From out of nowhere, spring is emerging. This time around it comes lockstep with an unveiling that I feel taking place in the musty recesses of my own wintry heart. To mix two curious metaphors from the Gospel of Luke, although I often kick against the pricks, God is removing scales from my eyes. Some of the most mundane things are now appearing in a new light. I give thanks because I know vernal breakthroughs, both in the heart and in the soil, come through unalloyed grace.

In a few days our pastor boards an early morning flight from Dublin, bound for his native Sierra Leone. It is reported that he won’t return until August. In his absence I have been asked to preach several of the Sunday morning sermons. Checking the lectionary, I take down my first text: Luke 24: 36-48. This will be two weeks after Easter Sunday so Jesus has already well and truly risen. “Peace be with you,” says Jesus, it is the broiled fish passage. Feverishly, I take down several notes. I hope that’ll preach, I mutter and add several more.

In further reading, I learn that the resurrected Jesus is mistaken for three different people. Mary Magdalene, the first ever witness to the resurrection (but certainly not the last), thought him a gardener. Later, the disciples took Jesus for a fellow fisherman hollering advice at them for how to remedy a fruitless night of fishing. And finally, two unnamed disciples thought he was just another random bloke traveling to Emmaus.

This insight captures my imagination and I decide to craft my sermon around it. When the resurrected Jesus appears he is devastatingly intimate and as local as a lemonade stand; a gardener, a fisherman, a dusty traveler. Yet he is also mysterious, unrecognizable at first, even among his closest associates.

Imagine the most universal and all-encompassing being you can think of and Jesus is more universal. Now imagine a person who spends their entire life in the same tiny neighbourhood and Jesus is more local, more embodied, more rooted in the particular.

Stepping into the shower to kick off my weekend, I remember lines from a popular Mennonite hymn: I thank thee too that thou hast made our joys abound/that in the darkest spot of earth some love is found. It occurs to me that the resurrected Jesus, hard as it is to recognize him and pin him down, is that joy in the darkest spot of earth. He descended into hell, he ascended into heaven…

Today, post-resurrection, Jesus is manifested not only in the gardener, the fisherman and the traveler, but also in the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. Nothing remains untouched by the cosmic Easter event. The divine has been irrevocably mixed with the human and now there is no turning back. The ship has sailed, the genie has been let out of the bottle, the cat let out of the bag, our messiah out of his tomb.

The Christ who transcends time and space comes to each of us differently, yet there is one commonality in each resurrection appearance: he knows us, changes us, heals us, and makes us whole people.

To me that is the meaning of Easter. I think it just might preach.