Easter Sunday 2026

Sermon for KH Easter Sunday 2026 - Rev. Doug Gay

There are two big questions in our gospel reading today – both are directed to Mary Magdalene. The first one which is asked by the angels, and then by the risen Jesus himself, is: “Why are you weeping?” And the second one which is asked only by Jesus – asked when, still blinded by tears, Mary thinks she is talking to the gardener – “Who are you looking for?”

It’s no accident that these questions are directed to Mary – because she is almost the hero of this story – just as she and the other women, three Marys, along with Salome and Joanna, were waiting and watching at the Cross – so she and one other Mary and Salome make their way to the tomb on Easter morning. In a time and place when women’s testimony was not always accepted in a court of law – in the providence of God, it is women who become the first witnesses to the resurrection. The church’s response to this was to record it in the gospels, and then make women wait almost two thousand years before they could be ordained as ministers of the gospel! And so it was right that it was from women this morning that we first heard the good news of Easter.

It is good news that Lent is over – even as a mere Presbyterian, I value Lent so much – I value the journey we have taken together these past six weeks – beginning on Ash Wednesday with the solemn reminder that one day we will die and with the call to turn towards fullness of life. We have gone six weeks without an Alleluia in our worship, some of us have gone six weeks without chocolate, or booze or social media – I took up going to the gym twice a week and have gone six weeks without ever not feeling sore.

Last Sunday, we could see the clouds gathering – as Jesus rode into a city where people wanted him out of the way – Thursday we shared a meal downstairs which began in celebration and ended in betrayal and disarray. Friday we lit candles in a bare church around the cross and yesterday we waited as the Storm came in.

Today at last it’s Sunday, at last it’s Easter, the pulpit fall is white and gold, the church is full of flowers, the liturgy is full of alleluias – and not even Storm Dave can dampen our spirits – because Jesus is risen from the dead.

Someone posted a clip this week of the great Christian teacher and writer Tom Wright – he said “it’s great that so much of the church has rediscovered Lent, but if it deserves 6 weeks, then so does Easter – the Church”, he said, “should be in celebration mode from now until Pentecost” – which is May 24 – so let me make you a promise – just as we had 5 minutes of silence and no alleluias every Sunday in Lent, we will sing an Alleluia every Sunday for the next six weeks. Can I get a witness? Can I get an Alleluia?!

I say that unreservedly – but I want to offer one qualification. We often talk in this church about the New Testament call to weep with those who weep and to rejoice with those who rejoice – we talk about how that shapes us as a community. That can be tricky - our lives don’t always line up with the shape of the Christian Year – during Lent we might welcome a birth in our families and our communities, or fall in love, or get a new job, or get the all clear from some tests. We might feel “I could do with an Alleluia right now” – or we might come to this weekend carrying the sting of grief, overwhelmed by the violence and suffering in our world, nursing a broken heart, holding hard news about ourselves or someone we love – and friends I know that is true for some of us. So we will try to do with one another and for one another what a church should do – when I cannot sing the Alleluia because it sticks in my throat or I can’t get the words out – I will ask you to sing it for me, in hope for the day when I can sing it again.

Last Easter, the Guardian published an editoral – the title was “The Guardian View On the Meaning of Life: Easter and the Ultimate Question”–and this is how it opened: “Christians are to be envied at Easter. The story of death and resurrection, suffering and rebirth is a beautiful and all-encompassing one. For non-believers, a diet of chocolate and wall-to-wall snooker, and the prospect of a perhaps drizzly bank holiday, do not have the same teleological logic. [that’s the Guardian using a big word for what the aim or the purpose of things is] The religious narrative gives life meaning. The notion that there is a plan and purpose is deeply satisfying.”

This Easter, four human beings are 200,000 miles away from earth – floating or maybe speeding in a tin can – they are sending us back pictures of ourselves – the first for 50 years to show the whole earth – a beautiful fragile Blue Marble. Someone commented on social media – that this picture contains every human who has ever lived apart from four - which is an astonishing and awe inspiringthought – although because its Easter Sunday I am tempted to correct them and say apart from five. (or 7 if you count Enoch and Elijah!)

Anyone interested in a theological debate about the DNA of Jesus can talk to me about that afterwards – but if the Guardian is right, and Christians really are to be envied at Easter, I want to say its not just because we have what the Texan theologian Stanley Hauerwas once called ‘the best damn story in the whole world’ – it will also be because we believe this story is true. If our story today is true, then let me say this – it means the body of Jesus is not in that picture, but the presence of Jesus is in our world.

As we prepare to celebrate our Easter Communion, I want to think with you for a few minutes about what it means and about what it feels like for Jesus to be present in our lives and in our world. Although I am just one preacher, I hope that what I say gives a faithful sense of what the whole church believes about this.

If the Jesus who rose from the dead, is present to us today – what does that mean?

It means that not everything which is real, true and important is something which can be photographed, even from Space. Karl Marx suggested the in the end everything spiritual is just a by product of what is material, but Christians don’t believe that. We take the material world very seriously and we understand how life in that world shapes our lives, but we believe the material world is a product of the spiritual world. The Bible says: by faith we understand that what is seen was made out of what is unseen. In the Creed we say on Communion Sundays, the one we will say in a few minutes, we say: “We believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”

We believe that we are made - there is a personal spiritual power and intelligence and love behind the life of the universe And if we say with Billie Eilish in the Barbie movie – “what was I made for?” The answer from Christian faith is that we ourselves are spiritual as well as material beings, we are made for relationship with the God who made us.

So this morning we are asking what does that relationship with the God of Life, with the Risen Jesus, with the Holy Spirit – if it’s a real thing, what does it feel like?

Let me try out some answers from 2000 years of Christian tradition:

It feels like life meeting you in the place of death.
It feels like someone asking you about your grief.
It feels like someone asking you what you are looking for.
It feels like someone speaking your name.
It feels like being led into the heart of God by someone who knows what it is like to feel forsaken by God.
It feels like a spirituality which gives you back the world in all of its materiality – in all of its bodily, messy, earthy beautiful extravagance, because grace doesn’t undermine nature, it perfects it.
It feels like accountability and mercy both at once.
It feels like being called to a life in which you will always have to be changing and learning, a life of repentance and discipleship.
It feels like being fully known and fully loved, even though you always felt it might not be possible to have both.
And it feels like that because it also feels like being forgiven.
It feels like being known completely, not in a way that violates your privacy but which establishes your identity.
It feels like being invited into a new family, given new sisters and brothers and siblings to love, some of whom are crazy hard to get on with.
It feels like being called to love your enemy and forgive those who hurt you.
It feels like being called to be a truth teller and a justice seeker and a peacemaker.
It feels like power and it feels like weakness.
It feels like losing your life in order to find it.
It feels like being a work in progress, where the power working on you is love.
It feels like at a graveside you have someone with you who also wept at a graveside.
It feels like when you’re in the wilderness, you have someone with you who has also been in the wilderness before and knows how hard it is to survive there.
It feels like home and it feels like pilgrimage.
It feels like security, and it feels like risk.
It feels like a pearl of great price that you sell everything to buy.
It feels like finding treasure in a field and having to buy the whole field.
It feels better than sex, although if you’re blessed, you may get to have both, because God was the one who made the world sexy.
It feels like hope, it feels like joy, it feels like freedom.
It feels like an anchor that will hold even through Storm Dave.
It feels like wherever you go, someone will be with you always.
It feels like within every joy there will be a sense of gift and gratitude and within every sadness and pain there will be a sense of being held by someone who loves you eternally - someone who himself suffered on the Cross.
It feels like death will not be the end of you as it wasn’t the end of Him.
It feels like Christmas and it feels like Lent and it feels like Easter.
It feels like a Cross and it feels like Resurrection.
It feels like Kyrie Eleison and it feels like Alleluia.
It feels like the water of baptism on your head, it feels like bread in your mouth and wine on your tongue, and spirit in your soul.

That’s what it feels like to know Jesus - to know the risen Jesus - that’s not just my testimony, it’s the testimony of millions of believers over thousands of years. Even though we often have bad days - or bad weeks - this is what we hold on to and this is what holds on to us.

And if you think for a minute my seeing this and saying this means that I am some great or remarkable or exemplary Christian, you are sadly wrong. “Preachers”, D. T Niles said, “are just beggars telling other beggars where they found bread”. We are just losers, telling other people how we got found. The treasure we have comes in jars of clay, in bodies with feet of clay. The members of this congregation are just people who heard and believed the witness of the church beginning with a woman called Mary who said “I have seen the Lord”.

And on this Easter Sunday, we believe that same Lord invites us to this table. We are invited to come and meet the risen Jesus in bread and wine, to sense the presence of the Spirit within us, to recognise God’s image in the people around us

And for that we say “Alleluia” and for that we say: “Thanks be to God”.