The joy of Easter continues. Our environment, still filled with flowers, fabric and fragrance, urges us to “keep the feast,” to sustain our joy and wonder at God’s great gift to us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. During the Fifty Days of the Easter Season, we will stand for all the portions of the Service at which we would normally kneel. We do this as a reminder that because we have knelt in the shadow of the Cross and have been forgiven our sins by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we can now stand before God as His children.

The gospel for the third Sunday of Easter is always one in which the risen Christ shares food with the disciples, meals that are the Easter template for the meal we share each Lord’s day. In today’s gospel, Jesus both shares the disciples’ food and shows them the meaning of his suffering, death, and resurrection through the scriptures: the two main elements of our Sunday worship.