It is very rare — once in every hundred years or so — for Easter to arrive before Anzac Day. It happened this year. And the conjunction of the two holidays is a happy one.
The story of Easter always fits well with any form of serious business. It has space for personal and domestic grief and death, and offers promise of life beyond grief. It expands to meet the large seasons of the human heart, the stages of life's journey and the vulnerability of the natural world in which we live. It also offers hope that we and our world might one day be transformed.
The Easter story is serious and far reaching enough to embrace reflection on large catastrophes like the war in Libya, earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, and flooding in Australia.
So Easter fits well with Anzac Day. Or better, Anzac Day fits well with Easter. Anzac Day recalls matters of life and death, tragic events. So many young men died in a lost battle that was marginal to Australia's interests and welfare.
Much of what was said by generals and politicians, and what was written on gravestones for the consolation of relatives and the reassurance of the people, was taken from the Easter story. 'They died that others might live.' 'They made the supreme sacrifice.' 'Their death was not in vain.' Grief needed to be housed in the Easter story.
But Easter also tests the meanings we find in great loss and disaster. It challenges any easy consolations we may find or offer to others, especially our temptation to describe people's deaths as useful to others and to minimise the suffering and lasting harm caused by natural catastrophes and wars. In the Easter story the connections that link death, in its various forms of loss, ageing, catastrophe and grief, with life and meaning are much more mysterious and complex.
Easter does not sweeten the death of Jesus. It remains a brutal, degrading, dismembering, dirty affair. The Catholic practice of hanging crosses with the image of the tortured Jesus in classrooms and over hospital beds makes the point that this is the only starting point for thinking about what rising to life might mean. There are no shortcuts.
To ignore the casual brutality, pain, death and diminishment of war by depicting it as an adventure for young soldiers is judged as cheap nonsense when set alongside Easter. Anzac Day is first of