Dear Friends:

I’ve seen a few fights in my time over change. The worst of them involved religious traditions or institutional reorganizations.

It is hard for men and women who believe they are doing God’s work to understand that he might have something new and different in mind for them. It is easy to confuse God’s work with God and tread the same path over and over again until it becomes a rut.

We like to “master” our tasks and circumstances. We enjoy knowing what it is that we are about. The flesh is tempted by comfort, not discomfort.

The prospect of change hints that we might not know everything and our mastery is inadequate. So we resist change, insisting that our good is good enough.

Running in place can get your heart rate up and strengthen the legs, but do it long enough and you will wear a hole underneath your feet. Faith always says to us, “Move on” (Heb 11:13-16).

Jesus tells us that satisfaction in the world to come requires a hunger and a thirst for righteousness in this one, not contentment here and now (Mt 5:6). He also says that the new wine of the gospel requires fresh and supple wineskins to hold it, not old, rigid ones (Mt 9:17).

Change, it seems, is the way of our Lord. The word “repentance” means a change of direction. How, then, can we know when a change is from God? We gain an insight from a story of the early Christians told in Acts 5.

Peter and some of the apostles take the opportunity of their arrest and imprisonment to tell the entire Jewish leadership the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. They end with a stirring call for the repentance of Israel from its sins. Read more »

Dear Friends:

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her. Jn 20:11-18

Jesus is on the loose!

He’d been Mary’s teacher and what a teacher he was! Devotion to him had cost her dearly in the misunderstandings of family and friends (Mk 14:3-9; Lk 10:39-42).

Now, though her devotion remains strong, she doesn’t know the risen Jesus. He isn’t who she expects him to be. He isn’t where she expects him to be.

Even her tears of sincere grief and loss are questioned.

It isn’t until Jesus calls out her name, with an authority that could only come from intimate knowledge, that she recognizes him as her teacher. But everything she knows about him is about to change.

Jesus is so much more than a teacher. “Don’t hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

If I had come through some really traumatic experience that upset and grieved the persons who loved me and counted on me, I’d want to embrace them and tell them, “Look, I’m fine. Go home and rest. Everything is going to be OK.” Read more »