A Sermon for Easter Day 2026

There is always a risk, for the overly eager Easter preacher, to hit their audience over the head with a kind of hyper-ventilating nonsense about newness and fresh starts and new creations. You can imagine it can’t you. There they are, the eager preacher, prattling on with their rather tired words about life bursting forth from tombs and there you are, feeling the normal human aches and pains of being human. We carry with us a secret inner geography; we have a particular set of dilemmas and problems we tend to find we meet, again and again, wearing various cunning disguises. There is a way in which we may feel tired of ourselves, bored of ourselves, and this condition of frustrated boredom can be exacerbated when we come to church in search of genuine vision only to find a priest giving out a set of re-heated religious cliches.

I wonder though. Are priests, is the church, also exhausted, tired of its landscape? Do we hurry to the tomb in search of the risen Christ and find instead a reflection of ourselves? We reach out for something of the otherness of God and discover a few melting Easter eggs. I have worked in churches where the church seasons are lovingly and reverentially prepared for, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany. And I have always sensed, behind the bustle of the preparation, the taking out, and laboriously laying in, of wise men or Easter tombs, a kind of secret boredom and exhaustion with the whole thing, as though a story were being retold which no one was really listening to; a grappling with outer forms and coming away with splinters. What does Mary Magdalene say today? ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ Often the reality of God seems to have been taken out of the churches, and we do not know where this reality has been laid.

Are we scared? Do we need our rituals and props to somehow keep the overwhelming reality of God at a safe distance? That, I suggest, is one of the truths of Easter. The truth of God’s transcendent, yet imminent, reality. A reality we cannot contain or manage. A reality which overflows all borders and enclosures. But we try to contain it and manage it. We can, and do, make a sentimental cult of Jesus as a good person who does good things. This is understandable, but if we get too stuck with Jesus at his human level we may never notice, let alone experience, the nameless God from which he comes, and is always pointing to. ‘Jesus said to Mary, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”’

If we hold onto Jesus, we separate him from the source of his true mystery, the Father. We cling to him to keep him at an understandable and human level. That human level is vital, precious, but the danger is if we cling to him in that way we make him our idol rather than the Icon of the living God; and we grow bored and tired of idols because, in the end, we know we’ve somehow half made them up.

There is nothing wrong with forms, with rituals, but there is everything wrong with forms and rituals taking the place of encounter with divine mystery and, often, that is exactly what forms and rituals become; they became ways of avoiding divine mystery rather than doorways into it. What is so poignant for us though is how the natural sense of God, God glimmering within us and within created things, has somehow been squeezed out of us, or educated out of us. If we look at the moon and how the clouds frame its beauty; or a face; or simply fall silent; the glimmering and shimmering and whispering of God comes to us. The problem with seasons like Easter is they risk making the reality of God a narrative which somehow has to keep to a particular set of rules, whereas, the story of Easter is pointing to an eternal reality; the reality that God is uncontainable, beyond death, and is both personal and entirely beyond us. “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

The gift which is given to us is the possibility of knowing God in the depths of God’s transcendence, a transcendence which lives in us. This is the gift given to Mary Magdalene. If the church can recover its sense of God’s reality, the outer forms of its worship will begin to speak again with a richer language. But more important than the church recovering its taste for the living God, is each of us knowing the divine mystery again as if for the first time. Remember God is not containable so we can encounter God everywhere, but we often need to make sure we consciously put ourselves in the way of God’s beauty.

The sense of God, the reality of God, isn’t like anything else. It can’t actually grow tired and stale. The language and the forms may grow tired and stale, but the divine reality can’t. ‘Therefore,’ Meister Eckhart said, ‘I pray to God that he may make me free of “God,” for my real being is above God if we take “God” to be the beginning of created things.’ He means if we make God into an idol, an object, we in the end risk losing our sense of the God who lives beyond the name of God. We can’t hold onto Jesus. We can’t hold onto God. If we do, we risk keeping ourselves stuck with the forms of things rather than sensing what is beyond name and form. ‘When a person clings to place,’ Eckhart says, ‘they cling to distinction.’ When we cling to form too tightly, to Jesus, to the name of God, we cannot journey on to what we don’t know.

We can’t put God in a tomb or a box. Behind the name, behind the form, is this unclassifiable life, this reality. This nameless God. The more we live into this reality the more the old forms, the old ways, the old interior landscape, will transform, will become charged with divine otherness. The inner will give life to the outer. But I remember my opening words about that overly eager Easter preacher, and I can hear how my own words have their own tendency to bombast and cliché, how my words again become the stale, outer forms hiding an immeasurable richness. Fortunately, Easter teaches us how nothing can tame the overwhelming reality of God, not tombs, not words, not churches. “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Do not take the word of the eager preacher too seriously. Look beyond the controlling hand of the church. Like Mary, meet the intimate and transcendent God yourself in your own interior landscape.

The Reverend Ben Brown