The Fourth Sunday after Easter falls within the white season of Eastertide, when the Church continues to dwell in the joy of the Resurrection. The Collect is one of the most beloved in the 1928 Prayer Book, acknowledging the disorder of sinful human wills and affections and asking God to order them by grace: that we may love what he commands and desire what he promises, so that among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may be fixed where true joys are to be found. It is a collect for pilgrims — those living in a world of flux who need an anchor beyond the world.

The appointed Epistle from James 1 provides the theological ground: every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. What the Collect asks — the reordering of disordered desire — is itself a gift from the God who does not change. The contrast between a mutable world and an immutable God is offered not as abstract theology but as pastoral comfort and as the basis for prayer.

The appointed Gospel from John 16 records part of the Upper Room Discourse, in which our Lord prepares the disciples for his departure: now I go my way to him that sent me, and none of you asketh me, Whither goest thou? But the disciples grieve at the announcement. Jesus teaches them that their sorrow will be turned to joy, and that in that day they will ask in his name and receive, that their joy may be full. The Easter season invites precisely this kind of reoriented asking — prayer shaped not by the instability of the world but by the name of the Risen Lord who now intercedes at the right hand of the Father.