Have You Ever Felt Like Something Was Missing?
You've felt it before. Maybe you couldn't name it in the moment, but it was there.
It's the feeling that love ought to win, even when it doesn't. The moment a piece of music or a sunset stops you and makes you wonder why beauty affects you so deeply. The frustration that justice is so rarely given to the people who need it most. The sense that you were made for real community, and that the relationships you have never quite reach what you were hoping for.
Most of us carry those longings quietly. We don't always know what to do with them.
Easter morning suggests they are not random. They are echoes of a voice.
A Garden, a Gardener, and a New Beginning
When Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb on the first Easter morning, the world is still dark. She is grieving. She assumes the body has been taken. She doesn't recognize the man standing near the tomb and mistakes him for the gardener.
John, who wrote this account, does not rush to correct that mistake. Because at the story's deeper level, it isn't really a mistake at all.
The resurrection takes place in a garden, on the first day of the week, while the world is still in darkness. Those details are not accidental. John is pointing back to Genesis 1, to the very first creation, where God began his work in darkness on the first day. Something new is starting. A new creation is beginning.
And the man standing in that garden? The first human being charged with caring for a garden was Adam. Adam was given everything and lost it. The risen Jesus, standing in a garden on the first day of a new week, is the last Adam — the true gardener, the one who has come to restore and care for what was lost.
Mary is more right than she realizes when she mistakes him for the gardener.
The Voice That Answers Every Longing
Then Jesus speaks her name. Just that. "Mary."
And immediately she knows who he is.
The theologian N. T. Wright describes those deep human longings — for love, justice, beauty, community — as echoes of a voice we have never quite heard directly, like hearing someone just around the corner that we can never quite find. They point beyond themselves. They suggest that the world is not simply what it appears to be.
What happens on Easter morning is that the voice steps out from around the corner.
Every ache for love that should have won but didn't. Every moment of beauty that made you wonder if there is more to the world than it seems. Every frustrated longing for justice, every sense that community should be deeper than it is. Easter is not an answer to those longings in the sense of an explanation. Easter is the arrival of the one to whom they were always pointing.
He was dead. Now he is alive. And he is calling you by name.
What Mary Does Next
Mary recognizes the voice, and then Jesus sends her. "Go to my brothers," he says.
She goes. And the first Easter sermon ever preached is brief, direct, and gets right to the point: I have seen the Lord.
That is what Easter produces. Not people with airtight arguments, not people who have resolved every question, but people who have heard the voice and can't help but go and say so.
The resurrection sends us out into a world still listening to echoes and staring at signposts and wondering what they might mean. Our calling is not to prove or condemn but to live in such a way that the echoes grow louder for the people around us, until they begin to suspect the voice is real and realize that Jesus is calling them by name too.
The tomb is empty. The new creation has begun. The gardener is alive.
And he is calling your name.
We'd love to have you join us at St. Dunstan's. If those longings resonate with you — if you've ever felt like something is missing and wondered where that feeling points — you are welcome here, exactly as you are. Click the button below to plan your visit. You can also read, watch, or listen to Fr. Michael's full sermon on this topic over on his Substack if you want to go deeper.