The Rt Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, gives a message of hope at Easter

EASTER is late this year, making sure that all the signs of spring are showing. It’s the season of hope. Behind us are the withering of autumn and the cold death of winter.

The bleakness of those days has been made all the more bitter by the earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, by the devastation of the Tsunami and the sinister threat of a nuclear meltdown. The world feels perpetually precarious.

During the Lambeth Conference three years ago, I was in a small Bible Study group with two Bishops from Japan.

We’ve been in touch with each other over the earthquake.

One of them wrote to me about finding Christ in all the devastation.

Good Friday is the day that God, too, died. Not a distant spectator of our suffering, but one of us from the womb to the tomb.

There’s a famous painting of Jesus being taken down from the cross.

The contour of his bent dead body mirrors the contour of his mother’s grief-aching body.

It seems to say that Mary his mother knew exactly what Jesus was going through.

But it also says that Jesus knew truly what his mother was enduring.

In this past year, I’ve been immersing myself in the documents being released to the Hillsborough Independent Panel and meeting regularly with the families.

More and more I’ve felt the tragedy of Hillsborough. My faith has taken me to Easter and to the grief of those around the cross of Jesus.

On the cross, Jesus asks “why” and gets no answer. Heaven is silent and the earth quakes.

For his family and friends’ tears were their food day and night.