Sundays 5th and 12th April 2026

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

‘Don’t be alarmed. 
You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. 
He has risen!  He is not here. 
See the place where they laid him.’
Mark 16:7 (NIV)

‘He is not here’
These are the words that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Salome, heard when they went that first Easter morning to the tomb where Jesus had been laid.  Their main concern was how they would get into the tomb in order to anoint his body, given that there was a stone covering the entrance. 

As it turns out, they needn’t have worried about the stone; it had been taken care of.  However, like all the other early witnesses of the resurrection, and despite what they had been told by Jesus himself, they were not expecting to find Jesus alive.  They had come to anoint a corpse, not to worship a risen Lord.  They had to be persuaded that it was true.

It was an angel who told them what had happened, in a few short words: ‘He has risen!  He is not here.’  It must have been quite a shock, to put it mildly! 

Normally, those words ‘He is not here’ would not be good news.  Normally, we would want Jesus to be there, where we are.  His presence only makes things better.  He brings healing, forgiveness, resurrection.  When he says ‘And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20), that’s a good thing.  Yet here’s the one occasion when to hear that ‘He is not here’ is genuinely good news.  He is no longer among the dead.  He was, but now he’s alive for ever and ever.

Horatius Bonar, a minister in the Free Church of Scotland in the 1800s and a prolific hymn writer, puts it most eloquently: ‘”He is not here.”  This is the only place of which it could be considered good news to say, ‘Christ is not here.  “Christ is here” was good news at Bethany, at Jericho, at Nain, at Capernaum, or on the Sea of Galilee; but “Christ is not here” is the good news from Joseph’s tomb.’

And it’s because he was not there then, because he has conquered death, that he’s now alive for ever and so able to be with us by his Spirit, wherever and whoever we are.

Prayer
Lord, thank you that you were not there then, in the tomb, so that you can be here with me now.  Help me to believe both that you were not there then and that you are here with me now.  Amen.

Yours warmly, in Christ
Chris Hobbs (Senior Minister)