I’m pretty sure we’ve all sung this one on Easter Day before. In conservative Evangelical churches there seems to be an unwritten rule that it has to be the first one on Easter Day, and it’s been so successful that it’s broken through to the wider church beyond Evangelicalism.

There’s loads to love about this one – the joy, the energy, the fact that it draws together details of the Easter story with their wider implications for us. But precisely the fact that I’ve sung it on Easter Day so many times makes it precious. We don’t want to repeat things by rote, but the fact that this song is the one we’ve ‘always’ started with on Easter Sunday means that each Easter Sunday a layered memory of Easters past returns, like a laquer beautifying an already elegant vase.