Love changes everything     Easter Day (5 April) 2026

Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18                                            

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!  This is a new day, a day that challenges everything we thought we knew, a day that gives to us new hope and new life.  Because of today, our lives can be different.  This is the day that changes everything.  This is the day that the Lord has made!

Psalm 118’s Easter refrain reminds me of another day that changed lives.  Years ago I attended a friend’s wedding, the beginning of a new life for her and her fiancé.  He was a violinist, and she walked up the aisle to him playing the song “Love changes everything” from the musical Aspects of Love. 

Love,

Love changes everything:

Hands and faces,

Earth and sky

If there was a sound-track to Easter, there in the garden outside the empty tomb, it could well be that.  Psalm 118’s refrain has that same idea, that love transforms everything.  Jesus’ self-giving love, his death on the cross, didn’t result in defeat but in his being raised to glorious, unstoppable new life.  The cross looked like the end of love’s power – the end of everything in fact – but it shows us that God’s love is stronger than violence, than worldly power, even stronger than death itself.  In Jesus’ resurrection God said Yes to life, to creation, to compassion, to hope, to new beginnings, and No to hopelessness, despair and evil.  Love changes everything.

But sometimes, love disrupts as much as it comforts, or before it comforts.  Sometimes there is chaos and uncertainty.  Before we meet the risen Christ, the story gives us the darkness of early morning, a lot of running back and forth, and an empty space that feels like a new loss.  Summoned to the tomb by the grieving Mary Magdalene, the Beloved Disciple – the one “whom Jesus loved” – runs and reaches the tomb first.  He sees the linen cloths, he realises something has happened – but he’s not exactly sure what.  He doesn’t fully understand yet, but he believes – believes what, exactly?   It’s comforting to know that faith often begins with fuzziness not certainty.  Sometimes resurrection nudges its way into our lives quietly, with clues, fragments of the story, the first hints of dawn.

Peter’s another one who rushes in: confused, impulsive.  He enters the tomb, but doesn’t really get it.  Maybe he’s a bit conflicted, very probably he’s remembering how only two days ago he denied even knowing Jesus.  It’s comforting to know that Easter is also for disciples who don’t have it all worked out.  That resurrection is big enough for the hesitant, the uncertain, the ones who don’t understand, and the ones who think they’ve made a mess of everything.  Maybe you feel like that sometimes.  Peter’s still drawn toward the possibility of hope, still waiting to see the risen Jesus and to feel his love – the love that would change everything for him. 

Love
Will turn your world around,
And that world
Will last for ever.

Fast forward several weeks, and Peter is sharing the good news boldly, assuring someone else – Cornelius, a Gentile, an outsider – that he belongs.  Resurrection overturns all the boundaries we humans put up between each other: it creates a community shaped by God’s inclusive love.  The love that makes people choose differently, act differently.  The love that can include us.

It was love that shaped Mary’s encounter at the empty tomb.  She came in grief and love, filled with confusion, fear, and that dreadful emptiness, the one when we feel everything’s over.  In that early morning light she sees someone she thinks is the gardener, someone who might know where Jesus’ body is.  And then he calls her by name, and everything changes.  Resurrection dawns with recognition – she hears her name and knows it’s Jesus, no longer dead, but gloriously alive.  For Mary, and for all of us, Easter faith is grounded in relationship.  Mary is known, called, and loved – and that changes her. 

For Mary and for us, love changes how we see ourselves.  It changes what we think is possible.  Love breaks through darkness and despair and calls us into a new story.  Easter doesn’t just bring Jesus from death to life – it changes us too, and opens to us a new sort of life.

Love changes everything:

Nothing in the

World will ever

Be the same.

The Pauline tradition captures this transformation in a different key, for that’s what the Colossian community were coming to realise. “You have been raised with Christ. … Your life is hidden with Christ in God.”  Because of this, you are secured, grounded, beloved.  Easter is happening in us – it reorients how we live now.  How we think about ourselves, how we act, how we treat others.  That’s what love does – God’s love, made visible on the cross, in the tomb, in the risen Jesus.  Because Christ is risen, the transforming power of love is let loose in the world – in us and through us – calling us by name, overturning our boundaries, reorienting our lives, and sending us as witnesses of hope.

Love,

Love changes everything:

How you live and

How you die

This Easter, let the resurrecting love of God touch your heart, and let it change you  – because love changes everything.  Alleluia, Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

The Rev’d Dr Deborah Broome

Priest-in-Charge, CHB Anglican Parish