Daily Reading for May 22 • The Fifth Sunday of Easter
Today there are many voices enticing people into the ways of death. As in the days of Christ, they speak in tones of prudence, expedience and self-protection. We are caught in the gravitational pull towards death. To stand on the side of life calls for the risks and initiatives of a different policy.
For behind every considered policy there is a bias either towards death or towards life. The arguments or the weapons or the methods you use reveal which side you are on. Was that why Jesus declined Peter’s sword and the merciful women’s drugged wine?
But aliveness will win, the enduring aliveness of God. Year after year Easter and Pentecost renew the promise that ‘in Christ Jesus the life-giving law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and death’. After every winter the spring flowers are drawn back into the light of the sun. So may we be drawn back from our falling away and up into Christ who is our life and in him grow sensitive to the reality of God, spontaneously responsive to the glory and pain of the world, less prudential in our self-giving, more daring in our risks, each marked with the liveliness and singularity of a child of God.
From “Most Glorious Lord of Life” in The Incarnate God by John V. Taylor. Copyright © 2003. A Continuum book used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com