Reflections for Easter

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

For Easter we use a very large number of scripture readings. There are 9 possible for the Vigil Mass and a whole different set for each of the daytime masses. For Pentecost there are almost as many, but we usually hear just 3 as on a “regular” Sunday. You might feel that Easter gives us

Jesus’s Easter story ends with the Ascension. At least it does in Luke’s telling. As with the beginning of the Easter story, the Resurrection, each of the evangelists takes a different approach on how to describe these events. Mark has a brief reference to Jesus “being taken up to heaven”, Matthew and John have no

The beginning of the Easter story is very personal and individual. Each of Jesus’s close companions, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Thomas, has to discover, or rediscover, the risen Lord in their own way. As the ripples spread, this process becomes less of an individual quest – people are coming to Jesus in larger groups. It’s necessary

As the Easter story moves forward, we hear how the church is now needing structures and organization beyond simply following the original disciples. Paul and Barnabas are appointing “elders” for their new groups of believers, using a framework familiar in Jewish life anywhere away from Jerusalem and its temple rituals.  But there is more to

The Easter stories we have heard so far are stories of joy, stories of discovery, of discovery of something that was thought lost, discovery of something even better than what went before. This week we hear how there is also a dark side to these stories. Or, if not exactly dark, that there are challenges