Today we celebrated the great feast of Easter!
The church was beautifully decorated, the paschal candle lit, Easter hymns sung and chocolate eggs shared – all in all it was a great celebration of Easter.
This Week
Tuesday – 10am Prayer Group in the Garden Room
Wednesday – 7.30pm Book Group – mine
Thursday 10am – Said Holy Communion followed by coffee in Friendship House
Still not too late to donate – The Bishop’s Lent Appeal this year is for the Mothers’ Union’s Away From It All (AFIA) project which provides holidays for families who would not otherwise be able to get away for a break.
There are several ways of giving.
- Take a Lent box home and return to the church after Easter
- Donate in the basket which will be on the coffee table during the remainder of Lent
- make a payment to the church bank account, clearly labelled Lent Appeal. The account is St Andrew’s Church Vestry, sort code 80-08-98 account number 00794929
There is also a Just Giving page online – Diocese of Glasgow & Galloway is fundraising for Mothers Union Diocese of Glasgow & Galloway (justgiving.com)
Readings for next Sunday – 2nd Sunday of Easter – Acts 2:14,22-32 1 Peter 1:3-9 John 20:19-31
Today’s Readings – Acts 10:34:43 Colossians 3:1-4 John 20:1-18
I always love the celebration of Easter. After the challenging and solemn journey of Holy Week, the arrival of Easter Day is always such a joy. The beautifully decorated church reminds us that the long dark winter days are over, spring is here with all its vibrancy and colour.
On Friday after the service, we prepped the church for today, Helen prepared the Easter Garden, always a charming reminder of that first Easter dawn. And…we might wonder what it would have been like to have been there – to experience the events of that morning in the garden with the risen Christ. Would we have recognised our Lord? Would we have been afraid? Would we too have run away?
What we celebrate today was an extraordinary event, and as such it was totally beyond the understanding of all the disciples, even though Jesus had told them repeatedly that it would happen, that he would be killed and that on the third day he would be raised from the dead. Yet not one of them believed it would happen. Not one of them took Jesus at his word.
When Mary got to the tomb on that Sunday morning, she realised that something was wrong. The huge boulder in front of the tomb had been rolled aside – exposing the entrance to the place where Jesus’s body had been laid. Mary is shocked – she thinks that someone has stolen the body. So, she runs and tells Simon Peter and the other disciple. They quickly returned to the tomb with her, look inside and then they go away in amazement back to their own homes.
Mary is again left alone by the tomb, weeping, but after a while she finds the courage to look inside the tomb. And when she does, she sees two angels dressed in white. Then – still weeping – still in shock – still unbelieving – still not expecting or hoping for a single thing Mary turns around, and she sees Jesus standing there and she supposes he is the gardener. He calls her by name, “Mary” – and it is then – suddenly – that she recognises Jesus – and she realizes that Jesus is alive and standing in front of her. She goes to embrace him and cling to him, but Jesus tells her not to hold onto him but to go and tell the others what she has seen.
We are told in the gospels that they do not believe her at first – they were so shocked at what Mary was telling them. Indeed, each of those first disciples took time to be convinced of the resurrection either by Jesus himself or by the overwhelming testimony of others who had seen him. But Mary’s initial disbelief and that of the apostles is reassuring for us because in many ways we are like them.
In scripture throughout the gospels, we hear the message that Jesus proclaimed. We witness the miracles that he performs in other people’s lives, listen to the parables. But when it all becomes more complicated and other worldly, we can struggle. It can be very hard to believe in what Jesus has said about being raised on the third day, and even harder to believe that not only was he raised – but that we too will be raised, that death does not in fact have the last word.
“Why do you weep?” Jesus asks Mary. We all feel like weeping at times and there are always many good reasons to weep. We weep for our families, our friends, for our world and for ourselves…..
But today – Easter Sunday, the empty tomb, the angels, Mary’s encounter with Jesus and indeed the existence of the church itself, it’s all a reminder to us that while there are many reasons to weep, there is also a great reason to rejoice.
Death is not the end of the story of Jesus nor is it the end of our stories. If it were, if Christ was not raised, the church would never have come into existence for the disciples would never have gone on, in the face of the opposition they encountered, to proclaim that God raised him from the dead on the third day. They would never have passed to us their testimony for they would have had nothing to testify about, for on that first day they also did not believe despite all that Jesus had said and done before he died.
Let us thank God for today. Let us thank God for Mary and for all the other disciples who did not believe. Let us thank God for them because their faith tells us that there is hope for us when we weep; hope for us when we do not believe; hope for us when we face the cross and the tomb and feel despair rising within us.
But most of all let us thank God today for the living Christ – for Jesus of Nazareth – God’s anointed one – for the one who was raised up on the third day and who for us has broken the power of death and brought salvation to us all.