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The Rectory

Myddle

Tel: 01939 291801

Dear Friends,

 

Just when things couldn’t get much worse – they do! How often have we felt like that – and then wondered what we’ve done to deserve it and where God is in all this? That’s just how the disciples felt on the Sunday after the terrible ordeal of the previous Friday, when their world had turned upside down.

They had experienced the terror of Jesus snatch arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, seen him illegally tried early that morning on trumped up charges, seen him killed by a barbaric form of execution by the Roman oppressors and had fled, confused and afraid, to hide behind locked doors waiting for their turn to come. They felt exhausted, traumatised, defeated – they had let Jesus down when it most counted, and all their hopes for the future were dashed. And just when it couldn’t get much worse, some women from the group come with a story of a tomb that had apparently been robbed – no body, just an empty space and their last act of compassion, to prepare Jesus’ body properly for burial, had been cheated.

So Peter and John run ahead to investigate, and find the tomb not quite empty – the heavy stone which sealed to tomb rolled to one side, the grave clothes (which grave robbers would have taken) still lie there, but no body. For John there’s a glimmer of hope, the start of belief in something new. For Peter nothing but a problem to be solved, and his feelings of guilt at denying Jesus. For Mary, left alone grieving the man who had transformed her life, there’s an empty feeling, and she turns her anger and confusion on the figure that approached her – probably just the gardener who might have seen something and could point her to where Jesus body had been hidden. But as this figure speaks her name in the old familiar way, everything is turned upside down as she realises that the impossible has become possible – that God’s love is