Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026
1.
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| Mary Magdalene (Kelly Latimore) |
And there, in the Old City, I was directed to a little shop on a little lane, run by Palestinian brothers whose family have passed it along, from generation to generation for hundreds of years. (Some of their designs, in fact, are four, five hundred years old. Simple designs. Like a side profile of Christ. Or a chalice and loaf. And it’s stunning, really, to watch a young person in 2025 or 2026 sitting for a tattoo that’s been etched into human bodies for hundreds of years as a sign of devotion and hope.)
But instead, I chose just a couple of words that day, in Arabic, المسيح قام! (Al-Masīḥ qām!)—words that say, right to left, “Christ is risen.” المسيح قام! (Al-Masīḥ qām!). And as the tattooist worked his magic on my forearm, and I turned away so as not to faint, I was struck by the idea that one day I would take this tattoo, and these very words, to my grave. No turning back now. المسيح قام! (Al-Masīḥ qām!) “Christ is risen.” And then I quickly thought of the amazing Palestinian Christians whose faith so inspires my own: friends like Zoughbi Zoughbi and his son Tareq at Wi’am in Bethlehem, and Omar Haramy and Laureen Abu Akleh at Sabeel in Jerusalem, and Father Issa Thalijeh who serves as parish priest at the Church of the Nativity on Manger Square. I remembered each of them, their faces, their testimonies and stories. And there in the shop, I invited them once again into my heart, and now into my own skin. I remembered their kindness in the midst of so much suffering. And most of all, their fierce and loving faith. المسيح قام! (Al-Masīḥ qām!)…
2.
She had run fast—you’ll remember—she had run fast to find friends, to share this madness with them, to bear this indignity somehow, together. But they’ve now run for cover. And Mary Magdalene stands alone. Outside the tomb. Weeping. For one whose love had freed in her a long-forgotten sense of wonder and joy. Weeping. For one whose teaching had offered her a pathway to service and leadership in the movement. Weeping. For a friend whose hands had washed her feet, whose arms had lifted her from despair, whose fingers had blessed bread and broken bread and turned simple meals into holy feasts.
Friends, there is no Easter apart from this ‘kairos’ moment. Mary’s weeping in the garden. There is no awakening to joy, no reconciliation in love, no holy hallelujah, apart from this moment. “Grief,” Walter Brueggemann writes, “is an element of aliveness, and the answer to the denial the world/market demands of us. Grief,” he writes, “is an index of our humanity. It is proof of the presence of our relatedness to each other.”
Mary Magdalene’s broken heart is the first sign, then, the first salty sign of Jesus’ resurrection, and hers and ours as well. It’s an index of our humanity. Proof of the presence of our relatedness, our connection, our solidarity with one we continue to love gratefully, and powerfully, and yes, fiercely. Grief is, after all, an element of aliveness. I felt that aliveness—and Mary’s broken heart—on campus last month with students crying out for gun control and sanity in their dormitories and lecture halls. I felt it in a hospital just last week where a doctor simply and bravely broke down, just broke down, after losing a patient. And I felt it again and again in Palestine last Spring—where old women shook their fingers in the faces of armed Israeli soldiers. And young poets in dark cafes breathed fire and hope, invoking a future beyond genocide and apartheid and occupation.
Sometimes our grief is about transition, and the turning from one life to another, from old dreams to new dreams, even from one worldview to another. Transitions can be remarkably beautiful and brutally hard; they can be sacred and important and terribly painful. And there’s grief in all of that. Of course, there is.
And sometimes, sometimes our grief is about disappointment, or even anger and rage, for empires that dehumanize our neighbors, and tyrants who demoralize our democracy, and zealots who turn to war without ever counting the cost, and mask their thoughtlessness in the language of faith.
So Mary Magdalene, indeed, she’s one of us. Standing outside the ransacked tomb, crying. Traumatized by violence in the streets. Her world, her life, her community divided and diminished all over again. She too struggles to find words for prayer. She too wonders if faith will ever make sense again. She too suspects that all his talk of love, all his musing on mercy, was just fantasy, illusion, even hope betrayed. She’s one of us.
And then, through her tears, through the salty rivers in her swollen eyes, Mary sees a gardener. At least, she thinks so. A gardener. And this is her ‘kairos’ moment. This is where Easter splits open the hard rock of despair and reveals light and hope and new worlds of possibility. Because the gardener knows her name. It turns out that the gardener knows her name. And now he speaks her name. The gardener is Jesus, who was crucified by empire, who was mocked by soldiers, who was betrayed by friends: Jesus who says now: “Mary.” Which is to say, “I know you.” Which is to say, “Love lives again.” المسيح قام! (Al-Masīḥ qām!)…Christ is risen.
The life-saving and despair-shattering gift of Easter is surely not that we live forever. We know that this is just not the case. Our human bodies are mortal and fragile, and our journeys bewildering and complex. The life-saving and despair-shattering gift of Easter is surely not that believers cannot be wounded, that we are somehow immune to suffering and brokenness and loss. We know that this too is just not the case. You’ve held the hand of a lover dying of cancer. You’ve looked into the eyes of a friend undone by dementia. You’ve watched the footage from Minneapolis. Rene Goode. Alex Pretti. State-sponsored terror in the streets.
No, the life-saving and despair-shattering good news of Easter is the mercy, the divine mercy, the inconceivable mercy that will not let us go. Any of us. Ever. It’s the grace that showers our dried-out hearts with love and heat and hope. It’s the peace—beyond all understanding—that bursts through sealed-up tombs, invades darkened graves, and raises the Beloved to life again. Raises Jesus from crucifixion on a Roman cross, and annihilation in wartime, and in doing so awakens in you and me something like the holy, untamable, irreversible Love of God. المسيح قام! (Al-Masīḥ qām!)…
And the one who looks like a gardener says, “Mary.” And through her tears she sees him now. And through her weeping, she hears him now. The music, the power, the purpose in his voice. And he says, “Mary.” And then he says, “Gretchen.” And then he says, “Mattea.” And then he says, “Ethan and Fionn and Mattias and Beau.” And then he says, “Karna and KB and Zoe and Phoenix.” And then he says, “Antony and Marie and Herman and Kelly and Blessing.” And then he says, “Ian and Maggie.” And then he says, “Van.”
And no, no, this isn’t even close to the end of our story. Because when Jesus says your name in that garden, you have a story now, a story you’ve simply got to tell. You have a story of mercy and love and life-resurrected to share now with a world that sometimes forgets. You have a reservoir of courage now, a deep wellspring of joy to draw from as you imagine a world redeemed. Your name is whispered in the crisp New Hampshire wind this Easter morn. Your name is God’s delight this Easter morn. Yours. You are a witness now to the resurrection of Jesus. And what might you do with that? What might you do with that?
4.
But as days and weeks go by, I’m not sure that’s the right question. I’m not sure that’s the intention, the purpose of our story this morning. I wonder now if the question isn’t “Do I believe it?”—but instead “Will I lean into it?” Will I lean into a world where love rises again? Will I lean into a world where mercy runs so wildly free, that it showers the world’s hurt with light, that it floods the world’s dry and barren hearts with grace, that it meets every broken heart with hope? Will I lean into a community that grieves together and hopes together and does justice together? Jesus says, “Mary,” in the garden. Jesus says my name and your name and every one of our names, in the garden. Will we lean into a world where love rises again?
Fifty-eight years ago on this day, the nation was ripped apart by riots in our cities, as news hit our tvs and radios: that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been killed in Memphis. “No one really knows why they are alive,” Dr. King used to say, “until they know what they’d die for.” “No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.” April the Fifth, 1968. The cross for Dr. King wasn’t a battle scar or even a theological “get-out-of-jail-free” card. It was, instead, a call to love and community, beloved community; it was an invitation to rise again no matter the cost, and a promise that—in his words—“unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
Today, again, Jesus offers you and me that very same promise. Standing in the garden, very much like a gardener, his knees dirt-stained from kneeling, his hands and fingernails darkened by planting. Jesus says, “Go!” Go and show the world what we’ve seen together. Go and show the world what’s possible when we love one another. Go and show the world that Love, Love, Love is rising again. Because, yes: “Unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
المسيح قام! (Al-Masīḥ qām!)…“Christ is risen.”
Christ is risen indeed!
Amen and Ashe.
