IN THE Bible, Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognise Jesus on Easter morning.
Thomas the apostle refuses to believe in the Resurrection until he has some very concrete physical proof.
Peter the apostle spends his first conversation with Jesus dealing with how wrong he got everything on Good Friday.
None of them responds with instant clarity.
Instead, they hesitate and even misunderstand.
The first Easter looks less like certainty and more like people trying to make sense of something they weren’t expecting.
It’s rare that any of us has neat, decisive moments where everything suddenly becomes clear.
We recognise what really matters slowly.
We wish we had done things differently, and agonise over it in the dark hours of the night.
Doubt is always there: doubt in God, and often even in ourselves.
In these stories doubt is always present.
The people at the centre of the Easter story are not the ones who get it right straight away.
Maybe that’s why the Church’s Easter season lasts fifty days: it allows us to explore all this uncertainty.
That’s where, for me, hope comes in.
Hope doesn’t make things magically okay.
There is no sudden answer.
Hope is something that persists, quietly, in spite of everything.
It is the sense that even when we don’t have things figured out, something good is still possible.
That is really the heart of the Christian faith.
In a dark world – and goodness knows the world is dark today – we hope all the same.
Fr Sam Tanna-Korn is the Rector of St Paul’s Church, Reading Road, which meets on Sundays at 9.30am.
For information, visit: spauls.co.uk
