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Easter Sunday 2024. An all age talk. On Easter eggs

John 20.1-9

Who has been given an Easter egg?
What is your egg like? You can find remarkable Easter eggs: This is a very clever Dinosaur egg!


Much more important: Who has already eaten their Easter egg?

Why do we think about eggs at Easter?

I want to suggest two things

1. Eggs are about new life

Out of something that looks like a stone, out of a hard shell, a baby chick, duckling, fledgling (or baby  dinosaur!) appears.
And out of the cold hard rock tomb, which was covered by a stone, Jesus Christ appears. 

Three days earlier, on the first Good Friday, they had taken him and nailed him to the cross and watched him die. 
To make sure he was dead, they had taken a spear and thrust it into his side. 
Then they laid his body in a tomb and put a great big stone in front of it. 
But on that first Easter Sunday something astonishing happened. 
Jesus Christ rose from the dead. 
New life came out of the dead tomb.

And that new resurrection life is available for us all

It is not that we are in a tomb - although one day we will be. 
But it can feel as if we are shut up in a hard shell - we feel guilty, with that sense of separation from the something that is outside of us, bigger and beyond us; trapped doing things that we know are not good; bound by our fear of what might happen, of what others will think of us, of death. 

The Good news of Easter is that it is about new life.
God raised Jesus from the dead
And he will give us new life.
He offers forgiveness and a relationship with him, whereby we can call him 'Father'.
He gives us the power to begin to confront our sin and to change.
He sets us free to hope and gives us the promise of new and eternal life. 

That is why one of the Bible pictures that Jesus gives of becoming a Christian is the picture of being born again, coming alive a second time, but this time to God and to the things of God.

Eggs are about new life. Easter is about new life. 

2. Easter eggs usually have nothing inside them. They are empty

There is something very special about Easter eggs
(and it is not just because they are made of chocolate!)

They look like the tomb
They look like the stone in front of the tomb
They look like a full stop!

But at Easter, God removed the stone, he smashed open the tomb and he smashed the full stop at the end of the sentence of our life. 

Can I have a volunteer to come and smash this egg for us?

What is inside? 

When the women went to the tomb, what did they find inside?  Nothing! 
[Note to reader: This is a bit of artistic license! The tomb was not empty. The linen grave clothes had been left, but the body of Jesus was not there]

Alleluia, Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed, Alleluia!

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