Today’s passage is Luke 24:1-12. The women go to the tomb, find the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. Two angels remind them that Jesus told them he would rise from the dead. They go tell the others but no one believes them. Peter goes to the tomb and marvels at the truth.
“The dead among the living”(5)
The angels’ question to the caring and dutiful women is such a great one!
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
It is one I need to remind myself of my life because I so often do that! I look for a memory of the past and garnish it with happy emotion, dropping off all unpleasant details until I have created a fantasy tale that is not true at all.
I do this when my present circumstances are hard to bear or difficult to face.
Sometimes I make an imaginary future as a way of trying to deal with an unpleasant present time.
When I can look carefully at what I am saying or my wife or a Christian brother or a colleague points out that I’m not living in reality, then I see that I have brought my dead thoughts into the living moment.
Fresh in my mind is the picture of the woman who nurses her invalid husband at home.
He is in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes.
He can barely raise his arms. He can barely move his head.
Otherwise, he is paralysed.
She has been so busy caring for his body in the memory of their past that she did not talk to him of the new life in Jesus. Now she does, praise God!
My actions in my life are like that.
Too often I nurse a dead body and dead thoughts instead of living in the Lord and acting with his Spirit.
Application: to move among my teachers’ classes today with a prayer for each as they minister to our students sent to us by God.
Lord, let me seek you the living God, keeping my eyes on your goal of heaven.
