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Jesus said to her, "Mary!" 

John 20:16

 

Friends,

There's a moment in the Easter story I keep coming back to.

Mary is standing outside the tomb, weeping. She was at the cross — she saw the death — and everything she had staked on Jesus was gone. Not just a person she loved, though that too. But a hope. The hope that the world's cruelty did not have the final word. That the poor and the forgotten and the crushed were not, in the end, abandoned. She had followed him because she believed something was being put right. And then the Romans put him on a cross, and it wasn't.

When Jesus appears, she mistakes him for the gardener. She's not hiding from the truth; she simply cannot yet see it. Grief does that. And so does the particular grief of shattered hope — it doesn't just hurt, it forecloses. It narrows the world down to what's already been lost.

Then he says her name.

"Mary."

And something shifts. Not because she understands what has happened — she doesn't, not yet. Not because her grief is resolved, or her questions answered, or the world suddenly made safe. But because she is known. Called by name, in the one place she expected nothing new, by the one she had watched die.

This is where John places the first Easter recognition. Not in an argument, not in a vision — but in a word spoken directly to one person, in the middle of her loss. The Risen Christ's first act is not to explain himself. It is to call someone by name.

That matters more than it might first appear. Because Mary's hope was not merely personal. She had staked her life on a kingdom — on the possibility that God was, in fact, doing something about the suffering of the world. The cross looked like the end of that. The name spoken outside the tomb is the declaration that it wasn't. That the hope was not misplaced. That the world's violence does not close the story. That the particular, precarious, disrupted lives of real people are known — and held — and not abandoned.

The resurrection is not only a cosmic event, though it is that. It is an utterly particular one. It reaches Mary as Mary — a woman, in grief, in a world that had just done its worst. It will reach Thomas in his doubt, the disciples locked away in fear, the two on the road still carrying what they don't yet know how to put down. Each encounter is personal before it is positional or even propositional. The recognition comes before the comprehension. And in every case, it reaches people whose hope has been disrupted, whose world has been made precarious, who are not sure anymore what they are allowed to believe.

That is still the world we live in.

And that is why the collection over Easter will be split between the work of St. Francis and the Lookout Housing + Health Society. Which is not simply charitable good work alongside our Easter celebration. It is a living expression of what Easter means.

Lookout's work happens in shelters, in health supports, in long conversations that don't resolve everything but refuse to let someone disappear. It meets people whose hopes have been disrupted — by poverty, by illness, by systems that have made them invisible — and it says, by its presence and its persistence: you are not abandoned. You are known. You are seen, and this is not the end of your story. That is not a different story from Easter. It is Easter, practiced. The same refusal to let the world's cruelty have the final word, lived out in the often unseen, steady work of people who show up.

When we give to this work, we are not simply supporting a programme. We are participating in the resurrection's own logic — the insistence that precarious, disrupted, forgotten lives are not failures. They are seen and they are called by name.

Easter has always been personal in that way. Not private or inward, but transformational — the kind that shows up in a room full of people who wouldn't normally be together, in the moment the music starts and something in you responds before you've decided to. In the quiet relief of not having to pretend you've got it all sorted out. In the shared things — the table, the coffee, the chocolate that somehow always finds its way in whether we planned for it or not.

So whether you've been here every week, or it's been a while, or you're not even sure what you believe right now — you are welcome. Not once you've figured it out. Not once things feel clearer. Just as you are.

Come early if you like, festive music begins at 9:30am on Easter morning, with worship at 10, and an egg hunt to follow.

He is risen. And somehow, still, he knows your name.

With love, 

Alex+