WE ALL have our own landmarks, stand-out passages in the varied terrain of scripture — places that seem set aside or lifted up for us to get our bearings, to be reoriented, blazes marked out on the sometimes mazy trail through the thickets of a text.

One of those landmarks, for me, amid the many scriptural place-markers of Easter, is the simple, almost matter-of-fact, passage in 1 Corinthians 15: “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. . .” (1 Corinthians 15.3-4).

I remember what a relief it was, when, in the biblical-studies section of my ordination training, the lecturer, who had introduced us to so much critical scepticism about what was or was not genuinely Pauline, said that this passage certainly was, and that, as the text itself proclaimed, it contained a witness earlier still, something that Paul himself had received. This passage was written before any of the Gospels, and is both our earliest witness to the resurrection, and, in essence, our earliest creed.

At last, having staggered through various historical-critical quagmires, I felt that I was standing on solid ground; and, of course, Paul not only declares that he has received this testimony from others, but goes on to name and enumerate some of the witnesses to that first Easter: “. . . and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died” (1 Corinthians 15.5-6).

I have always had the sense, when I read these verses, of widening ripples, as though from a stone flung in a pool, although, in this instance, the stone has not been flung in a pool, but flung back from the grave — first to Peter, just the one, then to the Twelve, and then to more than 500. You sense that the numbers are increasing, the ripples widening well beyond the confines of this text.

All these things were in my mind when I came to write a sonnet on this text for my sequence on the Stations of the Resurrection:

Five hundred then, and since, so many more!
In lonely prison cells and crowded streets
At brimming springs and at exhausted wells
On days of triumph, and in dire defeats
The risen Lord has shown himself to us.
He comes unlooked for, and in answered prayer
Comes to the mystic, most mysterious
Comes to the addict in their last despair.
He fed five thousand in the wilderness
And now, in bread and wine, he comes and feeds
Uncounted millions. Once he bore one cross
But now he bears all crosses, meets all needs.
The stone flung back at Easter means we share
The widening ripples of his presence here.