The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has reminded believers of the power of God's unconditional love to overcome human failure in his Easter sermon yesterday.

Archbishop Williams said in his sermon, preached on Easter Day at Canterbury Cathedral, that conflict and failure are part of the human condition, but said that the death and resurrection of Jesus turns that on its head:

"We share one human story in which we are all caught up in one sad tangle of selfishness and fear and so on. But God has entered that human story; he has lived a life of divine and unconditional life in a human life of flesh and blood."

He recalled a visit to the Solomon Islands in 2004 during which one of the leaders
caught up in the islands' recent civil war took public responsibility for
failure:

"Here was a politician representing a community that had suffered greatly and inflicted great suffering as well saying, 'We were all wrong. We needed healing and forgiveness.' And it was as if for the first time you could see the bare bones of what reconciliation means."

The lesson, he says, can be learnt in other conflicts when people learn to
listen to stories other than their own. He urged people to be more open to the opinion of others.

"We'd better listen, hateful and humiliating though it may be for some of us."

In Northern Ireland, he said, progress towards reconciliation had made it possible for people to start to hear each other's histories and that they no longer needed to be bound by the past:

"Everyone in this history made decisions, some shockingly evil, some tragic, some foolish [but] those decisions and the sufferings that came from them don't have the power to tell you what decisions you have to make today."

The Easter story, he says, provides comfort and encouragement to those struggling to live out the message of reconciliation: "If we can accept the unwelcome picture of us and our world that Good Friday offers, we are in the strangest way, set free to hear what Easter says.

"When in our world we are faced with the terrible deadlocks of mutual hatred and suspicion, with rival stories of suffering and atrocity, we have to pray for this resurrection message to be heard."