It is going to be a very, very different Easter this year. I cannot remember ever not going to church at Easter. It is always special. From the sadness of Good Friday and then the joy of Easter Sunday. The two most intense emotions of our human existence felt so close together.

None of us here can go to church this year. And this is the same in many countries where the governing powers put the safety of their people first and foremost. A very, very, difficult decision to make.

US President Donald Trump was ridiculed for even suggesting it would be a “beautiful” thing if the COVID-19 virus was over by Easter. He felt confident it would be. The same people who derided and show what he said via the airwaves now are the same people who derided and complained fiercely when he closed the US borders down completely, including air travel. Unfortunately, he was too late.

How many of us would have imagined when the virus broke out in China it would spread so fast and so deadly all over the world?

It is only just now our scientists have concluded, since the tragedy, the virus was MORE than twice as infectious as previously believed. They now believe the infectiousness rate is 5.7. Compare that to the SARSCoV2 RO which was one of the most contagious diseases we had ever seen, 2.2!

In our article yesterday, “Experts: Virus twice as infectious as previously believed” (https://www.ieyenews.com/experts-virus-twice-as-infectious-as-previously-believed/

Eric Feigl-Ding of Harvard Medical School, announced “an infectious rate of 2.2 would mean that once 55 percent of the population had achieved immunity, either by receiving a vaccine or contracting the actual disease, the disease would naturally fade out. But when you increase the infectiousness to 5.7, fully 85 percent of the population would require immunity before officials could rest assured a second wave of the disease would not follow the relaxation of social-distancing restrictions.”

Yet, we still receive reports of Pastors opening up their churches this weekend and playing God themselves by submitting their congregations to death.

As Judith said in her story (found in some Old Testament scriptures – The Book of Judith) “Who are you to put God to the test today, setting yourselves in the place of God in human affairs? And now it is the Lord Almighty you are putting to the test, but you will never understand anything! You cannot plumb the depths of the human heart or grasp the workings of the human mind; how then can you fathom God, who has made all these things, or discern his mind, or understand his plan?”

And, “So while we wait for the salvation that comes from him, let us call upon him to help us, and he will hear our cry if it pleases him.”

You can find these passages at JUDITH 8 v. 12-14 and 17.

On our Rooster radio yesterday, the disc jockey, I will not name him, announced how Easter was going to be different this year. He lamented we are all used to camping on the beach, visiting friends, partying, etc. but we all have to stay at home this Easter. Amazingly, he never mentioned church worship or what the Easter holiday is about.

And nearly all our churches here have been still holding services via the Internet using live-stream via YouTube and video with single members of the congregations reading scriptures, the Pastor giving his message and two choir members singing from their homes or inserting professional recordings of the songs/hymns.

It is not the same as physically being there but spiritually it is. And we are humanly and globally more united now than we have ever been, because of this disease.

As Sarah Coakley perfectly says in her article on the Australian website ABC Religion & Ethics:

“It is as if we have crashed precipitously into Holy Saturday, into the silence and emptiness and shock of Jesus’s tragic death, before we have even started the journey up to Jerusalem with him. But we still have to walk the way of his story this week.

“And the trouble with the controlling coronavirus “story,” of course, is that it isn’t just a story — we are in it, and for now none of us can get out of it. But the glory of the Passion story is that it also isn’t just a story: it is, as we Christians have to remind ourselves afresh at this time, the story, the final and ultimate story of “life and death contending,” and of life triumphing in the extraordinary power and mystery of the resurrection, in which God’s Son breaks out beyond the bonds of death and shatters the forces of darkness and sin. And that mystery, we must also remind ourselves now, in faith and hope and love, already binds us all together across the boundaries of time and space and even death itself; just as — inversely — the fear and anguish of COVID-19 reminds us right now of this same fact: that we belong together for ever, in need and vulnerability and compassion and mutual longing. We are one — both in death and in life.” – https://www.abc.net.au/religion/sarah-coakley-coronavirus-easter-holy-week/11002378

Both Joan and I wish all of you a most Blessed Easter, and we thank you so much for supporting our online news blog, ieyenews, that we started exactly NINE years ago this month. Yes, then we did a paper edition as well, but circumstances change, we now reach even more people and we receive messages from all over the world.

The message of Easter, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus and marking the beginning of a new covenant between God and man, by His taking all our sins into his hands and dying for us, won’t change this year but give it all an even greater meaning and reason.

I leave you with the final words from Sarah Coakley: “ For this year we are being stretched in new and even newly unthinkable ways, precisely by that fear and by that temporary sacramental loss, to understand afresh the core of our baptismal faith: that the resurrected body of Christ encompasses and sustains us all, “ourselves, our souls and bodies,” even in and through death itself, and mystically unites us not only to Him but to each other. It follows that the coronavirus story will not only not have the last word, but that even in its random cruelty it may yet turn us back to the transcendent source and unity of our Being, and to a realisation that as “very members incorporate” in this Christic body, we are now being called into a future — political as well as social — that it is our Christian duty to re-imagine in the wake of it.”

GOD BLESS YOU ALL.