Sermon for the second Sunday of Easter
‘Do not be afraid’
A Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham
Sunday 12 April 2026- 16:30
Daniel 6:1-23 and Mark 15:46- 16:8
“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here”.
We are at the start of the Church’s season of Easter at the moment, a period of unparallelled joy and celebration in the Christian year which extends through 50 days until the day of Pentecost. The drama of the Easter story, the women in the garden, the empty tomb, is meant to give us hope, a sense of life restored, the promise of things to come. Rather than just one day or a week of celebration, Eastertide is one long sustained season of praise. Our choices of hymns and music, the Easter acclamations that appear in our liturgy after the austere discipline of Lent, all ought to thrill and excite us, and to resound with this sense of real and lasting joy.
Yet rejoicing does not appear to match how many of us may be feeling in this season. To switch on the TV to watch the news, or pick up the newspaper, is to be filled with a fresh sense of dread, as we start to imagine what new horror or act of violence with horrendous human consequences to vast to compute may have been unleashed. And closer to home, joy also may not reflect how many of our young people are feeling, as they enter the most pressurised term of the school year. For them, as the Church begins to celebrate, the hard work begins. Just as we have thrown off our Lenten piety and let the festivities of Easter take hold, students and young people find themselves in an almost academic lent- one of preparation, of waiting, of being tested. Whilst the pressures of exams and deadlines are around, many people find this time of year full, not of Easter joy, but of anxiety, and even fear.
In Mark’s telling of the Easter story, which we heard earlier, as our second reading, the dominant note is one of fear. In this earliest gospel, even though his resurrection is announced by the angel, there are no reassuring appearances of the risen Jesus to the disciples, as in all the others. At the very end of a book where everyone has struggled to understand what Jesus is about, let alone follow- where people just don’t get it- fear features several times. The body of Jesus has been wrapped and laid in a tomb, and we read how early in the morning as the women come to embalm it, they are anxious. “Who will roll away the stone?” they ask. Then, when they find the tomb open, the body gone, a young man says to them: “He isn’t here: he’s going ahead of you to Galilee. Tell the others”. And they are alarmed – or “affrighted” as the Authorised Version has it, even more strongly. The man says to them, “do not be alarmed”. But they run from the tomb, for terror and amazement have seized them. And Mark tells us: “They said nothing to anyone, for they were scared”. And that’s it. No rejoicing, no celebration. Fear is the very last word of the Gospel, even in the original Greek text.
As already mentioned, we also, in the 21st century, live in a time of anxiety.
In his novel about civil war in Sri Lanka Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje’s main character says: “I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear…” (p.135).
In the West, at least, many – although not all – of us live in relative security; compared with previous generations, we are less vulnerable to illness, violence and poverty. But there are still things that make us feel afraid, as politicians are keen to remind us.
Fear permeates our lives on many levels. We may fear huge things, like ecological disaster, or the threat of terror or AI. Or we may feel the weight of daily fears, such as accident or illness, fear of redundancy, or fear of failure at something we’re trying to do or achieve that really matters to us.
Perhaps we get anxious about smaller things, such as embarrassment over a word spoken out of turn, making a mistake, feeling we have to work when we desperately needed a day off, or not having enough money to support ourselves and our family.
The experience of fear can be overwhelming, physically and mentally. Yet into the fears that threaten to engulf us, God says to us, as he says to the women on that first Easter morning: “Do not be afraid”.
Perhaps, we might think, this simple command, “Do not fear” doesn’t address the reality of fear; it fails to understand the hold anxiety can have on us. But to be courageous involves accepting fear as an inevitable part of human experience. When we find the courage to acknowledge our fears in faith, then we move a step closer to trusting in God in the midst of difficulty.
Having courage doesn’t mean having no fear; it means not being ruled by fear. Of all the qualities we value, courage is one of the most attractive. We can all think of people we look up to for speaking out against prejudice or injustice – not just the great figures of history – but, more often than not, ordinary people we know and admire for their brave ways of living.
But one of the marks of a truly courageous person is that they acknowledge their fears, that they face them, and still persist. There’s a story that Oscar Romero, the Archbishop in El Salvador who was martyred for standing up for justice for the poor, was once sitting on a beach with a friend, and he asked his friend whether he was afraid to die. The friend replied that he was not, and Romero said, “But I am. I am afraid to die”, and yet he gave his life.
Fear was part of Jesus’ experience too, when he prayed in Gethsemane before his crucifixion, “remove this cup from me”. Jesus was afraid, and that is incredibly reassuring for us. Jesus knew fear, and yet he decided, not my will, but yours be done. He chose to obey, making humanity at one with God: atonement.
The words “Do not be afraid” occur so frequently in the Bible that we might miss their impact. But perhaps the reason they occur so often is that we need to hear them, to keep being reminded to trust God, to trust ourselves, and to have faith.
When the angel appeared to the women at the empty tomb, he told them not to be afraid. But it was fear that silenced them, and prevented them from saying anything. Fear isolates us from one another; courage breaks the silence and begins to bring people together. As Catherine of Sienna said, “Only those are afraid who think that they are alone” (Timothy Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian?, Continuum, 2005, p.81).
We live in an anxious time for people of faith, particularly as the Church is and remains fiercely divided on issues of authority and issues of sexuality. But we all have a responsibility to be involved, to work together to resolve the issues, and to maintain faith, often with people we disagree with. All of these things take courage, just as they do on the world stage as well.
The message of Easter, especially as it is told to us by Mark, is that admitting to fear opens the way to courage, courage to break down the walls that divide us, courage to do the things that we thought would be impossible. The women who discover the resurrection are fearful, but they show us the way. Jesus’ ministry shows us that God works most where people suffer, where they know anxiety and fear. In ending his Gospel on a note of fear, Mark challenges us- the reader- as to how we will respond. Will we have the faith to overcome our fears, or will we allow them to consume us?
Whatever these 50 days hold in store for us, whether it’s joyful or not so joyful, we can know, as the women did, that God’s loving presence goes ahead of us. We can have the courage to reach out to God and to each other, trusting that he will lead us into new and reassuring experiences of his grace.
“Do not be alarmed” says the young man in the tomb. As Christians, we should rejoice and take courage in that, during this Easter and beyond.