The Resurrection Story

Week Fourteen Summary

Sunday
Resurrection reveals that love is stronger than death. 
—Richard Rohr

Monday
God’s resurrecting movement has begun, and it sweeps everyone and everything up within it.—Mark Longhurst

Tuesday
Easter joy is the grace of being able to say: This is hard. I am still waiting. And God is still good.
—Kate Bowler

Wednesday
How do we understand God-in-flesh, broken and vulnerable, and yet also resurrected and triumphant? How do we, like doubting Thomas, make meaning of Jesus with his still visible wounds?
—Yolanda Pierce

Thursday
Believing in the resurrection can and should transform not only how we view the world, but how we live in it. We should become people in whom others can see new life.
—Paula Gooder

Friday
Love is all that remains. Love and life are finally the same thing, and we know that for ourselves once we have walked through death.
—Richard Rohr


Week Fourteen Practice
Resurrection: A Nonviolent Commission

Peace activist Father John Dear finds encouragement for living a nonviolent life in Jesus’s words to his disciples after his resurrection:

When he rose from the dead and appeared to his awe-struck disciples on that Easter Sunday night, [Jesus] told them repeatedly, “Peace be with you.”

He showed them his wounds, and repeated his greeting, “Peace be with you.” In that resurrection moment, he offered a peace that is not of this world. It is the peace that comes about through total surrender, nonviolence, non-retaliation, and unconditional, universal love.

If, like the nonviolent Jesus, we choose not to respond to violence with further violence, if we dare respond with love, surrender ourselves to God, and practice creative nonviolence, then, come what may, we will know a new kind of peace.

Life is short. We have only so many years left. Even if we eat right, lose weight, exercise daily, and take care of ourselves, our time on earth is limited.

What do we want to do with the time that is given us? How can we get beyond ourselves and help relieve suffering and disarm the world? If we surrender our hearts, wills, and lives to the living God of Peace, I believe we will be given the resurrection gift of peace, and become instruments of God’s peace and universal love.

Resurrection means having nothing to do with death, having not a trace of violence within us. When we live in the peaceful spirit of resurrection, we find ourselves practicing the boundless love and gentleness modeled for us in the nonviolent Jesus, who came to reconcile humanity to God, which is the ultimate act of peacemaking.

This resurrection peace is ours for the asking if we dare choose it and surrender.

If we dare surrender to the God of Universal Love and Peace right now, then we can go forth into the world of violence and war, without fear, worry, anxiety, or anger, and be transforming agents of loving nonviolence like Gandhi and Dr. King, and know, with the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, that “all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.”