The Rising

Gospel: Matthew 28: 1-10

The resurrection of Jesus is the raising up of all humanity to provide a new hope and new possibilities for all.  Patterns of sin and destructive habits can be overcome; new opportunities that lift people out of misery and poverty can be imagined and put into effect; old attitudes of exclusion and discrimination that keep people down can be set aside; the swords of war can be beaten into plowshares.  

This new possibility is manifest throughout the Gospels through the special role given to women.  It is women at the beginning of the Gospel who are entrusted with the new life of Jesus.  It is the Samaritan woman who is the first to evangelize an entire town to belief in Jesus.  It is the woman caught in adultery who stands in for all of humanity as one condemned but spared death by the action of Jesus.  And today it is women who are first to experience and believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the first commissioned to carry the message of the resurrection to others, the first to be rejected by an unbelieving group of men.  

Our ministry to the world must raise up all humanity, and this ministry is one to which all must participate and take on full ownership.  In every time and place the resurrection of Jesus calls us to new possibility, to new and greater freedom, a new creation of the world to something more authentically human and truly divine.  This is what we celebrate today.