5 April 2026 – Easter

Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Hebrews 10:16-25, 13-17; Matthew 28:1-10

The Very Rev’d Bertrand Oliver, Dean and Rector

A few weeks ago, I spoke over Zoom with a Ukrainian priest, Father Ihor, serving about fifty kilometres from the front line in the war with Russia.

“It’s a dangerous place to live,” he said.

And yet, at first, his ministry sounds almost ordinary: prayer gatherings, music, teaching children, accompanying families.
But then come the stories.

A young mother whose husband is missing in action.
A twenty-year-old who has gone to fight.
Families who have lost everything, now living in schools and community halls.

And still—he says—their faces are radiant.
Hope remains.

When I asked him, “How do you preach Easter in the middle of a war?” he paused, and then said simply:
“The cross was not the end. Jesus is alive. This is not the end.”

And then he added something just as important:
sometimes it is not words that matter.
It is presence.
An embrace.
A shared silence.

On Good Friday, we stood at the foot of the cross.
We heard again that cry:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
And we recognized that the world in which Jesus died
is not so different from our own.

A world where violence is normalized.
Where power crushes the vulnerable.
Where human lives are counted, reduced, and forgotten.

Today, that same world stretches before us.
In the suffering of people in Iran.
In Palestine.
In Sudan.
In Yemen.
Across the Gulf.
In Haiti.

In every place where war tears apart families,
where fear becomes the air people breathe,
where the innocent carry the weight of decisions made far away.

And closer to home
In the quiet exclusions of our own society.
In the unease that turns difference into suspicion.
In laws like Bill 9,
and in the wider climate where visible signs of faith—
a scarf, a symbol, a way of being—
can make someone feel they do not quite belong.

There, too, the cross is present.
In the lives of women who carry loss and expectation.
In those who are pushed to the margins because they are different.
In all who are told, subtly or explicitly:
there is no place for you here.

And it is into this world—this very world
that Easter comes.
Not as an escape, not as a denial.
But as a startling, unsettling proclamation:
this is not the end.

The women go to the tomb carrying grief.
They are not expecting resurrection.
They are expecting to mourn.
They meet the angel.
They run—and then they meet Jesus.
And what do they do?

They take hold of his feet.
The same feet that once were anointed with costly perfume.
The same feet that walked the dusty roads.
The same feet that were pierced.

This is not a different Jesus.
This is the crucified one—alive.

As Rowan Williams reminds us,
the resurrection is not God moving on from the cross.
It is God pointing to it.

God saying:
Here — here in this wounded body — this is where I am.

The risen Christ is not a polished, untouched figure of glory. He is recognized by his wounds.

Because the love revealed on the cross
the love that gives itself,
the love that remains with the abandoned,
the love that refuses to turn away
that love does not change at Easter.
It continues.

There is no way around the cross
to a safer, more comfortable version of divine love.
The risen life of Christ is the same life
that was poured out on the cross.

And that is where community is born.
The cross is not only an event.
It is a covenant.
An unbreakable alliance between God and humanity,
made visible in a people.

A people who choose to stand where Christ stands.
In baptism, we enter his death.
As we share bread and wine at the table, we share his life.

We become, together, the body of the crucified and risen one.
A wounded body.
A living body.

Which means this:
If Christ is present in his wounded body,
then he is present wherever the world is wounded.
In the grief of a mother in Ukraine.
In the fear of a child in Gaza.
In the hunger of a family in Sudan.
In the uncertainty of a refugee.
In the quiet isolation of someone made to feel like an outsider here in Montreal.

And if we are his body
then that is where we are called to be.
Not turning away.
Not explaining it away.
But standing there.
With presence, with compassion, with courage.

So the question for us this Easter is not abstract.
It is deeply concrete.

Where do we stand?
Do we stand only at a safe distance from the cross
or are we willing to stand with the crucified of the world?

Do we want a resurrection that removes the wounds
or are we ready to recognize the risen Christ in the midst of them?

Do we dare to become a community
where those who feel excluded
find not suspicion, but welcome
not fear, but belonging?

Because the resurrection does not erase the scars.
It transfigures them.
It declares that violence does not have the last word.
That exclusion does not have the last word.
That death itself does not have the last word.

And so we return to Father Ihor.

In the midst of war,
he and his community continue.

Gathering.
Praying.
Singing.
Holding one another.
Becoming, in the most fragile and real way,
the body of Christ.

A body marked by wounds—
and alive with hope.

This Easter, we are invited into that same mystery.
To stand where Christ stands.
To recognize him in the wounded.
To become his body in the world.

And to offer, sometimes with words,
but often simply with our lives
an embrace,
a shared silence,
a stubborn, luminous hope
that even here,
even now,
this is not the end.

Happy Easter.

Amen