Year A: Easter Sunday | John 20:11-18
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
April 5, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“[Mary] turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.” – John 20:14[1]
Why was it so hard for people to recognize Jesus after the resurrection? We never read a description of how he had changed, but, apart from his wounds, clearly he had. We might imagine Mary’s vision being clouded with tears, but what about the disciples Luke writes about on the road to Emmaus later that same day or the Apostles John and Peter when Jesus is cooking them breakfast on the beach only a chapter after today’s Gospel reading? Even his keenest students, ones who’d already seen him after the resurrection, kept encountering him without realizing who he was.
The honest answer to the question is that we’ll never know—without details the Bible never gives us, it’s impossible to tell. Yet the question remains. Why did it become so hard to see Jesus for who he was?
I’ve begun reading a book that explores the idea of Jesus dying as victim and resurrecting as judge. The thoughts are still new to me, but the gist as I understand it at this point is that Jesus, as someone who didn’t respond to aggression and violence by lashing out in return, somehow absorbs and transforms humanity’s curse. His innocence drew out our cruelty and hatred in such a way that he alone has the ability to distinguish between a person and their sin or failings. In consequence of that clarity, among other things, God has established him alone as humanity’s mediator, the nonjudgmental victim reborn as the nonjudgmental judge. Just as we all share the guilt of causing harm to others—whether intentionally or not, whether individually or under the guise of a broader society—Jesus then unites each of us through the harm others have caused us. Jesus essentially becomes all victims, because each of us, as victims to some degree or another, find ourselves joined together in and through him.
And maybe that’s why it was so difficult for people to recognize Jesus after the resurrection. It wasn’t necessarily that his appearance changed; rather, his face became a mirror to humanity, reflecting back to us not only our own faces as people who have been victims but the faces of those we in turn have victimized.
Easter then becomes a call not simply to some metaphysical resurrection or magical afterlife party but to very real restoration in our physical, everyday world. By committing to follow Jesus, we train ourselves to see the innocence and divine presence in both those we have harmed and those we hate. However they arrived there, the drunk passed out in the gutter becomes the presence of Christ. The memory of our grade school nemesis brings to mind the face of Christ. The voice of that coworker absolutely no one can stand becomes the call of Christ. When all are united in innocence, we can approach one another in curiosity even in the face of difference, each of us reflecting an aspect of Jesus to one another as Jesus, in turn, collects and unites broken aspects of our individual selves as his one earthly Body. Ignoring someone else’s need becomes ignoring my own need. Harming the other reveals itself as violence against the self. Hatred of the other confronts us with an even deeper hatred of the self.
In equal measure, unmitigated love for the other becomes compassion for the self. Encouragement for the other becomes motivation within the self. And in meeting someone else’s needs, we find our own deepest needs met.
Maybe Mary had trouble seeing Jesus because she was, as yet, unwilling to see herself in him. Maybe the disciples couldn’t recognize him because they weren’t ready to acknowledge his presence in those around them. Maybe our own resurrection seems far off or incomprehensible not because God is absent or because Christ is distant but because we haven’t yet fully awakened to our own faces in the face of Christ and the life of Christ in the lives of those around us. And the day we finally do—maybe that will become the day we find ourselves already resurrected amidst God’s glorious and peaceful Reign.
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.