FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

26 April 2026

COLLECT OF THE DAY

Good Shepherd,
you are the gate that secures the
sheepfold:
grant that all who hear your voice
may know you who calls us each by
name,
and follow where you lead;
for you live and reign
in the unity of the Blessed Trinity,
one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.

Held, Not Hardened: Abundant Life in an Anxious Age

Reading Notes

Acts 2:42-47
Luke begins with what people do before he tells us how they explain it. The first picture of the church is made up of repeated actions: showing up, listening, eating, praying, sharing what they have. Christianity appears here as something learned through practice long before it is mastered as belief.

The passage reads like a description of how a community stays liveable. Teaching gives people a shared imagination. Fellowship resists the drift into isolation. Meals answer the plain vulnerability of bodies. Prayer creates a rhythm that can steady frightened minds and over-alert bodies.

The most concrete change happens around possessions. Goods begin to circulate according to need rather than remain fixed according to ownership. Wealth loosens its grip slightly. Need becomes visible. The community begins, however imperfectly, to practice sufficiency.

It is difficult not to notice how contemporary this feels. Many people now live with the quiet pressure of not knowing whether there will be enough: enough money, enough energy, enough time, enough future. Luke describes a community learning, day by day, how not to let that fear govern them completely.

This is not presented as heroic. It is through simple, repeated acts. Meals again. Prayers again. Gathering again. The miracle may simply be that they keep choosing to remain available to one another.

Psalm 23
Psalm 23 imagines God paying attention to what allows a creature to keep living. Grass that can sustain. Water that can be safely reached. Paths that do not lead to ruin. Rest that actually restores.

The landscape of the psalm feels recognisable. Fertile places exist. So do dark valleys. The terrain of life contains both nourishment and threat. What defines God’s care is not the removal of difficulty but a refusal to abandon the vulnerable within it.

Read slowly, the psalm sounds less like nice sentiment and more like vital maintenance. Life requires conditions. Soil that is not exhausted. Water that has not been spoiled. Pathways that still lead somewhere inhabitable. Bodies need places where vigilance can ease, if only for a moment. The shepherd attends to such things because without them life quietly begins to unravel.

This is what makes the calm of the psalm believable. It is not denial; it is the settled confidence that someone is paying attention to what keeps life from collapse.

In an age marked by environmental fragility, that picture feels newly necessary. Many now live not only with concern about the planet but with something closer to eco-distress: recurring fear, grief, anger, and exhaustion in the face of a damaged world and an uncertain future. The psalm offers the possibility that care is still being exercised within that awareness.

1 Peter 2:19-25
Peter turns from images to formation. Christ is described as an example, but not in the shallow sense of moral inspiration. The word used suggests a copybook given to a learner: something traced slowly, with mistakes, spilled ink, corrections, and patience.

The pattern is difficult. When harmed, Christ does not reorganise his life around revenge. When treated unjustly, he does not surrender his humanity in response. There is a steadiness here that feels less like passivity than refusal: a refusal to let violence set the terms of what a human being becomes. Abundant life is its own form of protest against violence.

This has always been costly teaching. It becomes even harder in an age of permanent outrage and accelerated reaction, where injury spreads quickly and response is expected immediately. Peter seems to imagine something slower: a life anchored deeply enough that it does not have to become wholly reactive.

The danger in this passage is obvious. It has sometimes been used to tell people to remain in situations that destroy them, or to spiritualise endurance in the face of abuse. That cannot be what Peter intends, since the passage ends with return: return to the shepherd, return to care, return to a place where life is not abandoned to harm, return to a place of safety.

Read carefully, then, this is not a command to accept violation. It is a witness to the difficult work of remaining human in a world that brutalises. It names a form of strength that does not become identical with the force that wounds it.

John 10:1-10
John’s shepherd imagery is familiar and unfolds against a landscape where life is precarious. Predators exist. Thieves exist. Sheep scatter easily. Survival depends on recognition.

The sheep know the shepherd’s voice. That detail carries more weight than it first appears. Life here depends on learning which voices lead towards life, and which lead towards diminishment. Discernment is a survival skill.

The promise of abundant life emerges inside this tension. It sounds less like expansion than like steadiness. Life that is not always braced for harm. Life that has somewhere to return to. Life that can move and rest without constant alarm.

The image of the gate suggests something very physical: a place of watching, a place where vulnerability is acknowledged rather than denied. Someone remains attentive there. Someone remains wakeful.

It is a striking image for an anxious age. We know what it is to live with background unease: about the future, about the climate, about whether the structures we depend on will hold. We know, too, how quickly fear can become a bodily condition rather than simply a passing thought. John’s image suggests that abundance may have something to do with being gathered into a form of life where watchfulness is shared, and where one does not have to carry exposure alone.

A common thread

Across all four readings, life appears not as possession but as something vulnerable, embodied, and entrusted to God’s care:

• Acts shows a community organising itself so that need does not remain hidden and no one is left to carry life alone.
• Psalm 23 shows care attending to the material and bodily conditions that keep life from unravelling: rest, nourishment, safety, guidance, presence.
• John shows abundant life not as limitless expansion but as recognisable belonging: being called, gathered, and guarded against dispersal.
• Peter shows the slow remaking of a life that has encountered harm yet refuses to let harm dictate its deepest form.

Taken together, these readings do not offer a fantasy of invulnerability. They assume exposure. They know that communities fracture, bodies remain vulnerable, creation itself is strained, and fear can settle deep within ordinary life. But they also bear witness to another possibility: that life can still be held carefully enough to remain possible.

Reflection

A simple question seems to sit underneath these readings: what helps life remain livable?

Acts answers with practices: shared meals, shared resources, shared praise. The church appears as a people learning how to reduce the number of people who must carry life alone. Experience tells us that, although this is the intention, it is not always the reality of life together.

Psalm 23 answers with attention: God notices depletion before it becomes collapse. Care appears as guidance, provision, shelter, and presence over time.

John answers with recognition: to be known by name, to be called, to be gathered back from dispersal, to be loved. There is something deeply stabilising in being known in this way. Within that steadiness, freedom becomes imaginable.

Peter answers with formation: the slow shaping of a life that does not become harsher in a harsh world. This is its own, often very potent, form of resistance.

None of this removes difficulty. These readings are remarkably clear about how exposed life remains. Communities remain fragile. Bodies remain vulnerable. The future remains uncertain. The earth itself is subject to strain. For many, this is not merely an intellectual awareness but a felt one: sleeplessness, helplessness, grief, anger, numbness, a sense that the future is narrowing. Eco-anxiety, like other forms of distress, is one more way that collective fear settles into ordinary life.

And yet another possibility keeps appearing. People continue to share what they have. Care continues to be given. Voices continue to call scattered lives back towards belonging. Conditions for life are still being opened, however partially.

God’s response to the harshness of the world seems to take the form of a way of living that keeps making room for life to continue. Perhaps that is what the shepherd image finally gives us. Not an escape from the earth, but a way of remaining upon it. Not a demand to be unafraid, but an invitation to handle life gently because it is known to be breakable. That gentleness begins with ourselves.

So the question that lingers may be very simple. Where, in our own lives, is life being carefully held? Where is it being worn down or neglected? Where might we make more room for what allows life – human life, creaturely life, the shared life of this earth – to remain possible?

Abundant life may begin there. Not in having more, but in discovering that life itself, in all its ordinariness and fragility, is something entrusted to our keeping.