Easter Sunday 2026
A very happy Easter to you all! Christ is risen. Alleluia!
It’s quite a challenge to put the Resurrection into words, isn’t it?
Something so mysterious and so wonderful has happened and our language is not really up to the job. As Thomas Merton the celebrated Cistercian monk once wrote: And here all adjectives fall to pieces. Words are stupid. Everything you say is misleading…Metaphor has now become hopeless altogether (Seeds of Contemplation: Pure Love).
There’s lots of theological discussion about resurrection and some of it is useful. Mostly it’s useful when it clarifies what we don’t mean when we make claims about Easter, and perhaps the first thing to bear in mind today is that the Christian Tradition is NOT talking here about re-animation (the straightforward coming back to life of a corpse).
When we talk of resurrection we are rather talking about a transition or a transformation through death, to a new and different, form of life.
We are also talking about something that is available to us here, now, before the death of our mortal bodies.
The 1st Letter of St John puts it this way: And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life (1 John 5:11-12).
St Paul says a similar thing in different words when he exclaims, I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me (Galatians 2:20).
St Paul seems to be telling us that this Resurrection-life we are talking about; this participation in eternal-life mentioned by St John, is life lived from a different point of view.
It is life lived from a different locus of consciousness, or identity; life from a different centre, and that reminds me that Jesus referred to himself as ‘the Cornerstone’.
In the Bible, the cornerstone refers to the primary, foundational stone placed at the corner of a structure to align and support all the other stones. We can apply the metaphor to the Church because Jesus is the Stone or the Rock on which the Church is built, but we can also apply it to ourselves because Jesus told us to build our own houses - our very selves - on the Rock (I hope you remember the Parable in Matthew 7:24-27).
So, this so-called ‘resurrection-life’ is life re-defined, so we begin to feel that in some mysterious way we are not US anymore, in the straightforward sense of that word.
So I’d like to ask you to use your imaginations this morning (it’s a bit of fun).
Imagine that you woke up this morning and you weren’t you anymore? Imagine you were someone else, and more than that: someone you’ve always wanted to be. The person you always hoped you were.
Imagine that you are sitting here now, and at some point in the night (you don’t know exactly when or how) a strange transformation took place so that you now experience the life you lived until yesterday from a completely different point of view.
Imagine further that your new way of seeing is filled with love and light and peace and goodness.
Imagine that you’re still you, though, because the fact that you are aware that a new perspective is in place means that there’s a degree of continuity with your old self here.
The fact that you know that something has changed implies that in some inexplicable way, even though you’ve changed and taken on an entirely new perspective, you’re still ‘you’ because you remain aware of your history and you still look like you and sound like you and smell like you.
Maybe this is what the scriptures mean when they tell us that the result of this transformation is a ‘new heaven and new earth’? (Revelation 21:1). Because in a life like this everything is seen and experienced differently; everything has become new; everything (including you) is so permeated with the presence of God that everything that is, is holy (as William Blake put it).
Well I think that’s (sort of) what we are saying, as Christians, when we talk of living a risen life. We are saying that what’s available to us is a ‘new’ life; a life lived from a different centre that’s not ‘you’ anymore.
As well as being yourself, you have woken up as ‘someone else’, and the good news is that the ‘someone else’ in question is Christ, in whom you now live and move and have your being (Acts 17:28).
You are born again. You are a new creation.
And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. (Revelation 21).
So as we move beyond Lent and in to the Great Fifty Days of the Easter season I pray that the reality of the New Creation (of Jesus Risen and his gift to us of a risen and eternal life) would begin to make itself felt in your lives (and mine).
I ask for the eyes to see it; the ears to hear it; the mind to perceive it and the heart to encounter it.
May our Easter be filled with the love of the God (the Beauty Ever Ancient and Ever New) who has begun and will complete the great work in us.
And may the next 50 days resound with our Alleluias. Amen.
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