Christ Easters In Us w/ Meredith Ainley

“Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.” This is one of the closing lines to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” I was reminded of this poem last year in light of the tragedy in the Yellow Sea in South Korea. The Sewol ferry, heading to a popular holiday island, capsized while carrying 476 people around this time last year, killing 304 people. Most of the 172 survivors were rescued by local fishing boats and other commercial vessels that beat the South Korean coast guard to the scene by half an hour. Many of the passengers were students and teachers from a high school near Seoul on a field trip. Dozens of divers searched in vain in the frigid, murky waters, holding on to the hope that they might find someone still alive inside the sunken ferry.

Hopkins’ poem was written in 1918 in memory of another ship that sank.  That emigrant ship, the Deutschland, had set out from Germany for New York but ran aground on a shoal 25 miles off the coast of England in a snowstorm on December 6, 1875. Waves crushed the ship and no one answered the signals for help until much later. Ultimately, it was a lazy rescue effort, and some even descended upon the scene merely for personal gain, taking anything of value off the dead bodies.

How do we respond in the face of great suffering and death? How are we to make sense of tragedies in our world and the patterns of death within our own lives? And what does this have to do with Easter? Sometimes, all we see around us is suffering. For Hopkins, an account of human suffering cannot be complete or understood apart from Christ.

Hopkins turns Easter, a word we identify as a noun, into a verb. God intends to actively save us, not out of the tragedy, but through it. Not out of death, but through death. When Christ easters in us, our view of the world and of our circumstances is transformed; we view reality through Him who entered into our world, and who overcame the world. We can take heart and have peace; in the world, we will have trouble but Jesus has overcome the world (John 16:33). When Christ easters in us, we are transformed and become a reason for joy and delight.  Continue eastering, friends. Continue the process of dying to pride, fear, and patterns of death; be raised with Him daily into new life. Do you have lingering questions about what it means to participate in the life of Christ? We would love to hear from you (admin@westsidechristian.org). Blessings to you and yours during this new season of hope as Christ easters in us.