Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C
May 12, 2019
Revelation 7:9-17 He will guide them to springs of the water of life.
John 10:22-30 It was winter.
O God of eternal life, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
During Eastertide, our lectionary offers no lessons from the First Testament. The effect, I think, is to overemphasize a break between Jesus’ followers and Jesus’ religious identity and tradition. Instead, we have passages from the Acts of the Apostles’ romantic accounts of the beginnings of Christianity, written toward the end of the first century about “the good old days.” (Always be suspicious when you hear about good old days, because they’ve never been good for everybody.) Today it’s Peter raising Dorcas from the dead with a line that is almost exactly the same as what Jesus said to raise Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Jesus reportedly said, “talitha cum” which means arise or wake up, come alive! Here Peter says, “tabitha anasteythi” which means arise or wake up, come alive!. In other words, Peter was ministering just like Jesus.