After Easter Sunday there are another 5 Sundays of Easter before we move into Ascensiontide. And, rightly, our minds are still full of the Easter story - the apostles huddled together and the women bursting in with that unbelievable tale of the empty tomb and the risen Lord. And how the apostles ran, so desperate were they for an answer, a way forward. And how all they found was emptiness, absence, the lack of a body. And you could easily stop there and say, ‘OK, that was it: that was the Jesus story’.

But what happened over the coming weeks, was that their perspective changed. Where some people saw only an empty tomb, the apostles saw a risen Lord – today in the garden, tomorrow on the road to Emmaus, the day after, perhaps, walking by the lakeside. God standing there in front of them, in front of their very eyes, in the person of Jesus Christ…and to recognise him and to know him.

And, if we can live with that new perspective, then we can follow the example of the apostles and we will find we are in the presence of Christ, sometimes in the breaking of bread, but more often in unlikely encounters, in unlikely places.

And that gives us tremendous hope. It was Mother Teresa, who said, “Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget the joy of Christ risen”.