Sermon for Easter Tuesday
“Behold my hands and my feet”
The Gospel for Easter Tuesday follows immediately upon the beautiful story of the Road to Emmaus, one of the most comprehensive accounts of how the Resurrection comes to birth in us. The crucial feature is that Jesus teaches us the Resurrection most clearly and most fully.
In Luke’s account in the Gospel read on Easter Monday, two things stand out: first, the opening of the Scriptures and the opening of our eyes in making himself known through the breaking of the bread. In the first, the opening of the Scriptures, Jesus gives us a way of understanding the events of the Passion by reference to Moses and the Prophets “the things concerning himself” but it is the second, his action in breaking the bread and giving thanks that crystallizes and confirms the teaching.
On Easter Tuesday, two things also stand out that are critical to the making known of the doctrine of the Resurrection: first, he shows them his hands and his feet and he opens our understanding again through the Scriptures. The first shows us one of the primary aspects of the Resurrection. It is made known through the signs of the Passion. This underscores the theological point that the Resurrection is known in the Passion and the Passion in the Resurrection as testament to God as life and love made manifest and alive in us. The point here is that Jesus shows them the marks of his Passion in his hands and his feet. He bids us look on him whom we have pierced but those marks of sin and human cruelty have become the signs of transforming love and life.
The second is the opening of the Scriptures which follows upon his showing us his hands and his feet. This is the reverse order from Easter Monday where the opening of the Scriptures precedes his making himself known in the breaking of the bread. All these ‘events’ go together and complement one another in the gathering of the understanding into the mystery of Christ now risen but showing us the marks of the Passion now transfigured, we might say, to become the means of our learning about the radical truth of God as love and life, that is to say, Resurrection.
The Easter Tuesday Gospel underscores the point that it is really the opening out of the whole of the Scriptures – meaning the Hebrew Scriptures – that provide the Christian understanding of the Resurrection but through Jesus as the exegete we might say. Luke here has Jesus makes reference to what is “written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms” concerning himself; in short, the TANAKH, the acronym for the Torah (the Law), the Nevi’im (the Prophets) and the Ketuvim (the Writings) as embodied in the Psalms. But Luke also shows us what this means for us: the preaching of repentance for the forgiveness of sins as belonging to our witness to the truth of the Passion and the Resurrection.
Just as our heart burned within us when he walked with us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us on Easter Monday, an image of being inwardly pierced or moved in our hearts and minds, so on Easter Tuesday, we are inwardly pierced by beholding Christ pierced but alive. The marks of the Passion are like words written in his body that open us out to the radical understanding of the Resurrection.
“Behold my hands and my feet”
Fr. David Curry
Easter Tuesday, 2026
