“Running Into Hope”

Let me begin with a Sunday School story and I should say, this didn’t happen in our church! A young boy was given an important line in an Easter play. He had to stand up and say, “He is not here! He is risen!”

He practised all week. But when the moment came, he froze. He was just too nervous. The director leaned over and whispered the line to him. The boy grabbed the microphone, took a deep breath, and said with great confidence, “He is not here! He is in prison!”

The congregation laughed. And frozen with nerves, the wrong words coming out, honestly… that’s where we find ourselves this morning. Put yourself in the shoes of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary for a moment.

It is before dawn. They haven’t slept. His crucifixion had left them traumatised, uncertain, and afraid. Three days of grief, of hiding, of trying to make sense of what happened to the man they had followed, believed in, and given everything to.

They are carrying spices because that is what you do. You do the last thing you can for someone you love. You show up. They were not expecting a miracle. Whatever they were expecting, it was not this. They walked in silence, I imagine. With fear. With emptiness. No words for what they were carrying. Just feet moving, one step at a time, toward the only place they knew to go.

The earth shook. The angel appeared.  And the angel’s first words were: “Do not be afraid.” Because that’s where they were. Into that fear, not after it, not around it, but right into the middle of it, the angel speaks. He meets them exactly where they are. And he speaks anyway.

That is where resurrection always begins. Here. In the fear. In the trembling. And that fear is not just theirs.

We live in a world of deep uncertainty. About the future. About what comes next. The news, the weight of decisions made without us, landing right here in our everyday lives. And many of us are carrying more than we show. So, how do we proclaim the hope of resurrection today? The answer comes from the tomb.

The angel doesn’t stop there. “He has been raised. He is going ahead of you.”

“He is going ahead of you.” Not everything will be fine now. Not that the road will be easy. Not  the pain will disappear.

He is going ahead. Into the very places we are afraid to go. Into the mess. Into the grief. Into the uncertainty.

Before we arrive, he is already there. That is not a comfortable hope. It does not wrap things up neatly. But it is a real hope. A hope that does not look away from the world’s pain. A hope that has already walked through death and come out the other side.

The resurrection of Jesus does not mean the world is fixed. It means the world is not abandoned. And then, something shifts.

Matthew tells us: “So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples.”

They ran. With fear and great joy at the same time. We tend to think of hope as the absence of fear. That when fear is gone, then we can be joyful. Then we can move. Then we can believe.

But that is not what happened here. They were still afraid. And they ran anyway. The joy didn’t cancel the fear. The fear didn’t cancel the joy. Both were real. Both were true. And in that impossible mixture, they moved.

That is the mystery of resurrection hope. It doesn’t wait for fear to leave. It runs alongside it. And they didn’t run because they had figured it all out. They hadn’t. Not yet.

The empty tomb. The angel. The earthquake. It was too much to process. Too big to contain. They didn’t understand what had happened. But their feet moved anyway.

That is the second mystery. Hope is not the reward of understanding. It is what gets us moving before we understand. The body knows something the mind hasn’t caught up with yet.

Faith has always been like this. Not certainty first, then movement. But movement first and understanding slowly, breathlessly, along the way.

And then there is this. They ran to tell his disciples. They didn’t run for themselves. They ran for others. With news too big to keep. Too important to hold alone.

That running, that is worship. Not the sitting, not the singing, not even the praying. The moving. The going. The telling.

Resurrection was never meant to stay at the tomb. It was always meant to run. Into the streets. Into the lives of others. Into a world that doesn’t yet know what has happened.

This is what it means to be Easter people, not just on Easter morning, but every day we wake up. Every moment we carry this news into the places where hope has gone quiet.

We are not just witnesses to resurrection. We are how resurrection moves in the world. This is a different kind of hope. Because most of us are not standing in front of an empty tomb this morning. We are somewhere on the road. Running. Stumbling. Carrying more than we show.

But that is exactly where Christ meets us. Not at the tomb. Not after we have arrived. But on the road. In the movement. In the running itself.

Matthew tells us and this is the most extraordinary moment of all, “Suddenly Jesus met them.”

On the road. Mid-run. Right there. And they fell at his feet and held on. He was real. He was alive. He was there, on the road, with them, in the middle of everything.

Hope is this: taking the next step when you are not sure what comes next. Moving forward because Christ is already ahead of you.