Eastertide and an Expanding Christ If Silent Saturday belongs to those grieving the death of the only Jesus they have ever known, Eastertide (the fifty days following Easter) belongs to those who are open to experiencing Jesus differently than they ever have....
The most significant affirmation of women in the New Testament may well be found in the tradition made prominent in all four Gospels that women were the ones to find the tomb of Jesus empty; that according to Mark and Luke the announcement of Jesus’ resurrection was...
Worship dare not be glib or superficial, ought not to dispense false assurances or manipulate emotions. Instead, genuine worship always offers the true hope of the Gospel—neither entertainment nor escapism, neither diversion nor another sort of consumerism, but the...
Let us not mock God with metaphor,analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:let us walk through the door.The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,not a stone in a story,but the vast rock...
And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense...
…because of the narrative we know best,we discover that in the rock where you had nestled us,You have blown the rock open from the inside.You have rolled the stone away,You have surged out of a tomb-like womb, a womb-like tomb,And are back surging in the world, to...
The event of the resurrection, the empty tomb, and the risen Lord breaks every mold that would imprison God in the rationalism of a fallen world. But it is the starting point for a new kind of rationality, for the possibility of living hopefully in a world without...
Sometimes the course of one’s entire life is determined by a solitary incident—some kind of defining moment that changes everything. Mary’s decision to anoint Jesus’ body for burial on the third day after his death was just such a moment. When she arrived, she found...
The outcome of Jesus’ arrest and trial was that brute force killed him in what appeared to be a triumph for the powers of evil. Yet that triumph of evil was limited and momentary. As the Gospels recount the story, three days later Mary Magdalene and other women, and...