Clifton College Website

Thought for the Week

Clifton College's Chaplain, Kim Taplin, brings us his 'Thought for the Week'

Archive...

Searching the Empty Tomb

There is a marvellous cameo in St Luke’s narrative of the Resurrection in which two dazzling angels ask the startled women at the empty tomb of Jesus, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (St Luke 24.5) They were looking for the corpse of a mere rabbi but, after Easter, nothing would ever be the same again. The Resurrection of Christ opened up the possibility of something new and revolutionary – eternal life experienced not as post-mortem cloud-hopping with harps, but as a new quality of living in the here and now, a perceptive way of seeing, an authentic way of loving.

However, so many of us are still looking in the wrong places for the Risen Christ. We look for him, “among long-dead dogmas, in old decaying fears and hurts, in the guilts and resentments we inhabit like a coffin.” (from Looking in the Wrong Places by Kathy Galloway)

By contrast, God’s resurrection life is revealed where enemies forgive each other, where the estranged are reconciled, where the humiliated are celebrated, where the exhausted receive refreshment and where those who cannot cope with living find fresh strength to carry on.

20 April 2009

© 2006-12 Clifton College