The Rt Revd David Thomson writes: My wife’s mother died last week. So my thoughts and prayers are very much with those who also have sickness and loss in their families this Easter.

But she was nearly 92, and slipped away peacefully with her girls around her, after a life of service and faith. And what looked to us like an earthly death was surely also her heavenly birthday.

So I still want to wish you all a very Happy Easter indeed – the festival not just of an old Northern goddess of the spring, but of a whole new springtime for our lives.

When Jesus stepped out of the tomb, alive in a new way that death could not hold, he offered a new Spirit to inspire us now, and a new way to bridge the gap between our fine visions of good, and the way they always fall short.

We experience that gap as individuals, and as a society too. Good Friday reminds us of it. But we call it Good because it also shows how it has been bridged. Every Easter offers us the hope that with God’s help we can still reach for the stars.

But spare a thought for those crossing over from despair to hope for real right now: the refugees of today, making their own Exodus, and seeking their own Promised Land. Spare a thought, offer a prayer, and think how your hand could be held out to them as that of Jesus is held out to us. Let theirs be a Happy Easter too.