Well, I’ve got to wait another week before I can catch up on the antics of Jack Bowers and the race against time to find the nuclear device that threatens LA. I have got hooked on 24 on BBC2 on Sunday nights and because of the snooker, which I also find quite gripping, I will have to wait till next week to catch the next episode!

If you are not addicted to this counter-terrorism drama set in real time, well that’s what they claim but I find that a bit far fetched at times, to set the scene so far. There is a nuclear devise set to go off in an American city in the next few hours and a team of counter-terrorism sleuths have just 24 hours to save the day and several million people with it. In the course of this the team leader has been exposed to a fatal dose of radiation. He is unlikely to see the series out. This gives rise to an interesting exchange between him and one of his colleagues. He asks her what she wants to do with her life if she gets out of this. He wanted to be a teacher but the counter-terrorism unit offered him more money, so for $5,000 he made himself miserable by suppressing what he really felt he wanted to do.

This prompts his colleague to go and chat up one of her colleagues. Her aspirations seem a little more to hand! It is an interesting interjection of some ultimate questions in microcosm and the way the characters deal with them. Actually the one exposed to the radiation has already called his estranged son and made up for years of fractured relationship.

For both of these characters love takes central stage. It is the one thing that seems most important when everything is at stake. For one it is the prospect of the love of another to share life with, to tell a colleague what is really felt about them and not let life go by with ‘what if’. For the other it is the love of a parent and a child and recognising that leaving their relationship unhealed is not right. The father realises that he is at fault and makes the first move and apologises.

Hidden in our second reading (Revelation 2:1-11), in the words of salutation and criticism to the churches, we find the importance of holding on to love especially when under attack. The church in Ephesus at first appears to get a good write up. They are holding their own in the face of attempts to lead them astray by behaviour or false teaching or by some pretending to be what they are not.

The criticism of them is linked to this. In their desire to hold firm they have become hardened. They have become inquisitorial in a way that leaves no room for love. This is something that has been repeated through the centuries. We are familiar with the Inquisition during the Reformation period. We can also think of witch hunters in the 17th century. We can think of extremists in just about any age who have a desire for purity but this becomes distorted and turns sour.

The only real hatred that is to be allowed is that of anything that works against love. The threat of the lampstand being removed is because by losing their grip on love they ceased to be a church, their light has gone out and they have lost their reason for being. Hating hatred is almost tautological, but that is what lies at the root of this message to the church of Ephesus.

As with the characters in 24, it is possible to be so consumed by other drives, or goals, that we lose the very goal that should direct everything; love itself. When love lies buried so deep that we cannot reach hold of it, we have lost our reason for being. All of our relationships and interactions are to be affected by love. We are to be people for whom love guides and directs and is our ultimate driving force.

This is an Easter theme, because it is to affirm life where we would otherwise live death, to enliven where we would otherwise suffocate. It is God’s unconditional and unbounded love that lies behind Jesus rising from the grave and this graciousness is to be our defining character in everything. Indeed, when we lose it, we lose everything. As St Paul says in that great hymn to love, often read at weddings, if we are without love we are nothing (1 Corinthians 13).

© Ian Black 2003

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