- Stourbridge Road
- Catshill
- Worcester
- Worcestershire
- B61 9LH
"No separation between matter and spirit"
Imagine you are one of the disciples. You’re still traumatised by witnessing the death of your beloved teacher. Imagine how startled and afraid you would feel if suddenly he appeared, you would think you were seeing a ghost, especially as your beliefs about life didn’t include much of an afterlife theology.
When they experience Jesus after his death in the flesh, an enormous teaching is happening here. This son of God was not dead, or a ghost but very much alive, and appearing as a full human being. The story goes on to show how he proved his physical reality by asking for something to eat.
This was a great shift in the disciples understanding about God, the divine that had always seemed so distant from ordinary life, and about sin and forgiveness.
Jesus’ fleshly appearance reveals that God is always in matter. It’s the only way we will ever in life, experience God, through the matter of our own and one another’s being. God is here and now among us. This is holy ground, the whole world is holy ground, the whole universe is holy ground.
There is no separation between God and creation This is the revelation of forgiveness, that sin, the belief that we are separate has come to an end. This is the message the disciples are charged with.
This is the Good news, that humanity is not a mistake, not an accident, but a manifestation of the divine on earth. This can only be truly experienced when humanity understands that it is loved and precious and is healed of its misunderstanding that it might be otherwise.
This is the restorative justice of God, a justice that sees the wounds we all carry and wants to heal them, by drawing them to Godself, taking on all the hurt that we might see who we really are. This is the God willing to suffer that we might grow and have life in all its fullness, a life that knows no separation from a Love greater than death.