This Sunday’s readings: John 20:1-10

Reflections

For me the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the present risen-ness of Jesus Christ.
~ Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

What we have at the moment isn’t as the old liturgies used to say, ‘The sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,’ but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end. … left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there’s nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present…is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.
~ N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Let us consider this settled, that no one has made progress in the school of Christ who does not joyfully await the day of death and final resurrection.
~ John Calvin, 1509-1564, French Theologian, Reformer

Christians, at their best, are the fools who dare believe in God’s power to call dead things to life.
~ Esau MacCaulley, professor, author, and op ed for the New York Times

This Sunday’s readings: John 20:10-29

Reflections

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone but in every leaf of springtime.
~ Martin Luther, German Theologian, Reformer

Let us consider this settled, that no one has made progress in the school of Christ who does not joyfully await the day of death and final resurrection.
~ John Calvin, 1509-1564, French Theologian, Reformer

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.
~ N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

For me the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the present risenness of Jesus Christ.
~ Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.
~ Charles Colson, 1931-2012, Political Advisor, ‘hatchet-man’