Acts 10:34 – 43 / Psalm 118:1 – 2, 14 – 24 / I Corinthians 15:19 – 26 / John 20:1 – 18
This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania
by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, April 17, 2022.
“NEW BEGINNINGS”
(Homily text: John 20:1 – 18)
In my former Diocese, I was, for a time, the Spiritual Director for the Middle School-aged young people’s weekend retreat, which was known as “New Beginnings”. The concept of these weekend gatherings was to enable these young people to see God’s guiding hand and presence in their lives at a time when they are undergoing significant change. So, for example, one of the songs we sang with them was entitled “God Don’t Make No Junk”. (Yes, I know, the title is terrible English…but the song, I think, made a good impression on these young people.)
The
Easter event is all about “new beginnings”. Jesus’ rising from the tomb on
Easter Sunday morning demonstrates God’s power to create and to recreate, a new
beginning.
For
the stratified world that existed 2,000 years ago, that message was a radical
one, for both within the Judaism of the time and also in the Greco-Roman world
of the first century, the message that God could, and would (with a person’s
permission), create a new, brighter and more meaningful life was culture-changing,
a direct challenge to the expectations of people everywhere.
How
did this challenge work itself out in the Church?
As
the Good News (Gospel) of the work of Jesus Christ went out into the world, the
Church would offer a radical welcome to any and all persons. So, for example,
when the Church gathered for worship, noble men and women would sit next to
slaves, and they would call each other “brother” and “sister”. The
sensibilities of the time in that pagan world dictated that a person should
expect to stay where they found themselves…if a noble person, that meant
protecting the prerogatives and the perks that went with noble status. For
slaves, it meant a life of servitude, one without choices and without hope for
a better tomorrow. For many in that society and culture, both for slaves, and,
as well, for the working classes, life lacked meaning and purpose. So for many,
the attitude seemed to be that purpose in life was to have as much fun as one
could manage to indulge in.
Within
the Judaism of the time, expectations were also challenged. For commonly-held
attitudes dictated that a sick person was to be avoided, in part to avoid
ritual contamination that would make a person unable to enter the Temple’s
precincts in order to fulfill the requirements of the Law of Moses. But also,
the attitude was that if a person was sickly, or was poor, their condition and
their predicament was directly due to some sinful condition they, themselves,
had brought about.
Into
this situation, our Lord comes, offering three things: 1. A radical welcome to
all persons; 2. Healing and wholeness of life; and 3. Amendment of life, a new
beginning.
Everything
we know about our Lord’s earthly ministry centers around His deep and abiding
concern for, and value of, each and every person. Secondary aspects of a
person’s identity, such as their status within society, or the status of their
health, or their ethnicity, or their racial background, or their membership in
a group or tribe, meant nothing to our Lord. What was important was that each
individual is God’s own, intentional creation, a human being who is deeply
loved by God, a human being with whom God desires to have an intimate,
powerful, life-changing and abiding relationship.
In
other words, what God offers through Jesus Christ is nothing less than a new
beginning: A new, more meaningful, purposeful, life.
Such
a new beginning means that, no matter where our life’s journey has taken us
until now, God offers us a new beginning. We aren’t stuck or consigned to a
tomorrow with little or no hope. God’s gift, God’s offer, is freely offered.
But we have to accept it. Once we do, then we must expect changes, for God
never leaves us where He finds us. That, too, is part of God’s new beginning,
offered to us.
Thanks
be to God!
AMEN.
