Easter Sunday Sermon

A few weeks ago when I spoke about the vertical and the horizontal I didn’t realize that this was going to be a theme throughout Lent, Holy Week and Easter but here we are. For those of you who are guests today, I spoke of the two directions in which we are in relationship with God. First, the vertical - the connection we have directly with the God we think of and pray to as above. Second, the horizontal - the God-as-Jesus who calls us into relationship with our neighbour, the divine human to human connection. 

From Palm Sunday through Holy Week, everything has drawn us into the horizontal. We have walked with Jesus in his humanity. We have seen Him teach, heal, serve, suffer. We have watched Him kneel and wash feet. We have heard Him give us the mandate to love one another, to serve one another, to be Christ-like in humble, sacrificial love.

That is the Church He calls us to be. That is who we are meant to be for one another.

But today everything shifts.

Because Easter is about the vertical. In the Gospel of John we find ourselves at the tomb early in the morning. It is still dark. Mary Magdalene comes and sees that the stone has been rolled away. She runs to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, the one whom we know as John. They run to the tomb. They see the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, rolled up in a place by itself. Then we are told something simple, but profound: “He saw—and believed.”

This is the moment where everything changes. Up until now, the disciples have known Jesus as teacher, as friend, as healer, as one fully immersed in the horizontal reality of human life. In this moment, standing at the empty tomb, they begin to understand something more.

That death is not the end. That sin is not the final word. That Jesus is not only human—but divine.

Easter is the pinnacle of the vertical relationship because Jesus breaks the bonds of His humanity in death and rises into the fullness of His divinity. This is not just a return. This is resurrection. In that act, everything is changed for us because the resurrection is not just about Jesus. It is about what God is doing for us. It is about forgiveness.

All through Holy Week, we saw human frailty on full display. Betrayal. Denial. Fear. Abandonment. The disciples fail Jesus in almost every way possible. Yet Easter morning comes anyway. The tomb is empty anyway. Which means this: our failures do not have the final word. God’s love does.

I am reminded of this, not in a grand theological moment but most often in the simple moments of life. For example, let’s say there is this couple, married for many years. Somewhere along the way, life has worn them down. Not in any dramatic way—no great betrayal, no single moment—but just the slow, quiet drifting that can happen. Work getting in the way. Young children wedging between their connection. Words left unsaid. Kindnesses forgotten. Love, still there, but buried beneath the ‘stuff of life.’

One day, after a particularly difficult divisive stretch, the husband does something small. He makes a cup of tea for his wife—just the way she likes it—and sets it down beside her without saying a word. She looks at him—really looks at him—she sees him in his humble human form for the first time in a long time. The next day, she makes his breakfast. Nothing elaborate, just toast and eggs, but she stays and sits with him awhile as he eats.

Slowly—over time—these small acts began to grow. A word here. A touch there. A moment of patience where once there would have been frustration. Nothing dramatic. No grand gesture. Just a quiet, steady reconnection. A return to love.

One day, she says, “It feels like we’ve been given another chance.”

Now that, my friends, is an Easter moment. Not always fireworks. Not always grand miracles with lightning bolts and sudden transformation. Sometimes it is the quiet miracle of love returning where it had grown cold. The gentle, persistent work of grace bringing something back to life that was once thought lost. That is what God does for us in the resurrection.

In the resurrection, God looks upon all of our brokenness—all of our sin, all of our shortcomings—and says: you are forgiven. Not because we have earned it but because God’s love is greater than our failures. We have moved through these days from understanding our human relationship with Jesus to being confronted with the divine reality of who He is. From walking beside Him to looking up to Him. From seeing Him as one of us to recognizing Him as God for us.

This is the beauty—the wonder—of our faith. We are an Easter people. Yes, we acknowledge our sins. We do not ignore them. We bring them honestly before God. But they do not define us. That is not who we are. We are not defined by our failures. We are defined by God’s love. We are defined by our capacity—because of that love—to love one another. Unconditionally. Universally. Even when it is hard. Even when we fail and have to begin again.

We are defined by hope. Resurrection hope. The kind of hope that stands at an empty tomb and dares to believe that life is stronger than death. That love is stronger than hate. That God is always, always, at work bringing new life out of what seems lost.

Here is where the vertical and the horizontal meet again. The vertical gift of resurrection—the forgiveness, the grace, the new life we receive from God—is not meant to stay vertical. It flows back out into the horizontal.

We are forgiven so that we may forgive. We are loved so that we may love. We are given new life so that we may live differently in the world.

Easter does not erase the pain of Maundy Thursday’s arrest and Good Friday’s crucifixion. It fulfills it. The command to love one another is now empowered by the reality that death itself has been overcome.

So now, we do not love in our own strength alone. We love as people who have been redeemed. We love as people who know that even when we fail, we are held in God’s favour and grace.  We love as people who carry resurrection within us.

Today, standing with Peter and the young beloved disciple, peering into that empty tomb, we are invited to see—and to believe.

To believe that Jesus is risen. To believe that we are forgiven. To believe that new life is not just possible, but promised. To hear, in that belief, a call. A call to rise. A call to live. A call to go ever onward into a new life in Christ. That, my friends, is what Easter is. Not just a moment, not just a celebration, but a new beginning.

A beginning of a life lived in the light of resurrection. A life where the vertical love of God transforms the horizontal reality of the world. A life where we, as the people of God, carry hope into every place that, for some, still feels like Good Friday. For we are the Easter people. That means the tomb is empty. We are forgiven. Love has won.

Today, on this Easter day, our day, we are sent out—together—not just to celebrate the resurrection, but to be the resurrection—living it boldly, carrying it into the world, and shining with the unstoppable light of love that God beams through us, the people of Easter.   

Amen.