On the first Easter Sunday Jesus appeared to some women first …

Luke 24:1-5 New Revised Standard Version
1. But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4 While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5 The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. 

At this morning’s virtual service at Trinity Church Revd Ian Griffiths said “On that first Easter morning, it was as if the whole world were sleeping when the most amazing thing happened.”

This Easter morning I am looking out of the window, and see new leaves on the trees. There is a house in East St Helen Street in Abingdon where there is a display of blossoms and flowers and palm crosses, that many people can enjoy walking past.

The lockdown is a strange return to almost forgotten days of family life. Our grown up children are back with us because of the lockdown. We decorated Pace Eggs with flowers, and then wrapped them in onion skins and string, and boiled them – as is the custom in my wife’s home town Ulverston. The picture above shows a Pace Egg in the Pitts Rivers Museum in Oxford – a few miles from Abingdon.

Abingdon has a historic connection to The Cross.

The symbol of the Borough of Abingdon was a cross surrounded by four small crosses.

The Fraternity of the Holy Cross was instrumental in building Abingdon Bridge (around 1416) and the Long Alley Almshouse (around 1446) and works in St Helen’s Church. Ancient tradition held that St Helen found the original cross in Jerusalem – the cross that held Jesus. According to Francis Little, The Fraternity set up a stately cross in St Helen’s Church (before 1388).

Christians remember with solemnity the death of Jesus Christ on Good Friday. They believe that Jesus was crucified by the Romans on a hill outside Jerusalem and died on a cross. It was a cruel and humiliating way to die.

The gravestone with the metal cross is in St Helen’s Churchyard.

It is said that Abingdon should make more of St Edmund of Abingdon, whose name is part of the Catholic Church of Our Lady and St Edmund in Abingdon. It might also be said that Abingdon should make more of Our Lady of Abingdon.

St. Edward the Martyr and St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, both encouraged pilgrimages to the shrine of Our Lady of Abingdon, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia included in the New Advent website. Our Lady of Abingdon was as famous in medieval times as our Lady of Walsingham is now.

So was Our Lady of Abingdon lost for ever like most of the Abbey?

When the ‘Sow and Pigs’ public house, in Culham, was demolished in 1913, a large stone was found. It was subsequently recognised as a Madonna and Child and given to Our Lady and St Edmund’s Church in 1949.  For eight years the headless and armless statue stood on a chapel floor.

According to one source, Canon Sexton, the parish priest, traced it to a shrine visited by many people on their way to a Sunnyg’s Well (Sunningwell) where people went hoping to be cured of blindness.

In 1957 Canon Sexton had the statue restored with the help of sculptor Philip Lindsay Clark and the advice of a Benedictine monk / medieval art expert. It is not richly adorned like Our Lady of Walsingham and looking up to heaven, but modest and looking down to people in the church.

The church website https://www.ourladyandstedmund.org.uk/brief-history says the statue was originally a part of the once great Abbey of St Mary at Abingdon, and was defaced and removed during the dissolution of the monastery and hidden away in a cottage wall.

The statue does not usually feature on Abingdon tourism guides or in history books. So are we all missing a local treasure?