Once a week I volunteer to help migrants learn English at a Melbourne university. At my campus, 70 per cent of the students are Christian minorities from Myanmar, persecuted by the military junta for both their ethnicity and their faith.
Most have harrowing stories of repeatedly hiding in the jungle or underground while troops rampaged through their villages. They fled across the border to Thailand, Malaysia or India, and waited 10 to 15 years in refugee camps, their lives in limbo, to come to Australia.
I think in particular of a family of parents and two adult children, who turn up every week (coming by public transport as they have no car), always smiling and dedicated to learning. My heart overflows for these courageous people, who are so free of resentment. They are delighted to be here and eager to fit in and become Australian.
For most of them, their new life is a form of redemption, in which they can move on with a measure of hope and confidence.
Redemption, Christians believe, is what Easter is about, Jesus actively choosing to go to his agonising death to redeem errant humans – so much so that the cross, which the Romans intended as a symbol of shame and humiliation, has become a universal emblem of sacrificial love, hope and redemption. As theologian N.T. Wright put it, “the symbol which had spoken of Caesar’s naked might now spoke of God’s naked love”.
Jesus’ resurrection is the vindication of his sacrifice. As the apostle Peter says, God raised Jesus up because it was impossible for death to hold him.
To some, such as new atheist Richard Dawkins, the cross paints God as a monster, sacrificing the innocent for the guilty. As so often, Dawkins has not grasped the core truth: it was not inflicted on Jesus; he chose it. Instead, it is a story of astounding moral beauty, love and tenderness.
God satisfied the apparently irreconcilable demands of his justice, which cannot ignore human cruelty and rebellion, and his mercy, which demands he redeem and reconcile humans to himself. He accomplished this by this divine gift of self in Jesus, “very God of very God” (the Nicene Creed).
It is perfectly summed up in the Gospel of John’s most celebrated verse: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Nothing could better illustrate God’s patience, love and mercy.
The possibility of a fresh start, which the Myanmar students are appreciating on a human scale, is also what is possible through the cross, a fresh start here and now, and in eternity. The Bible calls it
“new life”.
Barney Zwartz is a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity.
Barney Zwartz, a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity, was religion editor of The Age from 2002 to 2013.
