When we read the Gospels, the pattern of our Lord's Easter appearances is intimate and personal - even casual and simple - as the disciples were engaged in the "trivial round and common task" of their daily lives.

Mary Magdalene visiting the tomb mistook Jesus for a gardener.

To the disciples fishing in the sea of Tiberias he was a stranger on the shore who had taken the trouble to light a fire for them.

To Cleopas and his companion, he was just another traveller on the road to Emmaus. So casual were these encounters that it was only in the final moments that the disciples became convinced of Jesus' presence with them.

This painting focuses on an encounter with the risen Lord: 'The Presence' by Captain A E Borthwick which hangs in St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh.

Alfred Edward Borthwick served in the Boer War and the First World War and painted throughout his life until his death in 1955.

'The Presence' depicts a great act of worship taking place at the east end of the cathedral, but it is not that liturgy which attracts our attention.

In the foreground, at the west end of the cathedral, we see a woman kneeling in prayer and Jesus moving towards her.

It is almost as if he has left the worship at the far end to its own devices to meet the personal needs of this woman.

Why she is there we don't know.

Perhaps she has come like Mary Magdalene on the first Easter morning, perplexed, apprehensive, wanting some reassurance through her prayer.

Just as the gardener called Mary tenderly by her name, so the artist shows the tender movement of Jesus as he approaches the woman with outstretched hands.

Our Easter Day worship will, we hope, be something that brings us together in fellowship and joy with God and one another; a sharing in the joy of the resurrection and the new life of Easter.

Jesus seeks to bring us that new life at a personal level also, as he does with the woman praying in Edinburgh Cathedral.

The risen Lord says to each of us, ‘I am with you always.’ His coming to us in this Easter season may be like the travellers to Emmaus or like Mary Magdalene or the disciples fishing or the woman in the painting: a silent, unobtrusive coming.

The hands that took the bread at Emmaus, that gathered firewood by the lakeside, that reach out in this painting were the same hands offered for us on the cross.

But now they reach out to touch all of us with the new life of Easter.

(Anon, from Fawley Parish Magazine)