Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:28:49 -0500WeeblyMon, 20 Apr 2026 16:17:21 GMThttps://www.emmanuelmemorialepiscopal.org/sermons/third-sunday-of-easter-fr-robertsEvery Sunday the priest does four things at this altar. He takes the bread. He blesses it. He breaks it. He gives it to the people. Took, blessed, broke, gave. Four actions, in that order, every time, in every Episcopal church in the world, and in every Catholic and Orthodox and Lutheran church. These four actions are at the center of what the Church does when the Church gathers. And we do not do them because we thought them up. We do them because Jesus did them. He did them at the feeding of the five thousand. He did them at the Last Supper. And he did them at a little house in a village called Emmaus, on the evening of the first Easter day, in the Gospel reading we just heard.

The story of the road to Emmaus is the story of how the Church learned to recognize the risen Lord. And the Church's answer is a very specific answer. The Church recognizes the risen Lord in two places. The Church recognizes him in the Scriptures, when they are read and opened. And the Church recognizes him at the table, when the bread is broken. Two places. The Scriptures and the table. Word and Sacrament. This is what we are going to think about this morning.

So let us walk with the two disciples down the road. Luke tells us that on Easter afternoon two disciples were walking from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus, about seven miles away. We are not told very much about them. One of them is named Cleopas. The other one is not named. They had heard the news that morning. They had heard the report from the women that the tomb was empty. They had heard that some of the men had gone and confirmed that the tomb was empty. They had all the information, and yet they were walking away from Jerusalem. They were going home. They were sad, and they were disappointed. Luke tells us that they had hoped that Jesus was the one who would redeem Israel. Had hoped. Past tense. Their hope was in the past tense.

And as they walked, Jesus himself drew near and began to walk with them. But Luke tells us something important. Luke tells us that "their eyes were kept from recognizing him." The verb is a passive verb. Something is happening to their eyes. Somebody is holding their eyes back. And when we ask who is doing the holding, the answer is not Satan. The answer is God. God himself is keeping the disciples from recognizing Jesus. And he is doing this on purpose.

Why would God do that? Why would God keep the disciples from recognizing the risen Lord when the risen Lord is standing right next to them? The answer is that the Lord is about to teach them something important, and they cannot be taught it if they recognize him too soon. If they had known right away that this was Jesus, they would have fallen on their faces and the lesson would have been over. The lesson the Lord wants to teach them is the lesson of how he is going to be present with his Church from now on. And so he hides himself from them in order to teach it. The not-recognizing is part of the teaching.

What does he teach them? He teaches them that the Old Testament is about him. Luke tells us that "beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures." Notice what that sentence says. Jesus does not say that a few verses here and there in the Old Testament are about him. He says that all the Scriptures are about him. Moses is about him. The prophets are about him. The Psalms are about him. He is hidden in the Old Testament. He has been there all along. And the problem is that the disciples have been reading the Old Testament for years without seeing him in it.

This is our problem too. We read the Bible. We read it in our homes. We hear it read in church. But we do not always see Christ in it. We read about Moses at the burning bush, and we think it is a story about Moses. We read about David and his psalms, and we think it is a story about David. We read Isaiah and we think it is a story about Isaiah. We do not always see that Christ is the one who was there with Moses at the bush. Christ is the one David is singing about. Christ is the servant of Isaiah. This is what Jesus teaches the disciples on the road. He opens the Scriptures to them and shows them that he has been hidden in them all along.

And here is what is remarkable. Their hearts burn while he is teaching them. They feel something. They feel a fire in their chests that they cannot quite name. But they still do not recognize him. Even as he is opening the Scriptures to them, even as their hearts are burning within them, they do not see that it is the Lord walking next to them. The Scripture-opening warms them. The Scripture-opening is doing its work. But the Scripture-opening by itself is not enough. Something else has to happen. And the something else is the table.

They reach the village. Jesus acts as though he is going to walk on further. This is important. He does not force himself on them. He waits to be invited. And the disciples urge him strongly to stay with them. They say, "Stay with us, for it is almost evening, and the day is now nearly over." The Church has remembered this prayer. In the Evening Prayer, Christians for centuries have prayed the prayer the disciples prayed at Emmaus. Stay with us, Lord, for the day is almost over. Stay with us. Come in. Do not go on further.

And the Lord stays. And now the guest becomes the host. The one who was walking next to them on the road sits down at their table and takes the bread and blesses it and breaks it and gives it to them. Took, blessed, broke, gave. The same four actions. And in that moment, at the table, the disciples' eyes are opened. The passive verb has flipped. Before, their eyes were held from recognizing him. Now their eyes are opened to recognize him. Something is being done to them. God is doing it. The God who kept them from recognizing him is now opening their eyes to recognize him. And in the moment they recognize him, he vanishes.

So now let us listen to Gregory the Great, who preached on this passage at the end of the sixth century. Gregory says that the disciples did not recognize the Lord while he was speaking to them, but they did recognize him while he was eating with them. The God whom they had not come to know in the opening of the Scriptures, they came to know in the breaking of the bread.

Gregory is telling us that the Scripture-opening on the road was real. It was doing its work. Their hearts burned because Christ was opening the Scriptures to them. But the recognition happens when the bread is broken. The Scripture prepares us to see Christ. The Sacrament is where we see him. We need both. The Word without the Sacrament leaves us with burning hearts but closed eyes. The Sacrament without the Word leaves us with a meal but no meaning. Christ gives us both because Christ is hidden in both. He is the treasure hidden in the Scriptures and he is the treasure hidden at the table. And when we come to both, he makes himself known to us.

And so we come back to where we started. Every Sunday the priest does four things at this altar. He takes the bread. He blesses it. He breaks it. He gives it to the people. We do these four actions because Jesus did them at Emmaus. And what happened at Emmaus is what happens here. The Lord opens the Scriptures to us, and our hearts burn. The Lord breaks the bread for us, and our eyes are opened. And the Lord who vanished from the sight of the disciples at Emmaus is the Lord who is present to us now, at this table, in the Scriptures and in the breaking of the bread.

]]>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:55:47 GMThttps://www.emmanuelmemorialepiscopal.org/sermons/evensong-second-sunday-of-easter-fr-robertsThe Israelites are stuck between two things. Behind them is Egypt. In front of them is the sea. They have left slavery, but they haven't arrived anywhere, and now Pharaoh's army is closing in. Their response is remarkably honest: "It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness." They would rather go back to what they know than risk what they don't.

Moses does not rally them. Rather, he says something we might not expect: "The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still." The people have one job, and that job is to stop. To stand in the space God is about to open. The rescue belongs entirely to him.

We read in verse 22 that the waters became "a wall for them on their right and on their left." That word is important. Wall. Not a gap. Not a break. A wall. It is the kind of word you use for something built, something constructed. And the reason that matters is this: it is not the first time in scripture that God has separated the waters. Back in Genesis 1, God creates the world by dividing the waters from the waters. At the Red Sea, he divides the waters again. God is not merely pulling slaves out of a tight spot. He is doing what he did at the beginning. He is making something new. Israel is born right here, between those walls. This is a new Genesis 1.

And here is what I find so remarkable about our reading. It stops at verse 22. We never hear the Egyptians drown. We never reach the far shore. The reading leaves us standing right there in the middle of the sea, between the walls.

I suspect that is no accident. After all, you and I are still between the walls. We have left Egypt, but we haven't arrived home yet. Much like the Israelites, we live in the space God has opened for us, and that space is itself a new creation. John tells us the same thing in our second lesson. "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all." The same firm division. And then this: the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. Not cleansed, past tense, as though it were finished long ago. Cleanses. Present tense. Ongoing. The grace surrounds us right now. We live between the font and the altar, between baptism and the resurrection, between the old creation and the new. The new creation is not something we are waiting for. It is the space we are already in, and it is the Lord who holds it open.
]]>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:02:25 GMThttps://www.emmanuelmemorialepiscopal.org/sermons/second-sunday-of-easter-fr-guilianoEaster is a wonderful time of year. Many of us enjoy its traditions: Easter eggs, Easter chocolates, the expansive Easter lunch. Bishop N.T. Wright once recommended opening a new bottle of Champagne every day for the first week of Easter. 

The news media has Easter traditions, too. Pretty much every Lent or Holy Week, someone in a newsroom gets the bright idea to find a skeptical historian or scholar to weigh in on whether the resurrection of Jesus really happened. 

So right as our celebrations begin, we read or listen to vague statements from someone like Prof Bart Ehrman, telling us that the disciples of Jesus experienced him in a new way after his death. They “felt” he was alive in their hearts; they “had visions,” maybe they experienced a mass delusion, or it was a case of mistaken identity. They just couldn’t accept his death. 

I can never decide how to respond to these tiresome pieces. They rarely say anything new or interesting. Maybe they are just a minor annoyance, with minimal effect. After all recent surveys suggest that 2/3 of Americans accept the accounts of the biblical narratives, and believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, even if they don’t go to church. 

Still, there’s something about the skeptical journalism that aggravates me. It’s not just my hidebound traditionalism. It’s not even because some random or famous thinker fails to believe what the Church teaches. I don’t expect everyone to agree with us. I think, as a historian, it just bothers me that the “vision hypothesis” is made up. It has little grounding in the biblical narratives or anything Christians said in the first century. The apostles did not speak about “experiencing” Jesus. They talked about finding his empty tomb, touching his risen body, eating and drinking with him, speaking with him multiple times. In our Gospel reading today, for example, St Thomas “saw” Jesus with his hands. 

Jesus was tangible. The marks of the nails are portrayed in John’s Gospel as touchable scars. The spear wound in his side is still open. Very open. It is not like in Caravaggio’s famous painting, Incredulitá di San Tommasio, “The Doubt of St Thomas,” where Christ stands before three disciples, each earnestly looking as Jesus pulls away his outer garment, and guides Thomas’s index finger into a small but open wound. No, that’s too gentle for the Bible. The Greek verb in John’s Gospel is gross. Thomas says he won’t believe unless “I put my hand into his side” / Balō mou tēn cheira eis tēn plevran. The verb there, Balō, means “throw” or “cast”, rather than “put” – it is an energetic and violent word, presuming a large wound for its destination. Disgusting! Mysterious. 

Notably, Jesus does not shrink back from this: “Reach out your hand,” he says. “Throw it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

Or, as he says in Luke’s Gospel (24:39): “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Handle me, and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” 

The disciples did not claim to have a mysterious encounter with a spiritual presence; they did not claim to have a dream or a sensation in their hearts. They told stories about touching this man, this Master and Friend, once dead, still marked by his struggle, but now transformed and alive forever. Death may have had dominion over him – for an instant – but no longer. Now he leads an indestructible life. 

For us who live on the far side of the resurrection and on the far side of the Christianization of global culture, things are a little different, of course. Our faith rests on the sight of these apostles -- on their faithful testimony. 

Thomas had to “see” and “touch” to believe. We are blessed to believe without seeing. The apostles’ doubt and their struggle serve our faith; “these things were written so that you might believe,” as the end of our reading said. That presents a challenge, but let’s get the challenge right and cast from our minds any flim-flammery about visions and vague feelings. We believe confess the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and we await our own.

Let’s go further than that today, though. Let’s set aside the skeptics’ worries, and delve deeper into this story of a wounded but risen Savior. 

I’ll take you back in time first. On Good Friday, Fr Joe alluded to a long tradition of the Church, which sees its origin and sacramental life in the side wound of Jesus. After the crucifixion, when Christ was already dead, a soldier’s spear pierced his side, and we read that “blood and water flowed.” 

The Gospel of John itself takes time with this moment, saying: “He who saw these things testifies to them, and he knows his testimony is true.” Blood and water flowed: the blood of the Eucharist, the water of baptism. This is a traditional interpretation.

It sees in Jesus’ wounded and open body the fulfilment of the prophet Ezekiel’s words, with which our service began. Ezekiel saw visions of a new temple in Jerusalem and he “beheld water, which proceeded from the temple on the right side thereof.” That water is said to flow out from the Temple continually, first as a little stream, then as a deeper course of water, then as a mighty river, which coursed out of Jerusalem into the salt marshes of the Dead Sea, making them fresh and alive.

And, he writes: “On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.” (Ezek. 47:12)

There’s a reason we recited this text as we were sprinkled with blessed water. As Christians, we would say Jesus is the new Temple that Ezekiel foresaw. His wounded side is the font, the spring from which lifegiving waters flow. It infuses every baptism; it blesses the waters.

This would be totally vulgar if Jesus were only a dead man. At Calvary on Good Friday, no one bathed in the blood he shed, not literally. But myriads upon myriads have been washed sacramentally in th blood through their baptism into Christ. Myriads upon myriads have received his gifts. 

How wonderful and strange are these stories! It is too shallow to turn them into vague experiences of Christ’s spiritual presence; they are more than that; they say more than that. 

We learn through them how we may be washed clean and “born anew.” We learn of our inheritance in Christ, which is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven.” 

We learn how salt waters may become fresh, and the dead may live, how sinners may be made righteous. We see the mortally wounded Jesus risen again; we hear him saying, “Put your fingers here and see my hands. Take your hand and cast it into my side.” 

The Welsh poet R.S. Thomas captured the quality of our faith and of its mysteries in his poem The Kingdom. He writes:

It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

As we read the Gospels today, we may be uncertain, saying, “Well, that’s a long way off from here. I don’t know what to make of this living Savior, who comes in the flesh, who invites me to explore his wounds, to be bathed in his blood, to drink from his side.”

That is to give ourselves more distance than Jesus allows. We are not granted a critical vantage point where we may judiciously weigh the evidence. We are afforded peculiar sights, peculiar encounters, invitations to a relationship of such profundity that we may wish to shrink back in horror or shake our heads in mystification. “Put your finger here,” Christ says. “Cast your hand into my side.”

We are splashed with water from that font, that “right side,” whether we like it or not. The river flows outwards from the Temple and we are along the banks, witnessing its lifegiving power, whether or not we stoop to drink.
]]>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:09:55 GMThttps://www.emmanuelmemorialepiscopal.org/sermons/easter-day-fr-guilianoGive thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
     his mercy endures for ever.
 
Let Israel now proclaim
     his mercy endures for ever.
 
Our Psalm reminds us of the great truth of Easter Day. The mercy of God is from everlasting to everlasting. It springs from his goodness; it has always been present in human life; it always will be. For “he is good; his mercy endures for ever…”
         
That mercy is the ground of our being and the source of our salvation. In his goodness, God made the worlds, and “when we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death,” God sent his only and eternal Son “to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us,” to reconcile us to God, the Father of All. Jesus stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself in obedience to God’s will as a perfect sacrifice. In this way, he made atonement for every sin – from Adam’s to our own -- and he showed forth once more that eternal truth: God “is good.” All the time! “His mercy endures for ever.”
 
No sin could separate us from God’s love – not ultimately; no wickedness, no transgression, no evil within or without. God’s mercy remains present at every moment. Centuries ago, he spoke these words through the prophet Jeremiah: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you.”
That is good news for us this morning. It should free our hearts and our voices, bringing us to praise. We should say with the Psalmist: “The Lord is my strength and my song; and he has become my salvation.”
 
Our praise should resound this day, filling the Church and spilling out onto the streets, such that passersby on foot or in cars should say, “There is sound of exultation and victory in the tents of the righteous.”
 
They should hear our joy as we sing:
 
          The right hand of the Lord has triumphed!
          The right hand of the Lord is exalted!
          The right hand of the Lord has triumphed!
 
We raise together that Easter refrain: “Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!”
  
What else does this eternal mercy mean for us, beloved? I point you to our Scriptures which provide us with assurance, which tell us of the expansiveness of God’s purposes for us, and which provide a way of living in this world.

First, assurance. When Mary Magdalene and Peter and John went to the Garden of the resurrection, they did not expect to find their Lord alive. This is clear from all the Gospels. The disciples of Jesus expected to find him dead, vanquished, overcome. He had foretold his crucifixion; he had also foretold his rising; they did not believe. Even when they came to the tomb, they did not understand, not at first. It took something else. Consider Mary Magdalene who was blessed as the first to know of Christ’s rising: she found the empty tomb, she told the others, she lingered in the garden in her sorrow. She saw angels; it did not matter; she saw Jesus himself, and mistook his appearing; she heard him ask “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”

Then, he called her name: Mary. The Lord called her name, and so she found him whom her soul loved, and she was entrusted with the task of proclaiming his rising.

That is assurance. Whether we are firm believers this Easter Day or those with doubts, we may know this morning: God the Son is seeking us out. It may take much for us to believe. We may doubt the evidence; we may doubt his messengers; but he comes to meet us. He acknowledges our ignorance, our sadness. He call us by name. | We imagine that we are seeking God, don’t we? In truth, God seeks us, and he will find us. He will assure us. He will speak our name, and say in our ears those comforting words of the prophet: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”

The Lord will also show to us the great things that he plans for our lives.

Jeremiah’s prophecy, our first lesson, was a promise given to Israel as it was going into exile. They had been destroyed as a people, scattered to the four winds; they experienced losses that few of us can imagine. But God promised to them a restoration, a discovery of grace “in the wilderness” of their suffering, when they sought rest and solace. Their life lay in ruins, and God said, “Again I will build you…” Their voices were silenced by horrors; they could not lift their voices in song, and God said, “Again you shall take your tambourines, and go forth in the dance of the merry-makers…” They were brought low, deprived joyless; and God said, “Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant, and shall enjoy the fruit…”

That same is true for us on Easter Day, or whenever our life lies in ruins or our joy is squelched. “I will build you,” God says. You shall dance; you shall have joy. And why? Because Christ our Lord is risen, trampling down death by death and giving life to those in the tombs. He stands as an eternal sign of God’s victory, and he extends that victory to us today.

We may be raised with Christ. He has shared in our death; we may share in his life. He has conquered our sins; and he calls us to walk in newness of life in this world, in the joy of Easter. He summons us through his apostles to cast our vision upwards. As Paul wrote in the letter to the Colossians:

“Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

We are not just ordinary people, living quotidian and boring lives. We are Easter people, transformed by our sharing in the Lord’s death and resurrection. Our true life is with him.

So what are these things that are above, on which we must set our minds? Are they angels strumming heavenly harps? Are they planets in their courses? Are they the saints who have gone before us?
 
These are all worth contemplating, but not what Paul has in mind. Those things that are above are named by him later in chapter 3 of his letter. We have died with Christ, he says. So must put away what is earthly in us: that is, our evils, our immorality, our wicked passions.

We are to live our true life now, the true life of those who have been made new, clothed with Christ, remade in the knowledge of our Maker. We must put on “kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. […] bearing with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgiving each other.” Just as the Lord has forgiven us, we also must forgive. And “above all, we must clothe ourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

These are the things that are heavenly, the things that are above, the things of Christ, the life of Christ’s resurrection that is to be lived now, the revealing in our time of the goodness and mercy of God that last for ever, the gifts that are ours from now to eternity. God is good. All the time. “His mercy endures for ever.”

It is Easter, my friends. The world is made new, and we too are made new, if we have shared in Christ and received the gifts he offers. As you leave today, do not forget these things. Hold them firmly in your mind; let your heart rejoice in the truth. For “The Lord is our strength and our song; he has become our salvation.” Though he died, he lives, and he is present with us.

“The same stone which the builders rejected
has become the chief cornerstone.
This is the Lord’s doing,
and it is marvellous in our eyes.
On this day, the Lord has acted.
We will rejoice and be glad in it.”
 
Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia.
]]>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:06:32 GMThttps://www.emmanuelmemorialepiscopal.org/sermons/easter-day-fr-robertsAlleluia. Christ is risen.

Christ is risen. But that was not obvious to anyone on the first Easter morning. Peter goes into the tomb, sees the burial clothes, and goes home. The other disciple sees and believes something, but John immediately tells us that they did not yet understand the Scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead. Mary Magdalene stands outside weeping. She sees Jesus with her own eyes and thinks he is the gardener. The resurrection is happening all around these people and not one of them can see it for what it is.

And what John is doing in this passage may not be obvious to us either. He is writing for people steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, and he fills this scene with details that some of us read right past. He spends an unusual amount of time telling us exactly where things are. The linen wrappings lying here. The cloth that covered Jesus' face set apart there. Two angels in white, one seated at the head, one at the foot, right where the body had been. Why does John arrange the scene so carefully?

I think he is painting an old picture. With a twist.

In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses to build the tabernacle, the tent of meeting, the portable sanctuary where God would dwell among his people on their journey through the wilderness. At its heart was the Holy of Holies, and within it, the mercy seat. "You shall make two cherubim of gold, at the two ends of the mercy seat." And then God says: "There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim, I will deliver to you all my commands." Between the two cherubim is where God chose to make himself known. In Hebrew, one of the words for God's presence is panim, which also means face. Scripture speaks of God's panim dwelling between the cherubim on the mercy seat.
 
Now look at the tomb. Two angels. One at the head. One at the foot. Between them, the place where Jesus' body had been. The place where his face had rested. John seems to be telling us what this tomb has become. It is the Holy of Holies. And the place where the body lay, between the two angels, is the mercy seat. The place where God's panim dwelt is now empty. The presence has gone out. Risen.

Now, Scripture is clear that God was never confined to one room. Solomon himself, dedicating the temple, said, "The heaven of heavens cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built." Israel knew God in prayer, in prophecy, in the intimacy of the Psalms. God was always the God who heard, who spoke, who was near.

But there was one thing that ordinary devotion could not touch. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, one man entered the Holy of Holies with the blood of a sacrifice and sprinkled it on the mercy seat between the two cherubim. This was not for the everyday failures that prayer and repentance could address. This was for the deep fracture between God's holiness and his people's frailty, the accumulated weight of sin that could only be dealt with at the cost of a life.

If John is right, if this tomb really is the new Holy of Holies, then the body that had lain between those two angels was the sacrifice on the mercy seat. And the mercy seat is empty because the offering has been accepted.

Consider what that means. The old covenant had a mercy seat where blood was offered to repair what could not otherwise be mended. Now the tomb has become that sacred room. The angels mark the place. The offering is the body of Jesus. And the offering has been accepted, because the body is no longer there. God has taken it up. The room stands open. And Mary is standing right outside it, looking in freely, without a priest, without a veil, without permission.
 
So what does Jesus say to her, when she finally recognizes him? He does not say: I have conquered death. He does not say: I told you so. He says: go to my brothers and tell them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.

Israel had always known God as Father. "Is not he your father, who created you?" Moses asks. "As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him," the Psalms say. But now Jesus does something new. He takes his own relationship with the Father and joins it to ours. Not simply the Father of the nation, not simply the creator, but yours, with all the intimacy that the risen Christ himself enjoys.

And notice how he does it. Mary is looking for Jesus among the dead. She is peering into the tomb. She is looking in the wrong place. And Jesus is standing behind her, alive, in a garden, and she does not know him. He does not prove the resurrection to her with evidence. He does not argue. He speaks her name. One word. Mary. And she knows his voice.

If you want to know what the resurrection means, listen to that moment. One of the great early church fathers, preaching on this very feast sixteen centuries ago, called Christ "both sacrifice and celebrant, sacrificial priest and God himself." The voice that speaks Mary's name is the same voice that once spoke from between the cherubim. He is not merely an offering placed before God. He is God who offers himself. And having offered himself once for all, he lives still as our priest, our mercy seat, our way to the Father.

Alleluia. Christ is risen. And because he is risen, the God who met his people at the mercy seat is your Father. Alleluia
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