The transition from Easter to Anzac Day in Australia can be a strange one, particularly when the two celebrations come in the space of two weeks as they do this year.
At Easter, we move from the terrible desolation of Good Friday to the joy of Easter Sunday. It's the foundation story for the Christian faith, and speaks of the arrival of new life and hope for the world.
Anzac Day forces Christians to confront a different reality — that this new hope has yet to be fully realised. Looking back to the major wars of the 20th century that Australia was involved in, knowing they were waged by Christians against each other, as well as those of other faiths and no faith, we can see that the world is still far from that which Christ envisaged.
Dawn services across Australia mark Anzac Day, helping us remember the terrible cost of war and renew our determination to be peacemakers. The commemorations will help us remember those who have lost their lives in war, whose efforts helped shape our country's history. But in our reflections on Anzac Day, it's worth also looking at what the day might say in the light of the Easter story.
A great deal of the rhetoric on Anzac Day is about sacrifice. But often those sacrifices are described in political or social terms — of soldiers giving their lives for the freedom and security of their families back home. At their heart, they're stories of sacrifice in order to bring peace to others — which have echoes in the Easter story.
But the Easter story has other ways to look at sacrifice, too, ones that cause us to look at Anzac Day differently.
Christians, including early Christian writers like Paul, often talk about the death and resurrection of Christ in terms of the death of the old self, and the birth of a new self that is much closer to God. One of the lessons of Easter then is that to fully live, we must be willing to sacrifice all that we are to God; and if we are unwilling to make that sacrifice, we can never be born into a new life.
We don't often think of war as this type of struggle — the sacrifice of ones self, in order to give birth to new life. But it's a helpful way to explore the issues that are faced in a time of war.
"The stories we share on Anzac Day look