has always been. Even in this secular age, for many it is a day in which, by statute or by convention, the world stops - no newspaper, no pubs, no gambling, no shopping, no commuting, work or school.

In countries of Christian heritage such as ours, but also in some nations dominated by other faiths, Good Friday is accorded a solemnity that only death can evoke.

Whatever your belief about Jesus Christ, his life, death, teachings and resurrection, the day of his crucifixion more than 2000 years ago is one which shaped the future of humanity.

At that moment those who had followed this prophet phenomenon through the lands now known as Israel and Palestine were cast into despair. Gone, like all before him. The potential Messiah cold, the lifeless body wrapped and entombed in a rock cave, a large stone rolled across to close a life and a cause.

They entered this day, Easter Saturday, in hiding, fearful of reprisals now that their leader was dead. It was the Jewish Sabbath, when little activity was permitted anyway. It was the day when the lights went out for the followers of Christ. The emptiness of grief, the longing for what might have been.

Beyond the no-man's land of the Saturday, however, that grief was shortlived. Yesterday and today, in churches here and around the world, Christ's death is commemorated solemnly but in the knowledge that one more day, Easter Sunday, changed everything.

On that morning, Christ's followers found the stone rolled away to reveal an empty tomb. They had stumbled, Christians everywhere believe, upon nothing less than the end of death. Their leader had risen from the dead, changing humanity's most basic truth forever and, incidentally, lighting a flame of faith which still burns in the hearts of hundreds of millions of Christians today.

The authorities of the day, and many others since, prefer a version that says Christ's supporters spirited the body away and thus perpetrated what amounts to a hoax which has conned the planet for two millenniums.

Yet for the individuals who had believed in Christ, despair gave way to hope within three days. That juxtaposition of the most extreme of human emotions, almost as much as the physical facts of a highly public death and an empty tomb, make Easter Sunday the most important day in the Christian calendar.

It holds the core of any Christian belief. If Christ rose from the dead, then hope literally springs eternal. And if that is so, the joy is unending; this special Sunday is the day of celebration.

So tomorrow, those in the minority in New Zealand and in large numbers elsewhere who will attend an Easter service will do so out of the intangible motivation called faith. They probably identify with those bereft souls who spent the original Good Friday night and Easter Saturday without hope.

People everywhere want to believe that, in everyday life, sadness will give way to joy. Worldwide, the faithful will score: Hope 1, Despair 0.