Reflection: Resurrection Revealed

by Rev Paul Clark, Dean of Formation, Trinity College Queensland

I remember going on church camps as a teenager, having to spend time in nature waiting to see what God might reveal to us. I’m a bit of a logical person, so these creative endeavours never really grabbed me. I’d often come back with a rock and say, ‘God is very rock-ish’.   Here I was at another one of these camps, and oh no, guess what we had to do, go into nature and find God! I really didn’t expect God to show up, I thought this was going to be another waste of time.

Then it happened - out of nowhere, everything I saw, everything I looked at screamed resurrection. The seed fallen to the ground, the green shoots from the burnt tree stump, the caterpillar and butterfly, the decomposing leaves - it was resurrection! I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed it before. Nature was filled and flooded with the idea of death and resurrection. I didn’t expect God, now I was overwhelmed! Now I was the poor sod excitedly showing everyone else at camp the decomposing leaves I’d collected and how they pointed to Jesus!

Here it was. Nature pointed to one moment in history that made all the moments of history make sense: resurrection. “Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies it remains a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds.” John 12:24