Saturday in the Fourth Week of Easter (Year 2)
Acts 13:32—43
Luke 14:7—14
This sermon was originally preached by Br. Sean Glenn [then, ssje] on Saturday, May 4, 2022 at the Conventual Church of St. Mary & St. John, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In your days I am doing a work you will never believe, even if someone tells you.1
Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.2
Easter has always captivated my imagination—even in my days as an angry atheist, convinced that such miraculous events are of course impossible.
Yet, in this season of my life, marked as it is by bereavement, scarred by the awful and unanticipated absence of my late parents, Easter—with all its accompanying hope and joy—has been less a consolation and more a taunting insult, a vexation, a catalyst for all kinds of cynicism, doubt, and anger.
Of late, I have refused to be comforted, closing off the precincts of my heart to any touch of joy or hope. I have refused to be comforted, content only to bear my tears, anguish, and sense of injury. In your days I am doing a work you will never believe, even if someone tells you.
Yet God is merciful. As I prepared—reluctantly—to preach today, Jesus’ words to Philip came to my embittered heart over and over: if you have seen me, you have seen the Father. This reveals to me a mistake in my reading of Reality—my grave misunderstanding of the “terms” of life—and one of the ways even the Resurrection must be both consolation and challenge.
It is too easy to see the Resurrection in human terms—an event that reveals a god whose omnipotence is characterized by all the ways human beings conceive of omnipotence. A personality who is big and strong and powerful.
Yes, God is big and strong and powerful.
But not in the ways our hearts have been routinely formed to conceive of such attributes. For when we strive to be big and strong and powerful, we invariably strive for something that will ultimately destroy and injure and dominate.
This is one of the spiritual risks of Easter—to tear down our human conception of who God is along with the accompanying understanding of the ends for which God’s strength and power are oriented. For if we do not, we will not understand—we will not believe—the true, saving content of God’s revelation and gift in the Resurrection. We will not believe the work God is doing in our days, because we won’t have the eyes to see it. We will only have a heart stranded in the despond of dejection and bereavement.
If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.
May we take Jesus at his word. Look at Jesus, and there you will find God’s strength and power; a strength and power so unlike our own.
1 Acts 13:41
2 John 14:9