Saturday of the Second Week of Easter
A ham was baked and glazed; some asparagus roasted; a creamy sauce bubbled up among thinly sliced potatoes; colored eggs were hidden so as to be found. And, together with loved ones, a grand celebration of the resurrection was thoroughly enjoyed. Or something like that—depending on one’s Easter traditions (old or new). The point, of course, is that we go all out for Easter because it marks a moment beyond imagination—when Jesus broke into human history again and changed everything.
And then there’s the leftovers and the clean-up and the good-byes and the return to daily life, which can be a letdown. Bills are still due, maybe even overdue. Friends and family have been laid off by employers looking to cut costs. Groceries and other necessities seem to get more expensive by the day. Wars wage on.
Where, or where is Jesus in all of this?
I have struggled now and again throughout my life with this question. I remember as a teen wanting so badly to know Jesus. It seemed like just about everyone in my megachurch’s youth group already did. And they looked so happy and good and Christian. I felt like a fraud.
What I didn’t know then was that the idea that I had in my head of who Jesus is and how he makes himself known to us was super immature and ill-developed. I pretty much adopted that ubiquitous image of Jesus (the one in which he is fair skinned, with blond wavy hair, looking peaceful) that always hung on the wall of my Polish Catholic grandparents’ home in south Chicago.
Then, when I was a teenager in that megachurch youth group, I came to believe that Jesus would show up looking like that image. More than that, I had hopes he might visit me in my pink bedroom since that was where I earnestly prayed and read his words in red letters.
As I reported in a previous reflection, Jesus never visited me in my pink bedroom or anywhere else, so far as I could tell.
The story that comes to us today from John’s Gospel challenges all that in one simple, miraculous, and unimaginable act: Jesus walks on water. Simple conceptually. Impossible physically. And, so, the apostles are frightened. I would be too if I was sitting in a boat in the dark on a stormy night and saw some guy walking on water toward me!
— Susan Trollinger