An Easter Homily: Enter the New Story
BY DAN SHEED
“This is how God showed his love for us. God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him... not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God”
Whether we realise it or not, each of us lives inside a story. A narrative we’ve come to believe about the world, about others, and about ourselves. Some of these stories have been handed to us—shaped by our families, our culture, our histories. Others we’ve adopted ourselves. Still others hum away in the background, like a familiar soundtrack we’re barely aware of, yet which shapes everything.
Maybe your story is one of striving—always trying to measure up. Or proving—always trying to be enough. Maybe it’s marked by pain or disappointment. Maybe it’s a survival story. One shaped by the quiet ache of not quite belonging, not quite mattering, not quite making it.
These stories are powerful. They steer so much of what we do, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to God.
But at Easter, we’re invited into a different story. A better one.
It’s not a fairytale, and it’s certainly not a tidy, religious cliché. It’s a gritty, redemptive, real story. The story of love. A love that’s not abstract or detached—but embodied, personal, costly. As John says in his first letter, God has shown his love in action.
That’s the heartbeat of Easter. Love that shows up. Love that steps in. Love that doesn’t wait for us to get our act together. Love that enters our fractured stories not to condemn or scold, but to rescue, to heal, to restore.
Jesus comes right into the middle of it all—not to wave a disappointed finger from afar, but to rewrite the script from within. Through the cross, he takes our stories of shame, fear, and failure and folds them into his. He doesn’t erase them. He redeems them. And through the resurrection, he offers a whole new future. A whole new way to be human in the world.
This is the story of Easter: that your worst chapter doesn’t get to be the final one. That death doesn’t get the last word. That resurrection is now the defining plot twist.
And now—because of Jesus—we get to live through him. We’re invited to live in this story of love. To be found in it. Formed by it. And ultimately, to become people who embody that love in the world.
As Eugene Peterson put it,
“The church is a group of named people in a particular place who practise the resurrection in a land where death gets the greatest headlines.”
And that’s exactly what we’re called to be. A people who live the Easter story every day—resurrection people in a world that desperately needs hope.
So the invitation this Easter isn’t just to believe in the story of love. It’s to enter it.
To let the love of God re-story your life.
To allow the Spirit to shape a new narrative in you.
A story where grace is the foundation, love is the thread, and Jesus is the centre.
This is Easter.
This is love.
This is the story we were made for.