Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
April 2018
Go to Galilee
[The angel] said to [the women at the tomb]: Do not be amazed! You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Behold the place where they laid him. But go and tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.” (Mark 16:6-7)
I went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land this
time of year three years ago. Since
then, I have experienced Holy Week services very differently, with graphic
mental images etched into my heart of the places where the events in the
stories took place. The grassy hills of
Galilee were covered with wildflowers.
“Go tell his disciples that he is
going ahead of you.” Now if this were
John’s Gospel, the sentence would end, “and there in heaven he will prepare a
place for you.” But Mark’s focus remains
on the here and now, on the reign of God Christ proclaimed breaking into the
here and now.
“He is going ahead of you to
Galilee, there you will see him just as he told you.”
Why Galilee? In Mark, both the men disciples and the women
have all followed Jesus from Galilee on his ministry and ended up with him in
Jerusalem. Galilee was the
backwater. It was the sticks. We see several times in the Mishna, the
earliest part of the Talmud, stories where it is clear what people thought of
Galilee, where people abuse each other with the term: Galili Shote’! “You Fool of a Galilean! You Galilean Idiot!”
We are all invited to go to
Galilee and meet once again with our beloved Jesus. The men who abandoned him, the women who ran
from the angel silent, all of us who have failed to take the hope and love of
Jesus into our hearts and reorder our lives and the world by them, all of
us. Note the angel is clear: “tell the disciples, even Peter”—who denied
three times—“Jesus is going before you.” All of us can meet the
resurrected Jesus. But we must be
willing to rethink everything from the start, and break all our habits and
assumptions, and reach out to the strange and condemned.
Go to Galilee: go to your roots, where you started out, and reconsider everything in light of this news.
Go to Galilee: go to the margins, the dregs of society. Go to the ghetto. Go to the other side of the tracks, where the
hicks and rednecks live. Go beyond the
bounds of polite, acceptable society. Go
to Galilee: go to the poor, the outcast,
the unclean, the unrighteous, the ignorant.
Go to Galilee, you foolish Galilean,
and the living Jesus will appear to you there. Jesus will appear to you there,
as he has promised you.
Jesus in Galilee was all about
crossing boundaries, expanding inclusion, serving those who others said
deserved no service: the oppressed, the
marginalized, the persecuted. Only by
going back to our roots and retracing not our steps, but his, his steps of
inclusive, wondrous love, can our eyes be opened and the mystery of the
resurrection be revealed to us.
He is not here. But go to Galilee, and he will go before you. And there you shall see him, just as he promised.
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
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