Sunday 27th April – Family Service led by Anne Walton
Anne often comes up with something quirky to illustrate her theme of the day, and today it was ‘tis -an autobiography written by Frank Mccourt, a schoolteacher. To challenge the assumptions of his young students, he had recited a familiar nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty, and then asked his students to tell him what was going on. One had tried to explain it using biology and physics, “This egg falls off the wall and you know you can never put an egg back together again”. The other had said, “Where does it say in the rhyme that it was about an egg?”
Well, the answer to that question was that it didn’t. Humpty Dumpty was in actual fact, a rhyme about a mighty civil war cannon (at least if you believe the Colchester Tourist Board – there are other options, but not an egg!). Frank and Anne’s point was that we can be conditioned to see something in a particular case (blame the rhyme’s illustrations for Humpty Dumpty) rather than what was all around us. And Anne used the point about conditioning to introduce her Reflection on the day’s reading from John 20.
For many years she’d understood the story as being about casting away doubts and believing in Jesus’s physical resurrection. But on reflection she felt there was more going on in the story than just the literal words, and that we should look beyond our conditioning about resurrection and focus our attention on practicing resurrection.
Humanity had a very distinct tendency to use violence to settle disputes. And John 20 had been written in the midst of the colossal violence of the war between the Jews and the Roman Empire that had begun 20 years before Jesus’s crucifixion and had escalated in the 70 years that followed. It had been during those wars that the Roman Empire destroyed the temple, raised most of Jerusalem to the ground, and sent Jew and Gentile followers of Jesus into exile.
So John’s story had been written in the context of a deeply wounded community in order to provide Jesus’s followers with the much-needed hope for their own resurrection. His faithful disciples had been huddled together in a large room, fearful for their lives. Their beloved leader had been brutally executed, and they were terrified that they were going to be next. But something had happened which gave them the strength and the courage to burst forth from their own “tomb” and set about trying to change the world. Bumbling, terrified individuals who seemed always to be getting things wrong been changed into leaders who began a movement that spread throughout the empire within their own lifetimes, and then, based on the power of their witness, spread throughout the world.
So Anne wanted to follow Frank Mccourt’s lead in order to help us see what we needed to see today in the midst of all the violence that our world just seemed incapable of forsaking. We could never know exactly what happened 2,000 years ago but it transformed people hiding from endless violence into courageous followers of a way of being in the world which death could not destroy.
It was clear to Anne that it was the followers of Jesus who had been raised up by the image of resurrection to stand tall and proclaim boldly what they had learned from Jesus, and who got on with the business that had been begun by Jesus. Resurrection wasn’t about the physical resurrection of a corpse. It was about the wisdom and the courage to proclaim through our words and our actions, that Jesus continued to rise in us today. Death did not have the last word, because Jesus’s followers had been raised up to be His body.
Practicing resurrection for us began when we refused to let fears entomb us, when we gathered together to build communities of compassion that lived fully, loved extravagantly, and empowered people to become all that they were meant and created to be. So we should look at the wounds inflicted by violence today and practice resurrection by resisting violence and resisting injustice, so that Jesus’s reign of love could usher in the peace that we all so long for- that of abundant living for all.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 