Last Sunday, the fourth week of Easter, the Church’s liturgy explored the life of the Risen Christ through the imagery of shepherding.  Through this image of shepherding the Gospel of John develops the inter-relationship between the life of Jesus and our own lives.  The image speaks of the particular bond by which we have both our identity and our direction.  It is through this bond, and through this bonding, that we experience the life of the Risen Christ.  The bonds that unite us therefore are not incidental to our Easter experience; they are one of the primary means by which we touch the life of the Risen Christ How does…

Over these Sundays of Easter, we are introduced to the great post- Resurrection accounts, the stories of the way in which the life of Jesus becomes manifest to the first disciples.  These stories, of course, cannot be read in the same way that we might read a modern newspaper account of something that happened yesterday.  The gospels are not written from a modern sensibility.  Rather, the stories are complex theological reflections, in story form, on what the Risen life of Jesus means, and how we experience the reality that Jesus lives.  Each of the stories, including the one we have heard today, is an invitation extended to us, to wonder anew, and more deeply,…

Last weekend we celebrated how the life of Jesus has burst forth, no longer constrained by the fetters of death.  And we suggested that at the heart of this experience lay a question. On the first day of the week the women come to the tomb looking for something.  And there in the empty tomb, where they do not find what they are looking for, a proclamation re-orients and transforms, not only their own search, but indeed the human search itself.  The question with which they are greeted is simply, “Why look among the dead for someone who is alive? Just as discipleship of Jesus begins with hearing a question, “What are you…

One of my favourite lines out of the Church Fathers writing nearly 2000 years ago is from the 3rd century Clement of Alexandria.  He wrote simply:  “Christ our Lord turns all our sunsets into dawns.” It is Christ our Lord who turns all our sunsets into dawns.  This day we proclaim that dead ends have given rise to new possibilities.  Where diminishment and decay might be expected, there a new invitation is always available.  A new possibility has dawned into the world.  The future is given to us as a pure gift.  And by how more powerful a way does the Christian Tradition express this than situating the Resurrection on the first day of the week at…

Through this season of Lent, we have been exploring the theme of Hope, the focus of our current Year of Jubilee. We have reflected on how hope arises from our needs, on how hope opens us to the future, how it is guaranteed by our faith in Christ Jesus and in his Resurrection, and how it is our Christian answer to the encounter of evil because it is a pronouncement that the evil is never the final word, that something bigger is at work. And now we come to the final reflection in our series: how each of us is called to become an agent of hope. Do I offer…

The German writer, Deitrich Bonheoffer gave us the distinction between what he called, on the one hand, ‘cheap grace’ and, on the other, ‘costly grace.’ Writing in Germany in the 1930s he lamented the way in which the Christian Churches had so accommodated themselves to the prevailing currents as to have lost their genuine sense of discipleship of the Risen Lord. And this could equally be a possibility in our own time in which we can be swayed by political forces that use the term Christian to describe their aspirations, but which, in their conduct, are in no way Christian. Of course, this is always a tendency for us. we…