“Faith is a mystery of the heart that the mind wants to solve”, says Clayton J. Schmit in FEASTING on the WORD (A 2:395). Too many contemporaries have missed the might of Easter’s Resurrection because they’ve been taught only the STEM curriculum without a balance of poetry. The Easter story is purely a right-brain exercise: like most of our faith-journey, the stories we tell completely omit the “How” and concentrate on God’s “Why”. Post-Easter readings appeal to our hearts, and affirm that we, also, can experience a joyous dependence on God’s choice of Life.
In Acts 2: 22-32, Peter draws on Messianic hopes to rally his cosmopolitan hearers on the feast of Pentecost: although from many diverse cultures and languages, what unites them is the common denominator of Belief in God. Using this singleness of faith, Peter is able to persuade them that the audacious tale of a Resurrected Christ fits right into God’s plan for making all people whole. If death has no power over us from now on, those who intimidate others have lost their weapon!
The writer of I Peter speaks of the transitory rewards of earthly inheritances–money is easily spent, real estate may soon be appropriated for development, heirlooms grow dusty with age. But God’s inheritance is imperishable (1:4), and is kept in trust for all who will accept it! “By [God’s] great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Here is a reason for life which isn’t dependent upon property or status, arranged for us because God WANTS to.
The Gospel is again from John, 20:19-31, the story of “Doubting Thomas”, unique to this writer. In true Classic style, these well-developed stories of John demand an “other” to ask all the proper questions–and often this lot falls to Thomas. He seems to be the one appointed to speak the doubts of all the others, including me. Remember the nerdy kid in class who would interrupt the prof with the observations we all wanted to make, but were afraid of the master’s wrath? We were glad for this brave kid, and so am I glad for Thomas: he’s the one who gave Jesus opportunity to display his physical wounds and thus refute those who claimed mass hysteria or complete reliance upon a disembodied ghost. Please note that Jesus breathed the Spirit into the disciples at this time, a fitting finale to this Gospel which was written so that all may believe that Jesus is the true Messiah, the Christ–“and that through believing you may have life in his name”.
It’s hard to preach Easter. Everything about the Resurrection goes against our knowledge of physics or medicine. But it’s just in this otherness that the story has its power. Best of all, our Lord knows our puzzlement and kindly works with it as we grow into acceptance and gladly–eventually—relinquish our desire to control Creation.
In the process of unfolding, Horace Brown King
My meeting with the Scriptures assigned to the upcoming weekend can be found every Tuesday at this spot on Facebook; or at horacebrownking.com
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