For immediate release 17 April 2025
Wesley Mission CEO, Rev Stu Cameron, Easter Message 2025
It seems like 2025 is both rushing at us and rushing by. Everything seems to be accelerating, the 24/7 news cycle on permanent fast-forward, social media algorithms magnifying a sense of crisis around every corner.
Overseas, at breakneck speed President Trump is upending international alliances that have underpinned the fragile geopolitical stability much of the world has enjoyed since 1945. In Ukraine, a miserable war grinds on, while in its rubble-strewn streets, Gaza remains in the grip of a humanitarian crisis.
Here at home, the cost-of-living crisis continues to squeeze family budgets to breaking point, all while we continue to come to grips with a housing catastrophe decades in the making and which, truth be told, will take decades to fix. While the rich get richer, many of us are seemingly powerless in an economy that we feel has left us out and left us behind. With a federal election soon upon us, we are being bombarded daily with promises many of us don’t believe.
More than a century ago, Vladmir Lenin said that ‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.’ Given the pace of change washing over us, and the various crises mushrooming around us, it seems 2025 is a year where, to borrow Lenin’s phrase, decades are happening.
In these uncertain and anxious times, many of us are feeling overwhelmed. Through 2024 Lifeline recorded 8 of its 10 largest daily call volumes as ordinary Aussies from every demographic and nearly every postcode sought help. Whether we recognize it or not, many of us are grieving – a dream that’s fading, certainties that are disappearing or hope that’s receding.
Jesus, the central figure not only of the Easter story but of human history, was described by a prophet as a ‘man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’ On the night he would be betrayed, arrested and imprisoned, knowing the unimaginable suffering that lay head for him, Jesus told his friends that his soul was ‘overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.’
In that moment in the Garden, Jesus had a choice. He could have let the cup of suffering he was to drink pass him by. Compelled by perfect and pure love, Jesus willingly walked the loneliest roads of suffering, pain and death. Decades after his death, one of his friends recalled Jesus’ own words, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but will have everlasting life.’
Whosoever is you and me – all of us, everywhere and across every time – without exception. God’s love for us is without limit.
It was love that compelled Jesus to walk the way of suffering, love that stretched out his hands on the cross and love that forgave his enemies with his dying breath.
It was love that saw him lay down his life so that we might enjoy friendship with God. There is no greater love than this.
It was love that rolled the away the stone of Jesus’ tomb, revealing not only his empty graveclothes, but that in the end, that love has the first and final word – that when all is said and done, love wins.
The story of Easter is the story of God’s love overcoming our failures, our sins, our shame, our guilt, and the power of death itself. God’s perfect love is the power than can overwhelm all our fears.
In a world changing at overwhelming speed, when we can feel overwhelmed by uncertainty, anxiety and fear – the Easter truth that love overcomes, that love wins – echoes down two millennia of history and stretches out into eternity, and reaches out for you and for me, embracing us with the assurance that God will never leave us, that there is always hope.
This truth invites us into a personal and utterly transformative relationship with God. Freely God is offering you his love, and freely you can receive and be forever changed by it.
ENDS
Rev Stu Cameron is available for interview
Media contact: Anne Holt 0418 628 342 or [email protected]
