He was not one of the Twelve. He never met the Lord in the flesh. His mother kept a house in Jerusalem where the church gathered the night Peter walked out of prison. His cousin was Barnabas. His Hebrew name was John. The Romans called him Mark.

He went out with Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey, and somewhere in the heat of Asia Minor he turned around and went home. We are never told why. Paul never forgot it. When Barnabas wanted Mark for the next journey, Paul refused him, and the two greatest apostles of the early church split over a young man who could not be trusted with the work.

That is the man whose feast we keep this evening. Hold that in your mind for a minute, because the church remembered him for something else.

By the time Mark sits down to write the book we have just heard read, Peter has been crucified in Rome. Paul has been beheaded. James, the Lord's brother, has been thrown from the parapet of the Temple. The first generation is being cut down. In the gardens of Nero, Christians are being lit on fire to serve as torches at the emperor's banquets. And Mark's church sits in the dark with the question you cannot avoid when the masters are taken: who carries this forward now? Is the gospel running out of hands?

You cannot understand Mark's answer to that question without Elijah and Elisha.

In the Second Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah and his apprentice walk together toward the Jordan. Elisha knows that today his master will be taken. They cross the river on dry ground. Elisha asks for a double portion of his master's spirit, the share that goes to the firstborn son. And then Elijah is swept up in a whirlwind, and the heavens open to receive him, and as he goes the mantle falls. Elisha picks it up off the ground. He tears his own clothes in two. He strikes the water of the Jordan with the mantle. The river parts. And the sons of the prophets watching from a distance say, the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha. The master is taken. The successor is more powerful. The work continues.

Now hear how Mark begins his gospel.

A man stands by the Jordan in a coat of camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist. That is not a costume. That is a citation. Open your Old Testament to the Second Book of Kings and you will find, in plain words, that Elijah was a hairy man with a leather belt around his waist. Mark dresses John in the same cloth. He is reaching back four hundred years to say one thing. The prophet is here again. The waiting is over. And John points down the road to one who is coming after him. The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me. More powerful. The very thing Elisha became when his master's mantle fell on his shoulders. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

Then Jesus comes down to the river. As he comes up out of the water, he sees the heavens torn. In Greek, the word means ripped. Split. The sound of cloth giving way. The Spirit comes down. A voice says, You are my Son, the Beloved. My Son. My heir. The one to whom the inheritance falls.

This is Elisha at the Jordan. The master is taken. The spirit transfers. The successor stands in the river with the mantle on his shoulders.

But Mark is not finished. He is just getting started.

Watch where Mark uses that same word again. The verb for tearing. He uses it only twice in his gospel. Once at the Jordan, when the heavens are torn open. And once on the day Jesus dies, when the curtain of the temple is torn in two, from top to bottom. Two tearings. The first thing Jesus sees, and the last thing he causes. And after each one, somebody says the same thing. At the Jordan, the voice from heaven: You are my Son, the Beloved. At the cross, a Roman centurion, looking up at a dead man on a piece of wood: Truly this man was God's Son.

What is happening at the cross? The master is being taken. The mantle is falling again.

Three women come to the tomb at first light. The stone is rolled back. Sitting inside the tomb is a young man, on the right side, dressed in a white robe. And he says to the women, Do not be alarmed. He has been raised. Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee.

Now keep that young man where you can see him. Because Mark calls someone a young man in only one other place in his gospel. It is in the garden of Gethsemane, when the soldiers come for Jesus and all the disciples flee. Mark says, and only Mark says this, that there was a young man following Jesus wrapped in nothing but a linen cloth. When the soldiers grabbed him, he tore himself free and ran into the night naked.

A young man flees the place of arrest, leaving his clothes behind in disgrace.

A young man sits in the place of resurrection, clothed in white, sending the disciples out.

He is setting two figures side by side. Once stripped. Once reclothed. Once fleeing. Once sending. The disciple who fled at the sound of soldiers has his answer in the messenger of the resurrection morning, who carries the word back to the men who ran. Tell his disciples and Peter. Peter, who denied. Peter, who failed. Peter, named by name. Peter, named first.

Now do you see what Mark has done?

There are two transfers in this book.

The mantle falls from Elijah to Jesus at the Jordan, when the heavens are torn open and the Spirit descends.

And the mantle falls from Jesus to his disciples at the cross and the tomb, when the temple curtain is torn and a young man in white sends the women out with a word for the men who ran. Tell his disciples and Peter. And his disciples are every Christian who has ever stood in their place. They are the church. They are you.

John was handed over, and Jesus came preaching. Jesus was handed over, and the disciples were sent. The disciples were handed over: Peter crucified upside down in Rome, Paul beheaded on the Ostian Way, James thrown from the temple in Jerusalem. And the mantle fell on the next ones.

And one of those next ones was a man named Mark. The same Mark who had once turned around in Asia Minor and gone home. Who had broken faith with Paul. Who was the disciple nobody picked first. Mark, who knew in his own bones what it was to flee. Mark, who sat down at last in Rome and, in the steadiest hand he could manage, wrote it all down. The man who lost the mantle, and was given it again.

And the book he wrote, the book we have just heard read this evening, has been carrying its news to us ever since, telling us across two thousand years that those frightened women who fled the tomb in silence somehow, eventually, against everything, opened their mouths.

We do not live in an easy time. Violence comes through the screen each morning. Neighbors are set against neighbors over things we did not used to fight about. And underneath all of it, a loneliness no screen can fill. Whichever side of any of it you find yourself on, none of us comes home unscathed.

Even when we want to do right, we cannot always see what right is. We act, and only afterward see what we should have done. We remember things we cannot undo. The wisdom we have arrives a day late.

Our bodies do not help us. The young have bodies running ahead of their minds, full of energy that has not yet been schooled. The old have bodies falling behind their minds, knowing what to do and no longer able to do it. Either way, we are not the people we wish we were when the moment comes.

The garden of Gethsemane is not a place we visit only in Holy Week. We live there.

Whether it is you who have failed, or someone who has failed you, there is a way back. Tell his disciples and Peter. The denier is named first. The fleeing young man finds his answer in the young man clothed in white. The river that drowned you is the river that holds your mantle. The gospel does not move by those who never fell. It moves by those whom God reaches down and pulls a second time out of the water.

Mark was such a man.

So was Peter.

So was every saint whose feast we keep.

The mantle is falling. It is falling now. It is falling here. It is falling on you.

Catch it.

Amen.

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. 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.

Easter 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.

Give 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.