I rarely remember my dreams, but this morning the last part of my episodic nighttime adventures stayed with me.

It must have been about 4.30pm on a Saturday afternoon as I was turning on the television to check on the football scores coming in. I hadn’t expected to see Chelsea six-nil up as they were playing Man City.

Suddenly I was transported – I was there behind the goal at Stamford Bridge. The ball had gone out of play and Joe Hart was retrieving it right by where I was standing. He rolled the ball back onto the pitch for a goal kick but it went too far, and up popped Lampard to bang in a seventh for Chelsea. Just as I was thinking they would never allow that, the (female) referee awarded the goal.

There was a guy beside me. I hadn’t noticed him before. He was offering me a large paper bag, the sort you get a take away in. I wasn’t feeling hungry but thought I should be polite, so I reached inside. There was no food, only a collection of rubbish – a pretty disgusting mess actually.

I was confused. What did the man mean me to do? He had nothing that could possibly be of any interest to me. But he wasn’t going anywhere. Slowly I looked down at my own hands. They were full of rubbish that I’d been clinging on to, that I knew I hadn’t been able to get rid of.

Then it dawned on me. The man beside me wasn’t offering me his rubbish, he was offering to take my rubbish.

In this self-absorbed, materialistic world in which many of us live it’s so easy to misunderstand Jesus. Many believe that Jesus has nothing to offer the modern world. What could he possibly have that we would want? On the other hand Christians often claim that through his death and resurrection, Jesus offers us forgiveness, victory over death and eternal life. And, while all of that is true – is it really all about us and what we get out of it?

Easter reminds us, especially Good Friday and the waiting of Easter Saturday, that in the first instance Jesus doesn’t come to offer us rubbish – or offer us anything at all really. He comes to take away our rubbish.

As Isaiah says in his passage about the suffering servant
(Isaiah 53:3-6 The Message):

He was looked down on and passed over,
a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away.
We looked down on him, thought he was scum.
But the fact is, it was our pains he carried—
our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself,
that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him,
that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole.
Through his bruises we get healed.
We’re all like sheep who’ve wandered off and gotten lost.
We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we’ve done wrong,
on him, on him.

Happy Easter everyone!