KEY POINTS:
There is a green hill far away,
Outside a city wall,
Where our dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.
And:
Christ, the Lord, is risen today, Alleluia!
Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply, Alleluia!
Lives again our
glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once He died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where thy victory now, O grave? Alleluia!
The words of those two traditional hymns, which have been with me for as long as I can remember, sum up in a few lines the very essence of Easter for Christians.
I first sang them, probably, in Sunday School as a nipper and later as a teenage member of the choir in the Methodist church my family (well, mum anyway) attended.
There was a time when these hymns, the first by Irishwoman Cecil F. Alexander and the second by the prolific Englishman, Charles Wesley, would be sung at scores of churches throughout New Zealand tomorrow and on Sunday.
Not so today, unfortunately, for the traditional hymnbooks have long been left on the shelf or in dusty storage rooms while snappy modern choruses have taken their place.
That's sad, really, because in the years before the Bible made any sense, I learned more about God, Christ and my Christian faith from the hymns we sang, all based on substantial passages of the Bible.
The choruses these days are generally based on a fragment of Scripture and, as a dear old Catholic priest friend of mine is wont to say, "a text taken out of context is a pretext".
But I suppose it was inevitable that the churches would modify themselves to fit in with a society in which the human attention span has become shorter and shorter.
So this weekend many churches will ring to the sound of these often syrupy choruses, sung over and over and over again to raise the emotional temperature to ecstasy point and create a "spiritual" high that will ensure full collection plates and the punters coming back for more.
But I digress.
Easter is no time for cynicism but a time for Christians to reflect afresh on the central tenets of their faith, which billions will do this weekend.
As the Nicene Creed puts it: "For our sake [Jesus Christ] was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead."
Atheists, agnostics, rationalists, humanists and other secularists will, of course, look at these sung and spoken words and tell anyone who will listen that they are merely myth and fable.
They might concede that the crucifixion and resurrection are historically verifiable, but will contend to their last breath (at which time they're in for a hell of a shock) that the significance placed on these events by Christians is nonsense.
That is, of course, and always has been, the Church's dilemma. For, until one has experienced surrender to the lordship of Jesus Christ, and received an infilling of the Holy Spirit, the central precept of Christianity is beyond human understanding.
For instance, such people reading the opening stanza of There is a Green Hill Far Away will immediately ask: "Save us from what?"
The routine answer is "sin", but that's an unpopular word these days, even in a lot of churches, and anyway it opens up another whole can of worms.
So my answer is: "Saved from myself", for it was my self-destructive nature that led me in my 30s to the very gates of hell.
It was only after I - by necessity since I was beyond human aid - threw myself on God's mercy and laid my burdens down at the foot of the cross, that I was able to see myself as I really was and begin to co-operate in God's healing and redemptive process.
So don't try to tell me that the enormous spiritual significance to mankind of Christ's death and resurrection is myth and fable, for I have experienced a personal resurrection which would have been impossible had the events of that first Easter not happened.
So, in the words of John Bowring:
When the woes of life o'ertake me,
Hopes deceive, and fears annoy,
Never shall the cross forsake me.
Lo! It glows with peace and joy.