An Anglican responds to the Anglican Church’s feeble Easter message
The Anglican Church on Friday delivered an Easter message, viewable here: https://www.anglicantaonga.org.nz/news/common_life/2026abps_easter As an Anglican myself, I wish to respond, because in my view there are many problems with it:
Christ is described as a “teacher” who espoused an ethic of love and challenged unjust power structures of His day. In fact, Christ claimed to be far more than a teacher: He claimed to be God Incarnate. (For anyone interested, former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi explores the textual evidence that Christ claimed to be divine in his books Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus and No God But One.)
The Anglican Church’s statement also does not explain why according to our faith Christ needed to die on the cross in the first place. In fact, at the Last Supper Christ said that His blood was “poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). Thus, Christ Himself states that His death was a sacrifice to reconcile the world to God, as foreshadowed in the Passover sacrifice and the Old Testament sacrificial system.
But supremely, there is no mention in the Anglican Church’s statement that Christ rose from the dead. It is amazing to me that the archbishops manage to mention the Ukraine, Gaza, the cost of living crisis and basically everything other than Christ’s bodily resurrection in a message about the meaning of Easter.
“Just be nice, everyone” is nothing I couldn’t learn in a sociology course at the University of Auckland. It is a message indistinguishable from the secular world. The sight of God Incarnate walking through the streets of Jerusalem and carrying His cross to be crucified by the very human beings He created in an act of deicide ought to be one of the most extraordinary spectacles in human history. That and not radical niceness is the unique contribution of the Christian faith to humanity.
Easter isn’t about nice warm mushy feelings and whatever vogue cause of the day the Anglican Church chooses to attach itself to. (I notice in passing that the Ukraine and Gaza are the Anglican Church’s particular fixation, and not for example the genocide of Christians in Nigeria by Boko Haram or the persecution of political dissidents in Cuba.) Easter is about a crucified saviour dying for our sins and rising from the dead.
The fact that the archbishops did not mention any of this in their statement about (of all things) the meaning of Easter shows to me that they simply don’t believe the most central teachings of their own faith or have any idea of the power of this message to change our lives.