Easter day is the beginning of our Easter season. A season which will last 50 days until Pentecost. During this time the readings will remind us of Jesus' appearances to those whom he loved, and even to those who didn’t believe!
The Jesus movement was finished on that first Easter day. It was no more because Jesus was dead and the disciples scattered, some back to Galilee, maybe back to their families' work of fishing. Some went to Emmaus with heavy hearts, grieving and thinking about the events in Jerusalem. We’re not sure what happened to the women who are so prominent in the story of the crucifixion, because their story isn’t told after the end of the Gospels. Later, perhaps the following year, perhaps some years later, the disciples gathered again at the Jewish festival of Pentecost, and reformed into a community that followed the ideals of the Jesus movement.
Our beliefs are formed by the story of the child born in the stable and the man crucified on a cross. We have managed to turn those stories into lowing cattle and cuddly adoring shepherds and a precept that somehow the indignity of a death on the cross pays for our personal shortcomings.
It's not like that at all. We must never allow women to give birth and children to grow up in a stable, let alone allow people to die at the merciless hands of powerful and corrupt leaders. We must speak out and do the right thing working for change.
We might not be able to prevent the death on the cross, but like Mary Magadalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome, the women waiting at a distance from the foot of the cross, we must be there and be seen to be there. Our presence might just be enough to jolt the persecutors back to humanity.
How we consider the other, what our actions are for the other, are the mark not only of our humanness, but also a mark of how we follow the faith that we profess.
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