There is something deeply familiar about Easter morning. The lilies. The music. The brightness of the church after the restraint of Lent. For many of us, Easter carries layers of memory, childhood Easters with Chocolate gifts & easter eggs, family gatherings, new clothes, perhaps the echo of voices now silent but once singing beside us. Easter connects us not only to an event in Jerusalem, but to our own story, to Easter Sundays of years gone by.
And yet Easter is never simply nostalgia. It is always new. In the Gospel according to Gospel of John, we are told that Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb “while it was still dark.” That small detail matters. Resurrection begins in the dark. Before proclamation, before understanding, before joy, there is confusion, running, breathlessness, linen cloths lying where a body had been. The beloved disciple “saw and believed,” we are told and yet, in the same breath, we are reminded that “they did not yet understand the scripture.”Faith often begins before comprehension. In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Peter stands in the house of Cornelius and does something extraordinary. He tells the story again. “We are witnesses,” he says. Not philosophers, not strategists, witnesses.
In the Letter to the Colossians, we hear those striking words, “Seek the things that are above… for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” A new creation has begun, perhaps that is why Easter coincides so beautifully with our season of spring. The first shoots pushing through cold soil, blossom where there was barrenness, something awakens, life which seemed buried, rises.Over these past eighteen months, as you have welcomed me into the life and worship of St Stephen’s, one of the things I have come to cherish deeply is your rich Anglo-Catholic heritage. Not a nostalgia for its own sake, but a living beauty a respect for tradition . Incense rising, candles burning, the rhythm of liturgy that is older than any of us and yet received by us afresh.
This year, our diocese marks it’s centenary, indeed next year St Stephen’s will also marks it’s 100th anniversary, the first new parish, in the then new diocese of Blackburn. That sense of perspective has felt especially poignant to me as I’ve reflected on Easter this year. One hundred years, think of the lives contained within that span, the baptisms, marriages, funerals. The wars endured, the celebrations shared. The quiet, faithful Sundays when perhaps only a handful gathered and yet the Eucharist was offered, and the light was kept burning.I sometimes smile when I think of the 1970s, my father’s flared trousers and kipper ties. At the time, they were entirely current, entirely convincing. But fashions are ephemeral, what feels essential one decade becomes quaint the next. The Resurrection is not like that, the stone the builders rejected, sings the Psalm, has become the cornerstone.
Across a hundred years in the life of our Diocese and two thousand years in the Church, empires have shifted, cultures have transformed, technologies have redefined daily life. Yet each Easter, the same proclamation, Christ is risen. And each generation must hear it anew.One of the quiet wisdoms of our Christian inheritance is that we are not owners of the Gospel, we are custodians. The light of the Paschal candle, newly lit in the darkness, is never meant to remain in one place. It is passed, from taper to taper, from hand to hand, until the whole church is illuminated. That gesture is not decorative, it is theological. The light we guard is not ours, it is entrusted to us.
Those who sat in these pews fifty years ago once held it for us. Those who laid foundations a century ago carried it through uncertainty and change. They brought to Easter what we bring, their fears, their hopes, their questions, their gratitude. And they proclaimed, in their time and in their context, that Christ is risen. Now it is our turn, in our homes, in our conversations, in the way we live, in the way we worship with reverence and joy. The Resurrection does not ask us to be fashionable. It asks us to be faithful.Mary came in the dark, Peter ran in confusion, the beloved disciple believed before he fully understood. The Church has always lived in that space, between darkness and dawn, between partial sight and full glory. And so this Easter morning, surrounded by beauty that is both ancient and fresh, we give thanks, for a faith that is ever ancient and ever new. A beauty that does not fade with fashion, a Lord who does not remain in the tomb. May this centenary year not turn us inward in preservation, but outward in proclamation. May the light we have received be light we gladly share. May the familiarity of Easter never dull its wonder, but deepen it.
For this is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia