The Excitement Of The Witnesses Of The Risen Christ Series

30 August 2010

Monday of 22nd week in Course

You Will Be My Witnesses

When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,

It was the power of the Resurrection of Jesus. St Paul had tried in Athens to meet the philosophers on their own ground. But these were Greek philosophers who considered the mind to be the highest existence, and the body to be a weak and transitory thing–almost an illusion & certainly a hindrance. When Paul began to preach about Jesus being truly raised from the dead, they lost all interest.

But the risen Christ stirred a flame in His disciples. “I have seen the Lord,” Mary Magdalene reported. “Christ has risen and appeared to Peter,” was another message. The bane of our existence is the certainty of death. For ancient man, that meant either total extinction or a sad existence in a shadowy underworld. But the Christian proclamation is truly exciting. If we die with Christ in baptism, and live each day with and in the power of the resurrection, then we can look forward in hope to a like resurrection, a new and everlasting life with no tears and pain, only the ineffable joy of face-to-face communication with the Lord of the universe. Such joy cannot be imagined in this life.

As the Archbishop wrote, “it is [high] time for us to reclaim the excitement and joy of those first disciples, and to tell the world that we have found the One for whom we have all been searching.”