Hungarian church heads send Easter messages

“Only we, Christians can take the good tidings of the resurrection of Christ to the world,” bishop István Bogárdi Szabó, the head of the Hungarian Reformed Church’s synod, said in his Easter Sunday message.

The Protestant bishop said: “God trusts us with the good news of the resurrection because we can see the forgiveness of sins in the cross of Jesus.”

He said that two-thousand years ago God decided that the good tidings should be taken by simple people: at Christmas, by the shepherds, and at Easter, by the “sinful Mary Magdalene” and the “cowardly Apostle Peter”, who denied Jesus.

Bishop Tamás Fabiny, the head of the Lutheran Church of Hungary, urged his audience to be brave enough to set off on the path of faith, saying this was a path where courage would pay off.

Speaking at an Easter Sunday service held for detainees and their relatives, the bishop said the men appearing in the Bible’s Easter narratives are cowardly but the women show courage by going to the tomb of Jesus even though they do not know how they will roll away the stone covering the tomb. When they get there, the angel tells them to raise their heads, and then they can see that the stone had been rolled away, he added.