Garth George: True heart of Easter shines through murk

Hundreds of millions of Christians throughout the world will tonight begin their annual celebration of the events of the holiest and most sacred period in the Christian calendar, the first Easter - events upon which the Christian Church is founded and which stand at the very heart of our faith and belief.

Easter recollects the death, the descent into Hades and the victorious bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, Son of Man and Son of God - an event which can be said to have transformed mankind and his environment to a greater degree than any before or since and which split history in two.

There are those, including some so-called Christians, who will tell you that the Easter story is nonsense and just a myth; there are those who simply see it as a welcome four-day holiday during which they can do whatever takes their fancy.

And this year there will be those who will point to the churches' Easter celebrations with contempt, seeing Christians as a bunch of hypocrites who can't even keep their own house clean and in order, let alone show others how to live.

Among them will be those, in the Catholic Church in particular, who feel betrayed by the actions of a handful of their ministers whose desertion of their vows reported in the media in the lead-up to Easter has cast a pall over their church.

The enormity of the betrayal by paedophile priests is an abomination, particularly in view of the words of our Lord, whose great love of children is seen in the gospels and who warned: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea."

Other churches, too, find themselves in disarray. The Anglican Church worldwide continues to stave off schism over the ordination of female and openly homosexual clergy. In New Zealand the Presbyterian Church has never recovered from the heresies of a liberal theologian; and the Methodist Church has lost its way, betraying its Wesleyan roots in favour of the liberal philosophies of the age.

Nevertheless, the great majority of Christians who will crowd their churches this weekend will know that these considerations are irrelevant in the context of their personal Easter observances.

For they will understand the words of St Paul, who in a letter to the Church at Ephesus wrote: "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places."

When I was but a youth, a wise old church elder said to me: "If you seek the devil, look first in the Church." I didn't really understand him then, but I do now. Christianity has been under Satanic attack from the eve of the very first Easter.

We are told that "Satan entered into Judas who was called Iscariot, belonging to the number of the 12" and that the disciple sold out Jesus to the religious leaders for 30 pieces of silver.

Thus it was that Jesus was arrested, put through a series of show trials, hit, spat upon, nailed to a cross and hung up to die.

And while this was going on another betrayal took place when Peter, the big, bluff, bombastic disciple who offered to die with his Lord, denied that he even knew him, not once but three times. And when he realised what he had done, he wept bitterly.

It is the aftermath of this betrayal that helps to confirm my faith, not just in the survival of Christ's Church on Earth but its continued growth and influence.

Because the excruciating humiliation Peter suffered at that moment was to be a turning point in a life that was to make his name immortal.

I take little notice of the criticism and carping against the Catholic (or any other) Church by the secular media, for the writers obviously have no conception of the spiritual dynamics at play.

What I see happening is a God-inspired shakeout. From tragedy and humiliation will come repentance and from repentance new strength and purpose. As it happened for Peter, it will happen for the Church he founded.

And Satan's stratagems will continue to blow up in his ugly face as they did so spectacularly on that first Easter Sunday when the crucified Christ rose from the dead, giving all mankind who would accept it victory over sin and death.

Hope and faith and love and joy and peace surged afresh in the hearts of those to whom God had revealed himself, as it has to billions since, will again this weekend, and continue to do until the end of the world.