Fr. Don's Daily Reflection - April 27, 2024
Psalm 62: “In you alone is my soul at rest. My help comes from you.”
How often and how badly human life seems marred or limited by illness, accident, birth defects. To see the lame cured in the name of Jesus as in Acts 3:11-26 is to see a most concrete implication of the resurrection of Jesus. Resurrection is not some kind of fairy tale language for what more learned people know is really only the presence of the spirit of Jesus. No, resurrection as in “we believe in the resurrection of the body” has to do with a restoration of the whole person, not just the soul. In the resurrection accounts in the Gospels, Jesus shows the wounds in his body, asks the disciples to touch him, and eats with them. All this illustrates, as he says, that he is not a ghost.
Somehow this material world, including our often-hurting bodies, will be transformed, raised up, and we see that begun in the risen Christ. Easter tells us that God never meant for sickness and lameness and blindness and chronic impairment to have the last word. All is to be raised up in and through Christ. God loves all that has been made and wishes to bring about its healing and wholeness. By our union with the risen Christ the process is already begun; if not in the body, it often shows itself in the attitude we take in the face of bodily misery. Ultimately, we must expect everything in and from God's love, even total release from the tentacles of a virus.
Psalm 27: “I believe I shall see the Lord’s goodness / in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord; be strong; / be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord!”
