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.