The Sauntering Pilgrim

The story is told among preachers, about one pastor and his daughter who were on their way to an Easter service when the young girl asked, “Dad, are you going to try to explain Easter again this year, or will you just let people enjoy it?”

St. Paul tried to explain it (cf. 1 Cor. 15). Resurrection, he wrote, is being clothed in a spiritual body so different from the earthly body, it can hardly be described. Imagine the difference between an acorn and an oak tree, he might say (a very small example). That’s a little like the difference between the human body and the resurrected body.

The writers of the gospels try, too, but they tend to think smaller rather than larger. They describe Jesus’ resurrected body as so ordinary it almost goes unnoticed. People mistake him for a gardener (John 20:15), a fellow traveler on the road (Luke 24:15-16), or a bystander on the beach (John 21:4), someone so ordinary he could be sitting beside you right now and you wouldn’t recognize him.

One summer I stood at the edge of a woods surrounded by a snowstorm of cottonwood seeds floating on the breeze. The air was so thick with them, I knew the tree had to be close, but as hard as I looked, I couldn’t find it. It was as if the seed puffs had simply materialized out of thin air. When I finally spotted the tree, it was less than fifty feet away, so mature and large I didn’t recognize it, hidden in plain sight.

One Easter I hid some small, brightly wrapped chocolate Easter eggs around the house for Sheryl. She found most of them, including the one hidden in a tea cup on the living room bookshelf. The one she had most difficulty finding was the one I had perched on the spout of the teapot less than eight inches from the one she found in the cup. It was the one most visible and most difficult to see.

God has raised Christ to glory, and God is raising us to glory. The body of that glory is right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. It surrounds us like a cloud of cottonwood seeds floating on the breeze. It sparkles like a foil-covered egg perched on the spout of a teapot. It’s like the reign of God itself, which Jesus said is already spread out on the earth, and people don’t see it (Gosp. Thomas 113). We don’t see it by explaining it; we see it by, well, by seeing it, by being blessed with the sudden recognition that what we’ve been looking for has been right in front of us all along.

Each one of us, right now, is growing into the glory of a resurrected self. Each one of us has something precious and unique and essential to offer to the new creation that’s emerging around us. No one else in the world can be who you are or offer what you have to give to the new thing God is creating in this world, the new thing that is taking shape right now. Do you know that about yourself? Do you know that about your congregation?

That new thing will not be found in the past. You may find traces of its seeds in the past, but the gift you bring to life, the glory to which you are being raised, is as different from the past as the oak tree is from the acorn. And it’s right in front of you. We don’t need to understand or explain it. We need only to give thanks for it and take joy in it and let it have its way with us. We need only to live it. It’s the gift of resurrection, and it’s right in front of you, hidden in plain sight. ▪