Reflections for Easter

The key things we have been told during our Easter season are that the results of the Resurrection, for those who believed, were peace and power. Peace from fear, and power to preach – to preach that Jesus had won the battle against death, the battle against fear.  That message reaches its climax today, on […]

We are inclined to think of the Ascension as the event that finally took Jesus away from this earth, our world, to somewhere else, a place we call heaven. But the gospel writers, at the end of their telling of the story of Jesus’s life, were not really focused on his departing. If anything, quite

Today, our reading from the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:5-8, 14-17) moves us further on from the simplicity of those very earliest days after the Resurrection, when the apostles and a small group of disciples were still all based in and around Jerusalem.  Now the church is starting to be dispersed over a wider

During the first weeks of our Easter season we focused on the effect of the Resurrection, both on those earliest disciples and on ourselves, in all the varied ways that played out and continues to play out. We’ve thought about how all those relationships with God developed: how Peter changed; how Thomas came to experience

Peter proclaimed: “Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” He wasn’t pulling any punches! When he gets his act together he clearly comes out fighting. His is not the “softly, softly” approach to winning friends and influencing people.  We reflected

It’s hard to believe. Only a short while ago the disciples were locking themselves away because they were scared out of their minds that they were going to be the next ones executed. Before that they’d run away, and Peter, always so sure of himself, had denied that he even knew Jesus. Now that same

When did the Resurrection happen?  That’s not too hard – on Easter Sunday! But if I wanted to be irritatingly pedantic and ask: “Yes, but exactly when, please be more precise?” – then there isn’t a clear answer. We don’t know. But we also can recognize that it doesn’t really matter. The reality of the

Living things are very focused on staying alive, whether they are bacteria or mammals. Humans are no different. People survive under extraordinary circumstances. Occasionally living beings will put themselves in danger for a greater good, notably protecting offspring, and perhaps when a pack defends its territory. Humans behave the same way. Jesus chose to die, he

There are occasions when things just stop. A relationship breaks up, a diagnosis you weren’t expecting, you don’t get the job you were hoping for, an accident that comes out of nowhere. We find ourselves facing a different world. But the world isn’t really different. The world carries on. What has changed is inside us,

So what actually happened on that evening when Jesus and his friends shared their last meal together? Paul spells it out pretty clearly (1 Corinthians 11:23-26). Jesus took the bread and wine, which are traditional elements of a Passover meal, and used them in a completely different way. He turned them into a new reality