04/05/2026
EASTER SUNDAY April 5
We do not walk this road alone.
Matthew 28:1-20
Focus verse:
Matthew 28:20
And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.
Before the sun even rises, the earth shakes. Not for the first time in Matthew’s Gospel — and not for the last time in God’s story. Creation trembles at the death of Jesus, and now it quakes again as the stone rolls back and life breaks open where death once ruled. The women arrive expecting to tend a grave. Instead, they are met with an angel, an empty tomb and a message that shakes them even more: “He is not here; for he has been raised.”
This is the climax of the story we’ve walked through all Lent. Yet not even Easter morning is tidy. Fear mixes with joy and disbelief. A parallel narrative is fabricated by the chief priests to deny what God has done. And the disciples, entrusted with the next chapter, come to the risen Jesus with both worship and doubt. Matthew names it plainly, almost tenderly. Jesus does not rebuke them. He commissions them.
Go. Make disciples. Teach, baptize, bless. Tell the story.
Easter does not remove the difficulty of discipleship. The world still groans. People still suffer. Faith still wavers. There are always more hungry people to feed; there is always more mercy to show, more courage needed for justice, more growing for us to do. But Easter does give us the promise we need most: that we do not walk this road alone.
“I am with you always,” Jesus says. Not just on mountaintops or in neatly folded moments of certainty — he is with us in doubt, exhaustion, confusion and the ordinary Tuesdays of your life. The Christ who conquered death walks beside us into every room, every grief, every calling. Nothing – not empire, not cruelty, not despair, not even the grave – can obstruct the love of God.
Resurrection is not the end of the Gospel story. It is the beginning of ours.
Reflection: Where do you need to hear Jesus’ Easter promise – “I am with you” – in your life right now? How might that assurance reshape the way you move into the work God is calling you to do?
Prayer: Risen Christ, meet us in our fear and in our joy, in our doubt and in our hope. As you called the women and the disciples, call us again into courage, compassion
and faithful witness. Walk with us as we share your love in a weary world. Stay
close to us, now and always, to the end of the age. Amen.
