Thursday at Volmoed – Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter
I am intrigued by the resonances I find between two of the readings our Sunday lectionary invites us to consider this morning. Both the passage from Acts and that from the Gospel of John tell us stories of significant encounters with Jesus by men who would later have an important role in establishing the early Church.
In Acts, Saul who would become the apostle Paul is initially set on persecuting followers of Jesus, and goes to considerable lengths in his determination to do so. In John’s Gospel, the apostle Peter is floundering about, seemingly at a loss as to what to do after his denial of Jesus before the crucifixion. Both Saul and Peter are with others when Jesus meets them, but Jesus seems to be confronting each of them individually, as if those with them fade into the background for the moment.
Both encounters have extraordinary aspects, a light from heaven in one, a strange catch of fish in the other. I’m not sure what to make of these aspects, but I suspect they might somehow find echoes in our own lives of extraordinary experiences we perhaps have had of God, experiences that are difficult for us to put into words without seeming to diminish their significance for ourselves, a significance that is no less real for being usually less dramatic.
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