Easter’s hope and fresh beginning in broken world

During Lent, Kyiv Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, preached a powerful message in St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, anticipating Easter: “Hope is what we all need – every human soul navigating life’s challenges and moments of despair,’’ he said. “All of us who are facing our own sinfulness. We all need hope! Hope is what the hearts of my people long for.”

As the holiest Christian week culminates in Saturday night’s vigil celebrations of Christ’s resurrection, when darkened churches are flooded with light, Easter’s promises of hope and fresh beginnings are renewed, offering the comforting prospect of a fresh start. They also pose a challenge. Amid the brutality and suffering unleashed by Hamas on October 7, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, is conscious of the “loneliness of Jesus in Gethsemane, which is now shared by all of us”. Jerusalem, as he says, is the centre of the three great faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – because, “everything was born here’’. St John Paul II highlighted those ancient ties in 2000 when he visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, venerated as the site of Christ’s resurrection; the Western Wall, the remains of the Second Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans in AD 70 and the hilltop, gold-domed al-Aqsa mosque, where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. For them, currently in their holy month of Ramadan, it is a sacred shrine. If Gaza is to have a sustainable future after the Hamas-Israel war, faith leaders must encourage their people, as the late pope urged a quarter of a century ago, to “live in harmony and co-operation, and bear witness to the one God in acts of goodness and human solidarity”.

Human solidarity, which involves looking outward not inward, also poses a serious challenge in the West, especially for parents, as US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells Paul Kelly. The “rewiring of childhood” with the smartphone and social media has left many children in the Anglosphere and Scandinavia suffering unprecedented problems of addiction, mental damage and social deprivation. Childhood has been transformed, Haidt argues in his book The Anxious Generation, from play-based to phone-based, as tech titans use techniques “all day long” training children “like rats during their most sensitive years” … sculpting very deep pathways into our children’s brains” as advertisers compete to grab hold of eyeballs. The process has left many young people self-centred, anxious, depressed and lonely. For parents and teachers who recognise the need to reverse the trend through collective and family action, Easter’s values of hope and goodness can be a circuit breaker. It is a chance, as Brisbane Catholic Archbishop Mark Coleridge says, to roll away fears, anger, anxieties and depressions that block lives, like the big stone that blocked Jesus’s tomb before he rose. The good news of resurrection, Uniting Church Assembly president Sharon Hollis says in her Easter message, is proclaimed “for the broken humanity in each of us’’.

Sydney Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher reminded Australians of the value of Jesus’s words on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Forgiveness can be terribly difficult, he said “when we’ve lost someone or something precious to us, or been humiliated or otherwise hurt”. Australia is “blessed with greater harmony” than the lands of Jesus’s life, yet “even here there’s enough division for some to fan into conflict’’.

The ugly anti-Semitism that has surfaced since Hamas unleashed its evil must be contained for the good of our society, which has traditionally been tolerant of all faiths, or none. Such diversity has enriched our nation for generations, including through the work of religious-run schools, hospitals and services.

That harmony, unfortunately, is under threat with the Albanese government’s proposal to strip faith-based schools of their protections in the Sex Discrimination Act. As ideologues try to force woke agendas on students, it is an unconscionable attack on religious freedom and parental choice. Anthony Albanese’s willingness to negotiate with the Greens has set alarm bells ringing, opening the way to repression of religious teaching, bitterness and social division that will weaken our society. The last time Labor and the Greens worked together on such an issue, the ACT government forced its takeover of the Calvary Hospital.

The Easter liturgies began on Thursday night with the commemoration of the Last Supper – the Passover meal that Jesus, as a faithful Jew, shared with his disciples, honouring his people’s escape from slavery in Egypt 12 to 13 centuries earlier, to the promised land. That mysterious Supper, the night before his crucifixion, was more than a meal. At it, he instituted the Eucharist, the ministerial priesthood and an enduring tradition of service by washing his disciples’ feet. The following day, as he died on the Cross, those disciples “wondered what was going to happen to them”, Salvation Army Territorial leader Miriam Gluyas says. “Until they realised that He wasn’t dead. On the third day, He rose again! He appeared to them. Hope was back.” It’s an uplifting, encouraging message. Be it a holy day, a holiday or both, we offer readers a very happy Easter.