The Second Sunday of Easter – B – April 7 2024
Christ is risen, alleluia! Now what? If our Lenten observance was more than just an annual effort to become better people, how are we living radically different lives because Jesus was raised from the dead?
In the Acts of the Apostles, we witness the life-changing difference Jesus’s death and resurrection made for the first Christian community. They no longer clung to things they thought would bring them security—possessions, wealth, status, proof. When they received Jesus’s blessing of peace from his own breath, saw the nail marks with their own eyes, and touched his wounds with their own hands, everything changed.
Because of us and how we commit ourselves to live together of one heart and mind in Jesus, others may also come to believe.
Now, their mouths would carry Christ’s message of mercy to the ends of the earth. Their eyes would see one another anew. Their hands would heal and forgive, and they would be believed because they were “of one heart and mind.” Scripture scholar Matt Skinner calls their new way of living a “stunning display not of mutual concern but of mutual identity—an identity formed in Christ and his new life” (workingpreacher.com).
Because of that community who committed their lives to one another in Christ, here we are. And because of us and how we commit ourselves to live together of one heart and mind in Jesus, others may also come to believe. For we belong to one another because all belong to Christ.
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