Easter has come early this year. The Lent fast caught us so soon after Christmas that we were, perhaps, hardly ready for it. That can be inconvenient - and it can be a blessing.

After two thousand years, we can become very used to our Christian faith. We're comfortable with it, domestic. We've tamed it. We don't allow it to shock us any more.

But it should. And when Easter comes early and catches us unawares, it just might be that God is jolting us out of the Christian comfort-zone.

It's hard to live according to our Christian principles. Resurrection is difficult. There's a poem about Resurrection which begins, 'Everything panicked.' You can see the point. How much life can we take, surging through creation?

Much easier to stay within the comfort-zone of regular churchgoing and social responsibility, politically correct views and computerised Common Worship.

But I don't think that will do. Resurrection is inconvenient. It turns us out of our expected and accustomed ways, bursting the bounds of what we think as surely as Jesus burst the bounds of the grave, shattering what we thought we knew. That, we might say, is the downside.

But the upside is indescribable. The upside is freedom. The upside is new life, really new life - not just more of what we're already doing, but a real new start. The energy of resurrection, the energy of God flowing through Christ, energises us too so that we can put aside the ways of thinking and living we've got so used to and take upon us the mind and the life of Christ. No words can describe this. No greeting can convey it.

But my prayer for you and for us all this Easter is that we will know the glorious freedom of the children of God and experience the joy and the inconvenience of resurrection.

May you have a wonderful Easter.

+ Thomas Southwark