Easter Sunday 2026

John 20.1-18

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Light bounces off physical surfaces in different directions and with different wavelengths. It penetrates the cornea, slips into our eyes through the pupil, and is focussed by the lens before it enters the gel-like vitreous body and arrives at the retina, on the inner back wall of our eyeballs. This is where the magic happens, this layer of cells barely half a millimetre thick. In it are molecules that change their shape in response to light; these are surrounded by proteins that respond to the molecular changes, triggering a chemical and electrical cascade that eventually leads to visual experience. 

The retina is, in developmental terms, actually a part of the brain; it comes from a pouch in the front part of the embryo’s brain. And as such, it does not merely pass on signals to be deciphered by the brain: some visual processing already occurs here. It interprets some spatially adjacent differences in light as edges, separating object from object. Its own relationship to time determines how we understand events, how things persist and change. 

Some neuroscientists and philosophers go so far as to assert that we do not so much perceive the world as construct it. There is a breed of intellectual that enjoys scandalising people, perhaps because it makes them feel superior. They are not to be taken too seriously. But nor are they entirely wrong. The only world we can know is the world that our bodies know—our brains, and also our eyes and other organs of sensation. Human beings have three kinds of colour photoreceptors, each responsive to particular wavelengths of light, roughly corresponding to the colours red, green, and blue. Mantis shrimps have twelve kinds of photoreceptors. Their world is, in some sense, very different from ours. 

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I have seen the Lord, said Mary Magdalen on that first Easter Day. And she had. Christians have, as we shall get to in a moment, always maintained that the resurrection of Christ is more than a physical event occurring in time and space; but this implies that it is at least such an event. Light bounced off the body, not of a dead man but a living one, entered the blessed eyeballs of Mary Magdalene through her pupils, and she saw Jesus. And yet, she did not recognise him at first, which is perhaps the difference between visual sensation and visual perception, the latter implying understanding. 

We, who live twenty centuries or so after the events of the first Easter Day, do not have the great privilege and benefit of seeing Jesus, in the sense of visually sensing him physically: all that business with light and retinas and, further down the process, lateral geniculate nuclei and occipital cortices at the back here, and then through the ventral stream, down in the inferior temporal cortex, primarily responsible for object recognition, including facial recognition. 

It means something else for us to see Jesus, which is most pithily captured by C. S. Lewis. In fact, it is inscribed on his memorial stone in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, taken from the last sentence of his 1944 essay Is Theology Poetry?: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.”

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Psychologists often talk about religion as a meaning-making endeavour, something that helps us to make sense of the world around us. Sometimes this is said with derision: the world is, in fact, random chaos and madness, and religion helps us to retain our sanity by imposing upon the true nothingness of reality some sense of order, even if fictitious. But very often, over a few drinks perhaps, my colleagues in the social and psychological sciences will say this with rather more wistfulness, even wishfulness.   

And, indeed, those of us who manage to believe in Christ should count ourselves blessed, count our faith worthy of yearning, of aspiration. And not just for the obvious reasons, obvious on Easter Day, at least, though of course there is something compelling about belief in resurrection, the promise eternal life mitigating the tragedy of human mortality. But that is, in some ways, the least of it, especially in our day and age.

Ours is a secular society whose dance with nihilism has, as we have seen clearly in the past few years, taken centerstage in our political discourse, both domestically and internationally. And so, ours is a world that has plunged into cold-blooded pragmatism in which might makes right, and world powers feel at liberty to invade and annex and occupy other people’s homes, and politicians feel justified in trading the lives of the sick and elderly and poor and vulnerable and oppressed and disenfranchised in exchange for votes and a balanced budget, and the obscenely wealthy treat the world as a playground and people as playthings, to be discarded after they are used and abused. This is the world predicated on meaninglessness, where if there is meaning at all, it is not to be found but invented; and so, like history, it is determined mainly by the victors, the rich, the powerful. 

In this tomb of a world, and its culture of death and despair, we are fortunate indeed to see things, see everything differently. Ours is a story according to which right is right, and neither might nor wealth will have their way in the end. This Jesus whose life was traded away for thirty pieces of silver; whose capture was justified on grounds of political self-preservation, both by the religious leaders fearful of their imperial masters as well as by those same master’s apparatchiks; this Jesus who was murdered by this confluence of money and power could not, in the end, be killed by such blunt instruments. This life of self-giving love, who healed the sick and fed the poor and freed the oppressed and gave dignity to the humiliated and friendship to the ostracised, this life proved to be indomitable.

This is our Easter faith. [And I am especially pleased this morning that it is Caroline’s and Ruben’s also, who have already been for some time active members of this community, witnesses and participants of the Easter story as it is played out here in Bepton.] This faith that we share is that light that warms our faces, that we may radiate light to places otherwise hidden in the cold darkness of shame or sorrow or pain or poverty. 

It is our faith that insists—contrary to what sells newspapers or garners clicks on the Internet or wins votes; contrary to what world leaders and billionaires might want, and legislate on and pay for—[insists] that God is on the side of the weak and vulnerable, and not only on their side, but is with them and in them, participates in their lives just as truly now as two thousand years ago in the Palestinian dust, blood on his back and brow. And if the crucified God is on their side, then so is the risen Christ, whose kingdom has already outlasted that of the empire that killed him, and countless others. And if so, then we—we who are members of the Body of the Risen Christ—are also for them, whom the world despises and denigrates; as Christ’s Body, we are the hands and feet and voices of those who lack them; and so we shall ever be, world without end.