New Life

I never cared much for boiled eggs for breakfast, preferring scrambled or fried, but come Easter morning I want my boiled egg.  Hard or soft matters little to me.  Coloured, that’s the thing, it has to be coloured.  My mother always dropped a bit of food colouring into the boiling water with the eggs.  It might be red or blue or green, served in an egg dish, shaped like a chick or bunny, with toast.  Now that was Easter morning.

I think the egg became one of the many symbols for Easter because, from what looks like a lifeless orb springs forth a chick, and new life.  Just like the tomb where the lifeless body of Jesus was placed after his crucifixion, new life springs forth and the resurrected Body of Jesus emerges.

The hard boiled egg has another image attached to it, that of the hardened heart. “Ah, he’s such a hard egg…” we might say of someone seemingly predisposed to insults and violence. But, just as the old blues song says, “even the hardest boiled egg has a little yellow inside,” so too we can all be touched with the glory of God’s love revealed today in an empty tomb.

Despite threats and a soldier standing on guard some women, companions of Jesus went to the tomb to mourn and to make sure the body was washed and prepared properly.  They didn’t expect an empty tomb, they didn’t expect the resurrection.  They certainly didn’t expect to be the first apostles, the first ones sent to tell the Good News of the resurrection.

We too have been commissioned as bearers of the Good News.  Our shell has been cracked and the glory of the resurrection colours our lives and causes us to proclaim by word and deed God’s love for all creation.  New life springs forth. Thanks be to God. Alleluia!