Page 9 - The Plain Truth Spring-Summer 2026

We lit tea-light candles on our altar, and later we placed mother watching her son dying in the prime of life. Yet
them in jars, so that those who wished could take them we have a tendency to gloss over these themes and skip
and place them on graves after the service. That little light to the resurrection, as if that part of the story weren’t
symbolised hope and that we have the right to defiantly painful in itself.
keep their memory alive, against the backdrop of a society The women going to the tomb to anoint a body so
that would rather we pretend we were over it all now. It disfigured in death only to find the grave open, must
seems as though our society has partially forgotten what it have wondered what they would find inside: had wild
means to be a community. animals been there before them? A resurrected Jesus who
appears complete with the wounds of crucifixion is hardly
comfortable, and the story of Thomas being offered
the chance to stick his fingers in the wounds is quite
repulsive. The resurrection story is not meant to sanitise
Death, grief and death and grief, and it’s never suggested that the pain of
experiencing his loss could simply evaporate: trauma has to
go somewhere, it has to be dealt with.
remembrance

Shared emotions
A few years ago, one of the ponies at my friend’s riding
school died at just four years old. Little Holly had played
a part in the Equine Guided Learning sessions I organised
and I decided to visit the herd to pay my respects and share
my grief with them.
It was pouring with rain and as I walked down to their
field I began to feel silly at my notion of what might be
appropriate. I imagined the horses would probably be
sheltering out of sight under the trees in the distance.
When I turned the corner, there they all were waiting
for me at the gate. They took it in turns to step forward
and acknowledge me, rub their muzzle against me and be
fussed, before stepping back and making space for the next
horse to. It was such an honest and healthy sharing of grief
and belonging after loss. The story from John’s Gospel with the men fishing
During my time working for Christian Aid I met Nyine on the lake and meeting Jesus on the shore and sharing
Bitahwa, the director of a Non-Governmental Organisation breakfast with him epitomises this. Peter sits with Jesus and
(NGO) in Uganda. He and his wife returned to Uganda the shame of his denial hangs like a curtain between them.
from Germany when his exile under Amin’s regime ended. The Gospel doesn’t describe the emotion but we can fill
His wife became pregnant and the baby was born in in the gaps, imagine the knot in Peter’s chest, his inability
a hospital some miles from their home, but tragically died to make eye contact, then the tears, first from him and then
soon after birth. from Jesus too, as the question asked three times, ‘Do you
When they arrived home after a long journey, it was late love me?’ serves first to clean, then cauterize, then heal the
and dark but waiting for them outside their house was every wound of betrayal and loss. Resurrection of any kind can
parent from the community who had lost a child. They only be experienced after some sort of death and grief. If
were not alone in their consuming grief. we see the cross only as a symbol of a joyous hope, we have
The Easter Story is often portrayed as one of hope and missed the point.
triumph and yet, if we look at the Gospel texts, they are In El Salvador in the 1980s, when the people were
mostly about trauma, grief, guilt and fear. Judas’ despair at horrendously oppressed by those in power, and casual
his betrayal leads him to hang himself. Peter’s fear presents mass murder and disappearances were routine happenings,
as disowning his best friend. Christians called themselves Good Friday People because they
We’re told that the men all ran away, maybe out had yet to experience resurrection.
of fear of meeting the same fate as Jesus or because I have an El Salvadoran cross on my home altar that is
of their inability to watch events unfold. We see the painted not with the traditional figure of Jesus but with
women standing in the midst of a scene of abject horror, a village and a woman who lost her life standing up for
watching the man they love die an agonising, humiliating her people. In white, Western Christianity, we tend to
and prolonged death. In that group of women is his identify ourselves with Jesus in terms of striving to be
Continued on Page 10̬

Find us online at www.plain-truth.org.uk Spring-Summer 2026 The Plain Truth 9