An online presence for St Francis Anglican Church, Tairua, NZ
This Gospel passage about fruit-bearing set me a-searching – not for the first time, I might say – for evidence of fruit in my own life. This passage clearly says, if you abide in me, Jesus, you will bear much fruit. Ok, son … where is the fruit?
My first stocktake wasn’t promising. Presumably ‘fruit’ means healings and miracles and souls saved, right? Well, if right, my life is pretty well fruitless. In fact, I’ve had some big fails ,,,
The Mark reading is the story of Jesus’s death. Usually a Good Friday reading, it relates Jesus’s last moments before he died. We know that this was not the final chapter in his life though. He had told his disciples several times that he was going to die, but that he would be raised on the third day, and it was so. We have just recently celebrated Easter and his resurrection.
Today we commemorate the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey.
On Wednesday evening just after Easter I joined the Auckland Jewish community for a memorial service for the Shoah, the Holocaust. During the service, the words “Never forget” were spoken many times. It is an exhortation to an active remembering with the purpose of ensuring that such an event can never occur again; and not just that there could be no such horror again, but that that the seed bed of hatred and discrimination that leads to such things cannot be allowed to be fostered in our society.
Sometime in the predawn hours of a Sunday morning, two thousand years ago, a great mystery transpired in secret. No sunlight illuminated the event. No human being witnessed it. And even now, centuries later, no human narrative can contain it. The resurrection exceeds all of our attempts to pin it down, because it’s a mystery known only to God.
