JOHN MacLEOD: In this time of war and chaos, we must hold the message of Easter dearer than ever. For it offers us the most precious gift of all... hope

By JOHN MACLEOD FOR THE SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL Published: 20:46, 3 April 2026 | Updated: 20:46, 3 April 2026 Easter – the end of winter, the end of Lent, a time of renewed life and of spring and of hope, when Christians in older faith traditions emerge emotionally from the Tomb and priests set aside their purple vestments – is actually set by the Jewish calendar. Celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the spring equinox, that means, this year, Easter is exceptionally early. There will be beauty but, in all probability, a thin and chill beauty, even in the hope first personified in the snowdrops fast fading. Shafts of sunlight and enchanting rainbows; daffodils now bobbing and the whin and forsythia in bloom. But there may yet be frost; curtaining hail and wintry showers. We look forward to pinkly roasted Paschal lamb and a glass of that blushful Provençal, but a feast in the garden? In Scotland? Aye, right. I already have my chocolate egg, a high-end Thorntons Continental job. I may yet find it more chavtastic company – a Yorkie-bar number caught my eye the other day – and, of course, the association of eggs with Easter is a very old one. Indeed, older than Easter itself, for a scorched egg – Beitzah – is to this day part of the Passover meal of our Jewish friends, which they too celebrate this weekend. Dressed for travel as they prepare to sup on roast lamb and bitter herbs, and some vegetable dipped in salted water, for past enslavement and tears. The youngest child present prompted to ask aloud, ‘Why do we do these things?’ The burnt egg recalls the lost, destroyed Temple. Someone will raise the toast – ‘Next year, in Jerusalem.’ Probably unspoken, but on all minds as at every Jewish feast, the thought, ‘They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.’ We must hold the message of Easter closer than ever, writes John MacLeod, as it offers us the most precious gift of all - hope The egg, of course, also represents the cycle of life, rebirth and mourning. And, should you ask that old corker – which came first, the chicken or the egg? – every Hebridean crofter’s wife has at once the ready reply: What comes first is the clocking hen. You will know you have a clocking or ‘broody’ hen when you go to collect the morning’s eggs and find one of your ladies embarked on a sit-down strike in the nesting-box. Slightly out of it. Her eyes a little glazed, making a strange clock-clock noise. Frankly, awash with hormones, she looks stoned. But, for now, she is determined to be in the family way and there are only two things you can do about it. You can confine her alone in a coop without eggs – of necessity, if you do not keep a cockerel – till she gets over it, which she eventually will. Or you can gather thirteen fertile eggs – you can even order them online – and set them under her in the private suite. Water to hand, and corn too – not layer’s pellets, as the droppings would be very messy. And there she will happily sit and incubate while you count down the twenty-one days, looking in on her regularly. Indeed, she doesn’t strictly need your help at all. It never happened to me – and I do not have the land for poultry now – but I have heard of a prized fowl disappearing, and the bereft wifie blaming everything from hoodie crows to the cat next door… and then, perhaps twenty-two days later, Madame emerging from the deepest rushes, with some cheeping little darlings in tow. Hatching is quite a job. It is the toughest thing in its life that a clucker will ever do. The struggle to break and emerge from the shell can last a day. And yet – here’s the thing – you cannot help. If you intervene, and break the shell for it, the chick will be dead within hours, if indeed not minutes. The fight is immediate, personal and existential. And, come to think of it, there is a profound Easter message in that. ‘Opening and alleging,’ the Apostle Peter exhorted the Jerusalem crowd, ‘that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ…’ And though Jesus, in the agony of the garden of Gethsemane, did pray, ‘O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me: nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt,’ He duly drank it in full measure for His people, dying as we are all born –naked and alone. An agonising death; an anguished death; a humiliating death – till at last He could cry, ‘It is finished.’ Gethsemane is one of the fascinating glimpses granted us in the Gospel to the fit – and sometimes almost the tension – between the divine and human natures of our Redeemer. There are others. Despite our subsequent endeavours to make church – and salvation – very complicated, the penitent thief died with the promise of Christ in his ears, ‘Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise…’ Immediately: almost now. In glory for always, all tears wiped from his eyes. No purgatory – Heaven entire for a man who had never been baptised, never confirmed, never shriven, never partaken of what we variously call the Mass, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, Communion or the ‘breaking of bread’. There is another notable detail of Christ’s Passion. The women hung in there. His very mother, transfixed in horror, stood at the foot of the Cross. It was the women who secured the body, the women who washed and anointed it – and women were the first to behold the empty tomb and the risen Saviour. The men? They proved a bunch of wusses. To the last Apostle, they ran away. Peter, cowering by the fire in some low howff, was baited to distraction by one of those horrid little girls. ‘This man was also with him,’ she bleated. And kept bleating. And Peter cursed, and swore, and thrice denied all knowledge of this Jesus – and then the cock crew. There are abiding, cultural distortions. As C S Lewis once observed, we are apt to discuss the Crucifixion in sort of hushed, Sunday parlour tones, as if it were something medical. In truth, it was horrific. The Romans knew how to crucify people. Ideally, very slowly: nine-inch nails, with wooden washers, through wrists and heels. If you did not die from shock or loss of blood, if your heart did not give out from the agony, you eventually – unable to lift your torso any more by your mangled extremities – simply suffocated. Sometimes Roman soldiers simply smashed legs to hurry things along, and John’s Gospel attests thus perished both thieves on Golgotha. Priests didn’t want corpses – ritually unclean – around on the Sabbath: what squaddie ever has spurned the chance of an early pint? But one glance at Christ and they knew He was gone. Just to prove it, one lunged with a spear. Dead, coagulated blood and clear fluid duly oozed from the cardiac sac. ‘Jesus,’ George MacLeod of Govan and Iona fame once intoned, ‘was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles but on a cross between two thieves. ‘On a town garbage heap, at a crossroad of politics so cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek.’ And how apt we are to forget there were two thieves – both of whom initially mocked Christ. ‘One was saved,’ Bishop Ryle of Liverpool once powerfully observed, ‘that none might despair; but one was lost, that none might presume.’ The iconography we all associate with Easter Week – from illustrated Bibles, children’s story books, stained glass and statuary and so on – also misleads, especially as the most vigorous Protestant faith traditions do not permit imagery of Jesus of any kind. But Easter is not ultimately the corpse. Or the tomb, or the winding cloth. It is the Resurrection: the death of death in the death of Christ. Hallelujah, my Father: in His death is my birth – Hallelujah, my Father, in His life is my life. Easter is about renewal. In spiritual terms, the advent of the Christian dispensation: prophecies at the last fulfilled, in Judaea, in the earthly ministry of Christ from about 28 to 31 AD. Immediately, and personally, the making of new hearts, rejoicing lips and obedient wills. More: Easter was real. A real man, in a real place, in a real time. Luke could not have been clearer had he been recalling some past, great general election. As he recorded, John the Baptist emerged to proclaim Him ‘in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene…’ There is actually far more evidence, both from the Gospels and from near-contemporary sources, of Christ’s ministry on Earth than for Julius Caesar’s incursions into Britain in 55 and 54 BC. Our oldest, sole source for that is a 15th century manuscript of Tacitus’s Agricola: but who denies it ever happened? Easter, too, is about remembrance. Most powerfully, it changed the Sabbath. The Jews, to this day, rest from their labours on the seventh day of the week. So does the odd modern Christian sect, most notably the Seventh Day Adventists. But the Christian Sabbath has been for two millennia now the first day of the week, as the Acts of the Apostles make clear – because it was on that day that Christ rose from the dead. And on that day, at least in my Presbyterian tradition, we remember Him, typically twice a year per congregation, in the Lord’s Supper, never forgetting: That God was Man in Palestine, And lives today in Bread and Wine. Easter is about rejoicing. No, you need not join a Palm Sunday procession, or raise your voice in the silliest, repetitive modern worship-choruses. Nor is there any shame in gathered family, the tasty fare on the table, the kids excitedly hunting for hidden Easter eggs in the garden or the first sensation, in months, of golden sun warm on your skin. But all good things are, ultimately, the gift of God; and central to belief in Him and the Christian faith itself – as the Apostle Paul recognised from the get-go – is the Resurrection as grounded, historic and actual fact, and our surrender, as sinners, to the living Saviour. This has never, to put it mildly, been a popular message and Easter, too, is about rejection. Even in Scotland, not that long ago, men have been racked, tortured and slain – and at least two women drowned – for refusing to abjure it. In too many lands, Christians are savagely persecuted still. In Canada, they have just passed a law that could, in some contexts, make it a criminal offence to quote the Bible. There the edge in the Easter story we cannot ignore: that, even now, every Christmas and every Easter, every Lord’s Day and more and more in the public square, people hear the Gospel, are confronted with the truth of Christ – and spit on it. Back on the croft, it has been about twenty-two days now. Our clocking hen now seems to be the size of a car cushion and, if also perhaps a bit smug, it is because – and you can hear it faintly yourself – the cheeping has begun. You do nothing, save renew her water and the grain. Next day, you might lift her. Behold her babies; remove broken shells; note one egg or two – uncracked – that might be duds. Then restore hatchlings, and her, to their nest, and lay on water and chick-feed for them too. Come the morning, and you call again. No chicks are to be seen – though cheep they do – and there is a sweet and subtle smell. And then, from under her bosom and through and about her wings, tiny fluffy heads pop up to decide what sort of fellow you are. You lift, and grin; the last eggs have hatched. ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,’ declared Jesus, leaving the Temple for the last time, about to preach the sermon that would turn Judas traitor, ‘thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not…’ Even as He steeled Himself, George MacLeod concluding, for Golgotha – ‘the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. And that is what He died about.’ The comments below have not been moderated. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. 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