On Good Friday, the air around Bermuda is filled with the buzz of kites, darting and diving in the sky, tails swaying with serpentine movement in a dance of joy. Each kite is a kaleidoscope of colour, reflecting the beautiful diversity of our Island home, its bright palette of hues deflecting the light.

The community gathers in celebration, munching on hot-cross buns, stuffed with fishcakes, looking up at the spectacle that is a uniquely Bermudian tradition – but one that has echoes back to that first Good Friday. On that occasion the wood was not draped in tissue paper held on by Elmer’s glue, but the tissue of a human body, nailed thereto — as Jesus was lifted up for a mocking world to see. The cross on that day was not a tasty bun but an instrument of cruel torture and execution.

Disturbing as the first Good Friday was, it was, however, the mechanism and means by which humanity can be restored, as Jesus voluntarily took on himself all that was cruel and evil of the world — even death itself.

He took upon himself our divisions, hatred, sins and evils. In their place he brought love, forgiveness and the possibility of reconciliation, transformation, and new life and light.

He established a new kind of community — bound not by race, gender, tribe or tongue, but truly multifaceted. He took death’s sting by dying for us so that we may look up to the God who created us without fear.

The symbolism of our traditions are rich reminders in a dark world that there is a different way to live — in relationship to God, with barriers between us broken. And these promises are not just chimera, aspirational or vain hopes but earthed by the next occasion in which we gather — Easter Sunday itself.

On that first Easter day, the power of death was revealed to have been broken, and with it the ultimate power of all that ails and afflicts. Jesus’s resurrection — witnessed and attested to by hundreds — turned the world upside down.

As bombs and drones cascade destruction upon our world today; as families and communities feel the effects of discord, brokenness and violence; as individuals face a sense of isolation, depression and anxiety, and divisiveness becomes the norm through the form of social media; as our environment faces the consequences of our greed and indifference, there is an ever new hope and the possibility of beginning again.

Spring brings that in some measure as the Bermudiana open and Easter lilies wag their scented heads — but they do so only to the rhythm of our creator, God, who came to be like us, in our weakness and confusion; who understands, sees and knows us in our frailty, but who, through faith in Him, brings the omnipotent into the personal, and time into eternity; who shatters death and ushers in the possibility of new life.

We need to be awake to God’s presence in this world, and at Easter time we are the closest that we can be to seeing God’s heart of love — that God so loved the world that he gave his son, so that whosoever believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life!

May this season be for each of you a time for joyful gatherings, restored relationship and renewed hope that is offered by a God who is rich in mercy, and abounding in steadfast love.