opened

Thursday April 4th, Luke 24:  1 On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.  OK, mission is over, Jesus is gone and now is it time to get back to work and on with life?  Preparing the body was an act of love and caring, but also an act of bringing to a conclusion, the final chapter the mission and ministry of Jesus.  The only trouble was that it was not so final, the mission and ministry does not just continue, it starts anew, only this time in us.  We tend to see and hear only what we expect to see and hear.  All those predictions and preparations went right over the disciple’s heads.  They go over our heads also.  We expect to see a world in trouble, we expect there to be war and food shortages in parts of the world, we expect to live in peace on this side of the ocean, which is why 9/11 hit us so hard, we expect the Mideast to be a place of violence and therefore feel the way to deal with it is to provide more military hardware.  However, arms sales have more to do with profits than prophets.  We expect certain things to continue and that is what we see and hear and perpetrate.  God calls us to a new vision, a new reality.  God calls us to a vision where Jerusalem will be a delight and its people a joy, a vision where the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, a vision where we as the children of God accept people from every nation who fear God and do what is right, a vision where the Christ can be raised and call us all to a new life and in it a new vision for the world.  God calls us to open our souls to God’s vision for the world and to start to live it now.  All at once our eyes are opened, Suddenly we see, In the bread and wine and water Christ for you and me.