Some weeks ago a number of us attended a day-long seminar in Brixton.

Its purpose was to try and help us to understand problems which people with learning difficulties have in coping with everyday life.

The most obvious difficulty was the one experienced by those who are unable to read. And there are two ways this difficulty comes about.

One is that so many life-skills presuppose that people can read. Cookery books, instruction manuals even the labels on pill-boxes need to be read as if they are to be understood and followed without making a mistake.

However, even more tiresome than this is the fact that people who can read often cannot understand the problems faced by those who can't. They just can’t conceive what it must be like.

They can understand blindness well enough, and perhaps learn to empathise with it by trying to do things with their eyes shut; but many of us have altogether less patience with those who have eyes but cannot use them to read.

The Seminar helped us understand their problem: and it did so in the following way.

We were given a simple task.

We were divided into groups of four, and each pair in the group was given the job of creating a poster using only pictures, which would be easily understood by anyone who couldn't read.

One poster was to tell people that Small children should always hold an adult’s hand when crossing the road; the other was to say Toddlers should not be left alone before being bathed; so make sure you have everything ready-to hand in the bathroom before you begin!".

The two drawings were then exchanged between the pairs and each had to describe what they thought the other's drawing was trying to say.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, just try and do it and you'll see that getting the right message across is far from simple.

For one thing, none of the four of us could draw. Our efforts might have done credit to a three-year old. But even if we'd been able to draw like Michaelangelo or Rembrandt it wouldn't have helped much.

Why not? Because what we were trying to convey by our pictures was not so much an accurate representation of babies, or baths, or busy streets, or young children and their parents; it was more by way of being an idea, a concept, a command. "Hot water scalds babies"; "Babies can turn taps on"; "Traffic can kill"; "Roads are dangerous".

To put all these ideas into pictures is not easy; but without pictures those who can't read just aren't going to understand what they are being told.

Now what is true about posters for those with difficulty in reading, applies with even more force to you and me in our understanding of the Resurrection.

It's not a difficulty in reading that’s our problem. We can read the words "Christ is risen" or "God raised him from the dead" or "Jesus lives!" The hardest thing is getting a clear idea of what they really mean by "Rising from the dead": precisely the difficulty which the apostles themselves had earlier experienced. They argued amongst themselves, you remember, what "rising from the dead could mean".

That's why, perhaps, there are so many descriptions offered us by the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, of the different ways in which the Risen Christ revealed himself to his followers .

All four evangelists agree with each other and with St Paul that Jesus was really dead on Good Friday but really alive on Sunday morning; but each of them chooses his own way of presenting us with what "rising from the dead" was like to those who witnessed it. From that point onward their narratives follow different paths.

For instance, St Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, tells us about the women finding the empty tomb and the young man in white – who may or may not have been an angel. Quite possibly he was the young St Mark who had got up very early in the morning and crept out of his mother’s house to the Garden to see for himself whether anything had happened on the Third Day as Jesus had said it would. Be that as it may, Mark’s gospel ends abruptly with the two women running out of the tomb in sheer blind panic.

John, by contrast, tells us in much more detail what Peter and John found – the linen cloths and the napkin lying as if the body of Jesus had passed clean through them like light through a glass windowpane. John, too, tells us that Mary Magdalen at first simply didn't recognise Jesus until he spoke to her.

St Luke describes how Jesus's risen body came into the locked room and ate a meal of fish and honeycomb. Before that however, he tells us how Jesus appeared to Cleopas and his companion on their way to Emmaus; and how, even though he spoke at length to them, they failed to recognise him until he broke the bread at the inn where they stopped for a bite to eat.

Back to St John with the account of Doubting Thomas. Unlike Mary Magdalen, St Thomas is invited by Jesus to touch him in the most intimate way. "Put your finger into my hands, put your hand into my side".

There are other examples, of course. But what the evangelists give us, it seems, is a "picture-gallery" of images, which describe but do not define the Resurrection.

Describe, because each one of them adds another detail to our overall picture of what the Resurrection means. Remember those posters which we tried so hard and unsuccessfully to create? Our chief difficulty wasn't drawing a baby, or a bath, or a road, or a zebra crossing by itself (though goodness knows that was bad enough)

No, our real problem was getting them all to "fit together" in a single picture. It's what artists call "the problem of perspective". At Brixton we were trying to say in two dimensions on a piece of paper what actually happens in three dimensions, and needs that third dimension in order to portray it properly.

The Resurrection brings in a fourth dimension – what we call the Eternal, the Spiritual, or the Supernatural; yet the Resurrection necessarily had to be portrayed in three dimensions only. That's why the evangelists offer us so many pictures. Although the truth is in all of them, the complete truth resides in none. It simply cannot be defined in that way.

The eternal truths, like the Resurrection of Jesus, can only be fully understood by God himself. One day, perhaps, it will be our privilege to understand far more than we can at the moment with our limited human minds.

Meanwhile, God has given us a whole-picture gallery to be looking at: the more closely we look at each picture, the more details we begin to see. The potential for discovering new ideas is unlimited.

As St John says in the very last of verse of his gospel "there are many other things which Jesus did the which, if they should be written everyone, I suppose the world itself could not contain all the books that should be written