05.04.2026
Sermon of the Archbishop of Dublin for Easter Day
As is tradition, the Archbishop of Dublin, Archbishop Michael Jackson, was the preacher at the Festal Eucharist for Easter Day in Christ Church Cathedral Dublin this morning (Sunday April 5). The service was sung by the Cathedral Choir and you can read the Archbishop’s sermon below.
EASTER DAY 2026 preacher: The Archbishop
St John 20.9: … until then they had not understood the scriptures, which showed that he must rise from the dead …
THE TEMPORAL EASTERTIDE
We began Lent in this cathedral church by singing as The Offertory Hymn on Ash Wednesday:
Forty days and forty nights …
It is to the sixth and final verse that I direct our attention this morning, Easter morning:
Keep, O keep us, Saviour dear,
Ever constant by thy side;
That with thee we may appear
At the eternal Eastertide.
We have today reached the temporal Eastertide. We still await the eternal Eastertide. What we then sang in muted tone and in minor key has now been transposed into a thrilling metallic sound and into a major key. This joyful Eastertide has come. Happy Easter to you all who worship here today and who make your sacrifice of praise to God Almighty in Christ Church Cathedral wherever you have come from and to wherever you return – and also to those who join on–line.
THE DESERT: JACOB AND JESUS
We are not yet done with the Lenten hymn, however. It has something further to offer us as a perspective on the first Easter morning. Its sombre expectation of the resurrection and of the resurrection life feeds into the first reactions and responses of Mary of Magdala, of Simon Peter and of John the beloved disciple as depicted for us in St John 20. This written account is more tentative by far than our orchestration of Easter for brilliant sound, delightful and essential to our contemporary celebration as it is and certainly ought to be. There is within it another haunting echo which connects Jacob and Jesus in ways that we might not have expected. Just listen quietly to a line from the second verse:
Stones thy pillow, earth thy bed.
The promise made to Jacob in his dream as he slept on a stone pillow in Genesis 28 is about to be fulfilled in the spreading of the news of the resurrection of Jesus to and in all of the nations of the earth: All the families of the earth will wish to be blessed as you and your descendants are blessed. (Genesis 28.14b) The deserted place – inhabited by Jacob or by Jesus – has not been abandoned. It has become the seedbed of a new life in communion with God. After all, generations of disciples of the same Jesus throughout history will go again and again. Into the desert. It will establish itself as a place of counter–cultural reassessment of principles and priorities for people of firm faith and for people of faltering faith alike. The desert where Jesus retreated during what we have institutionalized as the Season of Lent in a real sense has been transposed and transplanted to the tomb which the early–rising disciples find empty, having expected to find Jesus there – but empty because he had risen to life in and through death itself. Let us always remember that two out of three of those disciples clear off home. This was not an instant or an immediate success story. Neither they, nor we, are out of the woods just yet. Tentativeness remains our friend in the temporal Eastertide. It has much to teach us.
FERMENT OF SPIRITUAL ACTIVITY IN THE CATHEDRAL
Over the past few days, we have had a great deal of spiritual activity in the cathedral. On Thursday, at the Maundy Thursday Eucharist, we looked at Jesus as prophet, identifying key themes of praying, watching and listening as integral to his Messianic redefinition of prophecy as he approaches his Passion. On Friday and Saturday, the theme of priest came through strongly as we grappled with the death of God and the sacrifice of the Messiah offering atonement for sin. This follows and builds upon the institution of The Eucharist the evening before which, through time, has become the definitive gathering point for this commemoration, this memorial as the church takes up the unique connection and combination of these two events in salvation history, calling them Holy Communion with God and neighbour. Today we can begin to explore the kingship of Christ, a theme that we shall continue to explore right the way through to the Ascension, which is the continuation and the culmination of the Easter Season, before it makes way for Whitsunday – and which, of course, we will engage again on Christ the King Sunday as Trinity gracefully makes way for Advent and our year starts all over afresh. The three terms: prophet, priest and king are distilled in another hymn: How sweet the name of Jesus sounds, in a believer’s ear John Newton’s hymn of 1779. Easter is an evolving revelation of God and self as these three themes intertwine and interconnect in our own coming to terms with the risen life . It is this living risen life that permeates and infiltrates our delight in the earthly Eastertide.
PRAYER, FASTING, ALMSGIVING AND PUBLIC RELIGION
But I ask: Is there another connection that we can make particularly through the lens of St John 20 with the whole of the Season of Lent which is well and truly over – and in this sense we really have now left behind the hymn: Forty days and forty nights …? It is, to my mind, the connection of the prophet, priest and king with what set us out on this journey on Ash Wednesday. If you remember, its Gospel was not The Temptation of Jesus but an object lesson in how to do the things you might do in any case in any of the Jewish, Christian or Islamic Faith traditions, with a new urgency and a new humility by integrating the relationship of prayer, fasting and almsgiving as set out for us in St Matthew 6. They are to be integrated around the instruction not to parade your religion before others. (St Matthew 6.1) This forms part of The Sermon on the Mount. It is Jesus at his teaching best. Lent has proved to be for us all the time of enhanced discipleship.
… AND ITS CONNECTION WITH THE INCARNATION
Jesus is opening up a new world full of grace and truth, as he did in his Incarnation. It is one devoid of hypocrisy and posturing and it is offered to people who had no role to play in existing and conventional religion. It is these same people who are swept onward and upward in to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with the Messiah as they follow and festoon this donkey–king. The reimagining of prayer, fasting and almsgiving was their invitation to be part and parcel of the kingdom of heaven here on earth precisely because that kingdom is the kingdom of God, not a kingdom of human manufacturing. How can this be re–invested and re–discovered in the fragile and febrile narrative of Easter Day which offers so little in terms of majesty and yet so much in terms of future glory for us today?
The full list in John Newton’s Hymn offers us a belonging to everything that Jesus is:
Jesus! my Shepherd, Brother, Friend,
My Prophet, Priest, and King,
My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End,
Accept the praise I bring.
From Christmas Day, we have been dealing directly with God’s use of humble beginnings. There is every god reason for us to find the same God doing the same things on Easter Day. St John chapter 20 holds the same ingredients of salvation from below and salvation from within. This is yet another message emanating from the generous text of St John 20 which keeps on giving. The wonderful thing about Christmas and Easter is that on each occasion and in each year we can and do start all over again. As earthen vessels containing the grace of God we must do this. St John chapter 20 introduces us to the positive emptiness which we have found to be the characteristic of the Desert of Lent. Its ingredients of the earliest moments of resurrection are: grief, recognition, telling and rejoicing. These form a new community out of people and places and experiences. We are that new community of belief and belonging.
CHRIST IS RISE HALLELUJAH!
This is the new life on Christ that we feel in our fingers and in our toes, as they say and sing somewhere else. Christ is Risen Hallelujah! And God works with our hands and our feet to bring this very particular and precious type of salvation to the whole world of his creation and recreation from this moment in 2026. What we have lived through is the recharging of kingship by prophecy and by priesthood. What we have lived through is the most colourful and the most powerful few days of the yes. We have seen retaliating replaced by redemption. We have seen darkness replaced by dawn. We have seen aggression replaced by acceptance:
Jesus said, Mary! She turned and said to him, Rabbuni! (St John 20.16)
Thomas said, My Lord and my God! (St John 20.28)
FINALLY …
St John 20 is not only the culmination of the whole of The Gospel. It is of a piece with the totality of it. Essential for centring and anchoring our faith is that there seems to be no Christmas in St John’s Gospel but Easter is Christmas fulfilled. The fragilities of the first Easter morning are essential to this movement and to this continuity. There is no fragility about The Prologue but there is fragility about The Resurrection. One disciples has kept watch all night; two disciples run the next morning to find out what the story is. The one who remains gets the most fulfilled picture. And yet at the heart of her recognition there is rejection: Do not cling to me …for I have not yet ascended to the Father. (St John 20.17) And the disciples will continue to huddle behind locked doors in Jerusalem for fear of the Jews (St John 20.19). Everywhere we turn there is a long way to go.
Our Lenten life has not been wasted. It has been essential in the almost tantric conservation of energies, in their repurposing so that we can join in the metallic resonances of a joyful Eastertide. Tomorrow is a new day. Our Lenten discipline is not wasted. We start afresh, our lives restructured and repurposed. We follow the Risen Lord into Galilee where he has gone before us … and to the ends of the earth.
St John 1.18: Mary of Magdala went to tell the disciples. I have seen the Lord! She said, and gave them his message.