The adventure of faith

 27 April 2025, Easter 2: Acts 5:27-32, Revelation 1:4-8 and John 20:19-end

Yesterday morning, Cardinal Giovani Battista Re (the Dean of the College of Cardinals) preached a homily which reflected on the way in which Pope Francis showed warmth and sensitivity in the face of today’s challenges. He shared our anxieties and our hopes, reminding us that the joyful heart of the gospel is God’s mercy. 

Such mercy which means God never tires of forgiving us, healing our wounds.   For Pope Francis, the church was to be a ‘home for all, a home with its doors always open’.  

How do we get to that place? How do we get to a  place of healing and openness, of mercy and joy? For Pope Francis, Thomas is our guide.

St Thomas - stock image

Three years ago, in a short address, he said that Thomas ‘represents all of us’ because he was not present the first time the risen Lord Jesus appeared to the apostles. 

He is one who shares our struggles. How do we believe without having seen him? How do we know Christ’s presence and love without having touched him? 

Thomas shares our reasoning, doubts and questions; our longing for relationship with the risen Lord. Thankfully, Pope Francis reminds us that God is not looking for perfect Christians!

Today’s gospel allows us to be honest about wounds and questions. It begins with the reminder that Jesus’ risen body is still wounded. The wounds witness to pain and to loss, to the traumas inflicted on mind and body; to the traces of relational hurt and suffering. 

Wounds do not heal instantly. They become scars over time - we see the outer transformation. The deep tissue healing - that takes longer. The knitting together of fibres and growth of new cells is sometimes felt, always unseen. 

The medical term for such deep healing is ‘granulation’. A term my late supervisor picked up during his treatment for cancer - and creatively re-deployed to describe the time and patience needed for healing to occur. 

Healing of past hurts or regrets; of challenging relationships. Healing in how we live differently in relation to grief or chronic illness. Healing in our communities - the life long work of bridge building. 

In Jesus we see the wounded God whose wounds are healing ours. 

He is present with us - in the tender heart of things; the places where we still wince at the touch. This is real presence in the wounds, the pain; presence in the granular healing, in the deep tissues of our fear and confusion, in our hurt, yes; but also in the experience of mercy, in the depths where joy might begin to emerge; in the depths of our lungs as peace is exhaled. 

We are embodied people. So was our Jesus in his life, death and resurrection. 

Our bodies tell something of our stories: scars of childhood and of surgery; of first loves and lasting griefs; of challenges faced and moments of happiness; successes, failures and everything in-between. 

Jesus’ body tells a story too: the one who was and is and is to come dwelt with us; a story of solidarity and encounter; of love and mercy; of forgiveness and peace; of wounds that heal. 

If God does not seek perfect Christians but wounded, healing ones then Pope Francis is right. Thomas stands for us.

He says: 'the adventure of faith, as for Thomas, consists of lights and shadows. Otherwise, what kind of faith would that be? It knows times of comfort, zeal and enthusiasm, but also of weariness, confusion, doubt and darkness.’

He highlights the way Thomas teaches us that we should not fear the moment of crisis: they are part of the story. 

The crisis he experienced is not hard for us to imagine. We live with FOMO - the fear of missing out. Thomas may have felt that acutely - his closest friends had encountered the real presence and peace of their risen friend and Lord. 

He wasn’t there. It wasn’t enough for him to have their account of what happened - however detailed, emotional and vivid. If you weren’t there as the applause erupts or as an infant takes a first breath; if you weren’t there for that shared joke or that parting word, we do feel as if we have missed out. 

It’s not something to write off as weakness or stubbornness or a lack of trust. 

It is an expression of our yearning for encounter; to hope in the face of uncertainty.

If Thomas stands for all of us, we can take courage from him - from his witness - as one who recognised his Lord in woundedness. As one whose own wounds were healed by a wounded Lord.

Thomas knew his need. He was not ashamed to express it - his crisis of missing out was part of his journey.  Such moments, as Pope Francis put it, ‘rekindle the need for God and thus enable us to return to the Lord, to touch his wounds, to experience his love anew as if it were the first time.’

Our need exposes our humility. It strips us of our pride. 

That week of waiting must have felt very long for Thomas. Waiting without knowing if or when he would encounter Jesus. 

Did he think his fellow disciples were suffering from grief-induced delusion? Did he find hope in the murmurings of peace? 

Jesus knows these moments of crisis and vulnerability. And as the gospel reminds us he does come back. Pope Francis says ‘he always comes back: When doors are closed, he comes back; when we are in doubt, he comes back; when, like Thomas, we need to encounter him and to touch him up close, he comes back.’

And this moment of return is the moment of Thomas’s recalling. He went - legend has it to Kerala - he witnessed to others of the one who was his wounded and risen Lord. 

Perhaps, with a pastoral tenderness born of his experience, he was able to speak peace to others; to speak of mercy and joy. Perhaps breathing those words - softly, urgently - ‘blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.’

Perhaps he is the one who not only represents us, but bears witness to us, so that we can live out the good news of resurrection life. 

Perhaps it is in this place of woundedness that healing happens: at a granular level life begins, faith blossoms; a new future in community is made possible. 

As David Ford puts it: ‘Here the breathing in of life is inseparable from the words of peace, sending, receiving and forgiveness.’

When John writes of forgiveness and what is retained, he is reminding us of Jesus’ promise to hold us fast. In all our woundedness and capacity to wound others, we are held fast. Jesus holds on to us in that - loving as God desires us. Forgiveness is tied to such an embrace. 

Peter went on to speak of what it is to bear witness to the resurrection and forgiveness, to repentance and obedience. As part of a fragile and fallible community of friends, we are invited to love and serve - breathing in and breathing out the Spirit of peace. 

Revelation reminds us that we are loved and set free from sin. We are made a kingdom - a people of solidarity and encounter, serving God and our neighbours, drawing the margins into the centre of our life.

Thomas is the one who asks the awkward questions - who stands for us in seeking faith and love, worship and embrace.  As we break bread together, we relearn  mercy which means God never tires of forgiving us, healing our wounds.   May we embody those gifts in the local, in the unseen and granular, so that this church might be: a ‘home for all, a home with its doors always open’.  

© Julie Gittoes 2025

Love's risen body

 Easter Day - 20 April 2025: Isaiah 65:17-end, Acts 10:34-43 and John 20:1-18

Not darkness but twilight

In which even the best

of minds must make its way

now. And slowly the questions

occur, vague but formidable

for all that…

The opening of R. S. Thomas’s poem “The Answer” draws us into where we find ourselves this morning. 

We like the first witnesses to the resurrection out caught in the half-light. Easter begins in the early morning; in the not-yet light darkness of dawn. 

Questions occur, vague but formidable. Has the stone moved, or is it a trick of the light? Are those shadows or grave clothes? Can I trust what my eyes see, the sense my mind makes? Is that the gardener?  

Easter begins  here: not darkness but twilight.

Mary Magdalene Br Robert Lentz

R. S. Thomas is unafraid to write about problems and how we answer them, kneeling, praying; waiting for the stone to roll from our minds.. He takes us to the point of dying, and to the piled graveclothes of ‘love’s risen body’. 

He invites us to trust in the midst of struggle, as the disciples did. Whether they ran or hesitated, wept or rejoiced, they had to allow their imaginations to come to terms with something new. 

As light breaks in at dawn, their minds and emotions respond to slivers of hope; of life. That looks different for each of them.

Peter hears the rumour and runs towards the tomb. He’s outran by his friend, the Beloved Disciple, the one who trusts and senses love’s risen body. 

Mary arrives first and flees - the questions are too formidable. But she returns, hearing love speak and touch her heart.

Resurrection breaks-in not in darkness but twilight; it meets them where they are as a stone rolls from their minds, questions folded to oneside; love’s risen body taking up space not in an empty tomb but in and around them. 

They all come to the tomb as they are - with all their fears and hopes, questions and emotions.  They give us permission to approach the empty tomb as we are too - whatever our experience of loss or the hope we need to face tomorrow; whatever our struggles and disappointments;  whatever baggage weighs us down or new life that sets us free.

Today we are invited to linger in the garden, alone and in the company of friends. We listen as our names are spoken in tenderness; as the seed of this story settles  in our hearts.  Here we begin to notice what love’s risen body might mean for us, in our lives. 

Mary was the first to encounter the risen Jesus - and the first to speak of that experience. She waits, kneels, weeps and questions in this sacred time at the point of death, and the possibility of life beyond it. 

She remains in twilight: feeling the fullness of her bewilderment and pain. She remains before the emptiness, giving herself over to agony of tears and heartbreak. She remains in the garden, searching for answers; bearing witness to what feels unbearable. 

Her faithful love and openness, her honesty and questioning leads her to a moment of clarity.  As the theologian David Ford puts it: "Mary had been looking for a dead ‘what’; she is questioned and surprised by a living ‘who’.”

As she hears her name, she recognises her teacher.  She reaches out to that hope and healing; but rather than holding on to him, she is promised something more. 

Her letting go also signals that Jesus, love’s risen body, can now relate to all people, places and times. Mary also receives a new purpose within a new network of friends - that of being a witness, of sharing her testimony. 

She is the first to say: “I have seen the Lord”. 

Peter and the Beloved Disciple had confronted the emptiness of the tomb, but neither of them waited.  Their responses speak to our feelings and experiences too.

Peter rushes headlong into the tomb; but he cannot stay in that empty, desolate and painful place. He runs with his mind full not only of doubts and questions, but also the weight of his own failure and denials. 

His emotional landscape has been reshaped by exhaustion, shame and fear. He cannot risk waiting. He abandons the garden for a room with locked doors. 

But it’s there that the stone rolls from his mind. It’s there, perhaps, that he heard Mary’s cry of joy; it’s there'll he hears Jesus’s words of peace. 

In his haste, his retreat and defences, the good news of resurrection finds him. He can run, but new life waits. Love’s risen body claims him as his own, forgives and restores him. 

What of the Beloved Disciple? He too runs, but he hesitates. When he enters the tomb he sees beyond the emptiness and believes. He embraces what he sees - his heart and mind remain open for faith to be renewed in him; for trust to deepen. 

Believing because of the empty tomb and folded graveclothes is for him the beginning of a new understanding. It is his imagination and experience that shapes the Gospel that bears his name, John. 

He is the one who brings Jesus’ mother Mary into his own home; he is the one who invites successive generations into the space of the story he tells; deepened by images of light and life, of truth and a new commandment of love. 

He invites us into this journey too. He gives us permission to believe and to trust - and yet to allow space for understanding to grow. He waits with us in death’s reality and its defeat. He invites us to trust that all will be made new, to persevere when justice and mercy seem fragile. 

Resurrection is as much a process as an event; it’s a  promise made at the graveside, just as twilight promises a new day.

It is the promise of what we long for: from Ukraine to Gaza, Sudan to Jerusalem, in every place where tears are shed. It is the promise of homes to inhabit and grapes to be harvested; it is the promise of life from infancy to old age, with dignity, joy and delight. It is the promise of blessing - and an end to hurt and destruction. 

It is the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, as Isaiah puts it. 

That can feel a long way off. 

In Acts we hear Peter preaching in a world not so different from ours: where the power of empires, with power and wealth, seek to possess, control and dehumanise; where culture wars value some bodies and lives less than others; where rights are reduced to a zero sum game; where scarcity and excess divide peoples and communities; where the world itself cries out for release.

Peter begins with words that speak of divine acceptance; the dying and rising of Jesus presses us further into this way of life, an ethic of love.

As Willie Jennings puts it: ‘The Jesus of history becomes the defining moment of all history. Here is the deliverance of the world and its restoration toward health and life… The unbelievable has happened: Jesus was killed and rose from the dead. Death has been overcome in and through him. Yet this was no singular miracle but rather the great announcement of the new order - Jesus is the judge of the living and the dead. He is the Lord of all.’

This cosmic hope is also personal and particular: Peter preaches the forgiveness he has known. As he speaks, the Spirit moves, inviting us to love those who are different to us. In Christ, God brings loving judgement to  us and a wayworld world - calling us to embody love where we find ourselves; to announce in the way we live  what Jennings calls ‘God's desire for joining and communion’.

Such new life cannot be stopped, though many try to place a limit on the scope of love. We will rise.  We glimpse it now through tears; through communion. We glimpse it as many  bodies - beautiful, aging, bruised and tender - made one. Every grief and every hope, every doubt and every joy is held within love’s risen body as Thomas ends his poem, “The Answer”:

There have been times

when, after long on my knees

in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled

from my mind, and I have looked

in and seen the old questions lie

folded and in a place

by themselves, like the piled

graveclothes of love’s risen body.

©️ Julie Gittoes 2025

Love rising

 Easter Day 2023: Acts 10:34-43 and John 20:1-18

Mary Magdalene in the Garden by Sieger Koder

It was dark.

Exhausted. Unable to sleep.

Mary came to the tomb, alone. 

With oil? Or just to be there? At the grave. 

Close to love’s bruised, buried body. 

But something was disturbed and disturbing. 

The stone had been removed. 

It was no place to be alone. At twilight. 

She ran. Ran to beloved friends.

Questions troubled from her lips.

Listening. And then.

Peter and the other disciple ran.

One would outrun the other - first in this race.

He looked. Saw. Paused. 

At the threshold of what had been entombed. 

Peter went in and saw.

The other would follow him, see and believe.

But they went away, returned home.

And she? She stood weeping. Outside. 

She had to bend, twist her body, to look in. 

To gaze from twilight into darkness.

Emptiness announced an absence.

Just as tears make eyelids swell, announcing grief.

Grief in a world made strange.

Mind racing. Thinking the worst.

It was dawn.

Have we not felt it?

The grief and insomnia; the questions and tears.

Wanting to hold on. Waiting at grave sides.

Waiting in silence. Wanting answers.

The need to run to friends; the times we’ve walked alone.

The burning eyes; and racing mind. Until twilight turns to dawn.

For Mary, recognition dawns as dawn breaks.

She senses a real presence.

Her question repeats itself, dissolves in the air, resolves itself in her body language.

Love rises, breathes, speaks.

Her name. Her Teacher.

Her heart swells, beating a little faster. 

It’s not that it’s over; that it’s solved; that it’s unproblematic, uncomplicated, undone.

The pain, confusion, death and grief were real: but maybe, just maybe, their vice-like grip has softened.

Replaced by life.

Now the green-blade riseth, from the buried grain.

Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;

Love lives, that with the dead has been:

Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Love lives. 

Not only as the sleeping, quickening grain, but as the gardener.

The one whose hands are soiled with the earthiness of our hearts.

Even when they are wintry, grieving or in pain.

The one who brings us life when we can’t see it; who loves when we can’t accept it.

Or when there’s a risk to be taken, a change to be made.

The one who is with us when there are more questions than answers.

There when we rise, stumble or fall; when we stand alone, or together.

The one who feeds us with bread which earth has given and human hands have made.

Becoming for us the bread of life. 

Mary could not hold on to her Teacher, Lord and Friend.

Letting go allows her to tell her story of his story of good news.

A story that tells us that God in Christ does not leave us.

But rather lets go in order to relate to all peoples across time and space.

Letting go leads her deeper into a new community.

One that is truth seeking, sense making, peace building, bread breaking.

One that shares God’s desire for joining, forgiving, blessing.

In that way, Mary, along with Peter and the Beloved Disciple, love expands until it reaches beyond our human limits.

Until it echoes the pulse of God’s own life.

Each one of them spoke of this hope.

Hope that sees the world as God does: with no partiality but with judgement and mercy.

Seeing God’s light and life reflected in a band of colour: violets and oranges, blues and reds.

Those particular sites of love.

Hope that reaches goes beyond the grave.

We claim that promise in the face of tears and questions.

Love is come again. 

Not as a one-off miracle.

But as the beginning of a new order.

Death has been overcome; therefore all things are being made new.

This is the Spirit’s work. We share in it.

We persist and protest; dream and disrupt; nurse and nurture; create and care.

And sometimes we stand at the tomb ourselves.

And maybe find our questions, tears, losses and hurts folded with the clothes left behind by love’s risen body.

And then, maybe, rather than run, we stay; let go and live. 

Live so that love can rise in us - and show that God’s loving mercy is for others too.

© Julie Gittoes 2023

A matter of life and (beyond) death

3rd Sunday before Advent: Job 19: 23-27a, 1 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-end and Luke 20: 27-38

In an interview last month, Bill Nighy said: “I think about death 35 times a day”; he continues “I know it’s gonna happen, but I think that maybe at the last minute somebody might make an exception”

It's an apt and fascinating remark given his latest film called Living in which he plays Mr Williams, a widowed civil servant in post-war County Hall who’s been given 6 months to live. At that moment he realises that he’s not been living fully, but literally shuffling paper, deferring decisions, sticking to his routine.

Film still

When Mr Williams reflects on what he’d say when he’s called to meet his maker, he expresses the mortal prognosis we all share. He decides to get something done; to express gratitude and kindness; to find space for wonder, playfulness and song; to leave a modest legacy of social justice. 

It’s an extraordinary and exquisite performance: every movement understated; every gesture refined; every word a whisper; every emotion restrained. It’s increasingly joyous - shot through with humanity and hope. 

If you can see it, do; it might well be a cinematic parallel to the question in today’s Gospel. The Sadducees were asking a question about what happens when we are called to meet our maker; but doing so from the starting point of their own scepticism. 

They turn talk of life after death into an absurdist riddle exaggerating the human concerns of this life: marriage and family life, death and childlessness, law and legacy.  

Jesus does not respond on their terms. Resurrection cannot be grasped in earthly terms; their imagination is limited and makes God too small. They approach the question through hypotheticals rather than faith. 

As one commentator puts it: “To speak of God as a living God, the Bible means not merely that God is real or alive, but that God, as the beginning of Genesis makes clear, is the very source of life. Therefore, God is just as capable of raising people from the dead as of giving life.’  

This divine life is different from human life; resurrection life is different from lives lived from birth to death. Of course we have questions but we can’t resolve them in simply human terms. Resurrection takes us beyond the logics of bio-medical and physical realities; instead Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, the story of Easter, invites us to stretch our imaginations.

Image: Empty Tomb - Mike Torevell

Part of what  Jesus’ response to the Sadducees reveals is that resurrection speaks of liberation and the reversal of human injustice. Our scriptures place widows within the realm of God’s preferential option for the most vulnerable; yet here she is treated like chattel, a possible means of continuing the family line.  Even her grief and loss is, in this instance, amplified and abstracted for the sake of debate.

For those longing for all those longing for consolation and peace, resurrection is a radical hope. Given our human experience of anxiety, loneliness, disappointment; those times when love is met with unkindness or control; and also the inevitability of our mortal prognosis,  then this hope is a matter of life and death, as well as life beyond death.

For Jesus, and in the letters, we see marriage as an earthly institution for the good of human beings - goods of faithfulness, mutual comfort and not just family life but the building up of community through generosity and compassion. It is a good commended alongside being single - through choice, circumstance and calling - as we seek to live in love of God and neighbour.

Resurrection is the entering into an eternal love - where there is no more suffering, crying, pain or death. Being caught up in such a depth of love can bring comfort; whilst here and now we treasure our earthy ways of loving. Loves which are fragile and tender, imperfect and evolving; the love of friends and siblings, parents and spouses.

In Jesus, we see love divine made perfect in our human weakness. He takes up his cross, bears the weight of our capacity to wound and be wounded. He takes all that separates us from God and others to his final breath. Like a seed, his life is buried in the ground, dying to bring forth new and abundant  life.

In him, love has the final word; in him all things are restored to Godself. Love’s redeeming work is done - where thy victory, o grave?

Jesus invites us to walk this way. To take up the cross in this life - and follow the way of new life. There we find love in community and intimacy beyond any human loving.  In Thessalonians we hear of several dimensions of this life.

There is the hope of being gathered together in this universal, peaceable, consoling love. Hard though it is to conceive, poets such as John Donne have given us a vision of life beyond darkness, dazzling, silence and noise of one equal light, one equal music.

There is also the lived reality of life on earth shaped by this heavenly hope: we are assured that God loves us in Christ Jesus; we are assured of salvation, the promise of healing and making whole; we are also assured of the Spirit being at work in us. So we hold onto eternal comfort, this good hope; but we also commit to the work of comforting the hearts of others, of strengthening them in what we say or do.

In Living Mr Williams finds his own way of putting into practice this purpose. Around him, we see others wanting to order their own lives - for the good of community or for self-interest, the blossoming of love or the shuffling of papers, expressing gratitude and sharing food.

As we gather to celebrate this Eucharist, we come in gratitude to share heavenly food in earthly bread. We eat for the laying aside of self-interest and the good of community. Here we pray that love blossoms making strangers, friends. Here there is sacrifice and joy, mystery, wonder and hope. Here our grief, pain and betrayals are transformed as we become restored penitants. 

Here we are recalled to serve a Kingdom where no-one belongs to another; but where all are beloved of God. Here in a way, the patriarchy of the Sadducees' trick question dies. Before we eat together, we pray ‘thy kingdom come’. We pray that the radical hope of the gospel might make us free to live for others in love. 

We serve the God of the living. The great I AM who was and is and is to come. The one who makes all things new and whole and alive. The one who invites us to repent and grow and flourish.  In the power of the life-giving Spirit, we serve a living and loving God who came near to us in Christ Jesus.

Like Bill Nighy we know that death is going to happen; but we trust in a rather more radical exception than mere continuation; the exception is life eternal offered through God’s merciful and loving judgement. So we can declare, like Job, with confidence: I know that my redeemer lives and that we shall see our God here on earth and in the world to come. 

© Julie Gittoes 2022