In the world in general and in the Church in particular Easter is perceived to be a time of joyful celebration. For the world, perhaps, it’s like a smaller version of Christmas and a few distinctive touches like Easter chocolate eggs.

As a child I looked forward to my Easter egg on the breakfast table on Easter Sunday, and in the eastern parts of the Church the egg retains more of its symbolism of the egg or the tomb being cracked open by the new life springing from it.

The general life-bearing fruitfulness of spring after the deadness of winter perhaps also retains for some an Easter symbolism.

The Church looks on Easter Day as defining all Sundays, so that every first day of the week is a sort of Easter day. If you counted the days of Lent from Ash Wednesday on, you would have found that you had to leave the six Sundays of Lent out to get the 40 days. This is because the weekly feast cannot be part of the Lenten fast.

Sunday is always a day of celebration, a resurrection day, inserted as a special occasion in our regular lives, so that by its influence all of our lives might be touched and infused by it, making them special through and through.

Those of us who followed the events of Holy Week from the Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem through the whole drama of the rejection of Jesus by the authorities, His betrayal by a false disciple and His denial by His own friend, His trial in a series of shameful parodies of true justice and finally His agony of body and spirit on the cross as He who was without sin became sin for us, have had at second-hand some insight into the costliness of Jesus’ accomplishment.

Having insight into the costliness of His accomplishment gives depth and reality to our gratitude for it. We truly have much to celebrate – indeed we have everything to celebrate.

The work was accomplished and the King of Kings was finally vindicated. As Jesus offered Himself for us, He extended to us His new covenant by which our very hearts, that is to say our wills and intentions, have God’s law written upon them, and by which too our sins and rebellions are forgiven.

The apostolic witnesses to the risen Christ, for example St Peter’s declaration in Acts 10: 41 that the chosen witnesses ate and drank with Him after He rose from the dead, are still a witness to us down the centuries that the way of the cross that the Lord trod was the triumphant way.

The Easter Season, then, is the declaration of God’s triumphs over the powers of darkness, for the love of His children.

All this, of course, and more, is what we see now, looking back on the first Easter with the benefit of the New Testament witness. It might come as something of a surprise to remember that on the first Easter day there was no New Testament yet.

If there was the beginning of a glimmer of understanding on the part of some about the significance of the strange things they were witnessing, that is the most that can be said.

The women saw the empty tomb, and Peter and John saw the empty tomb, and St John witnesses that he alone “believed” when he saw it.

We are not told what the terms of his belief at that point were, but we can surmise that he had begun to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

But other gospels make clear that most of the disciples did not immediately believe the first witnesses. There was confusion and questioning.

In fact, the victory that we rightly associate with the Easter season seems not to have become fully clear until another 40-day period had passed. During that time there were many witnesses to the reality of Christ’s resurrection.

Finally, when the disciples and associates were gathered in prayer in Jerusalem, they were confirmed in the knowledge that Christ the King had conquered, as Peter preached.

They had come a long way from the uncertainty of those first Easter Day witnesses.

For commentary, information and devotional material see www.churchofenglandcayman.com and http://www.anglicansatprayer.org/.