A Weekly Reflection, Sunday, April 30, 2017
By: Kerri White
As I listened to the sermon last Sunday, I wondered in part how I would respond if I had been among those presented with the idea that Jesus had risen. Would I have needed to sink my fingers into His wounds? Or would His absence from the tomb been enough for me to know and believe? It was just another one of the many questions that I had confronted within a week that started so joyfully and ended so differently.
As I drove to church through the canopy of trees that crown Blair Road, I was partly comforted and partly haunted by the words of a mother who had just buried her thirty-year-old daughter. During the afternoon visitation, she told me that she had made the difficult decision to see her daughter’s body. That decision had in fact brought her more peace than pain. It was then that she knew, that she believed, that what God has promised was realized. Her daughter wasn’t there. She was with Him.
This mother knew like Mary Magdalene and she accepted that truth.
After church, I visited the gravesite of the beautiful young woman. Her path crossed my own for a brief but important time in my life years ago. I felt compelled to speak aloud on the one hand and to speak within on the other. Flowers adorned her resting place but I knew she wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen but I believed.
I think of heaven with that same certainty. Oh, the comfort it brings me! I don’t fear death. I don’t invite it in but I don’t fear it. I don’t have to see it to know with the same certainty that Thomas finally reaches once he accepts that the man before him is indeed the Lord. Today, it’s so easy to demand proof in pictures, video, or DNA evidence. However, I am going to try to live with greater faith, to be less Thomas, more Peter.
I know there will be times when I need to reach into the wounds but not today.