Easter Monday Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
EASTER MONDAY...

...When I became Dean of Lichfield in 1994, one of the first things I saw as I was shown around the magnificent cathedral was the place where the building had been, as it were, stitched back together again after the serious damage it had suffered during the Civil War three hundred and fifty or so years earlier. (The cathedral tower had been used, shamefully, as a post for snipers, so it had become a ‘legitimate’ target.) At first it seemed to me really sad that the building hadn’t been mended, as it were, ‘invisibly’, in the way a tailor will mend a suit that’s had a tear. Surely that would have been better, more honouring to God?

A moment’s reflection made me think differently. Whether for good or ill, that cathedral had stood at the heart of England at one of the most appalling periods in our history. It had shared in the violence and destruction, and had come through to be, once more, a place of prayer, sanctuary and pilgrimage. The marks were still showing; but that wasn’t a bad thing. That is how the church often is. That is how, according to Luke and John, Jesus himself was: risen from the dead, no longer to suffer pain, but recognizable by the mark of the nails. There is a profound truth there about the nature of the people of God...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright