Monthly Archives: April 2025

Reflecting on John 20: 19-31

If you watch enough of Dateline, you’ll never answer the phone or email again. Predators are everywhere, we’re told, and we will never be smarter than they are. It’s best to be suspicious of everyone.

I wonder if Thomas had heard reports that Jesus was alive, and his broken heart couldn’t take any more disappointment. It was best to keep his heart hard. Religious zealots were everywhere. Nobody was going to make a fool out of him.

And now his own brothers, the ones who had witnessed Jesus raise Lazarus, met him at the door, ecstatically shouting that they had seen the Lord!

But Thomas would not be fooled. No. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

You can almost hear the catch in his voice. He’s fighting back tears. He wants to believe with everything in him. But he knows what the Romans did to Jesus. He can’t be alive. Can he?

And then, on the next Sunday night, Jesus appeared again! He went straight for the dumbfounded (and overjoyed!) Thomas. Can you imagine if Jesus took your fingers and placed them over his wounds, and put your hands in his side? You would fall to your knees, like Thomas, and cry, “My Lord and my God!”

After his life-changing experience of the Risen One, Thomas set out to tell the world what he knew. He traveled all over the Middle East and Asia, and eventually died in India, where he is revered among the Indian Christians as the patron saint of India.

He preached the Divine Mercy of Jesus.

                                                                    Have you had an experience of the Risen Lord? 

Kathy McGovern ©2025 

Reflecting on John 20:1-9

There is a detail in John’s eloquent and symbol-laden Easter gospel that we must not miss: When Simon Peter arrived, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place. Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed.

Well, that settles it. Jesus’ body was not stolen by grave robbers, perhaps hoping for a big ransom from his believers. No robber would politely remove the burial cloths, and then take the time to roll up the face mask. It appears that Jesus resurrected straight through his burial cloths.

Contrast that with the raising of Lazarus, relayed in the eleventh chapter of John: 44 The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.”

THIS is what convinced Peter. He was present at the raising of Lazarus. He witnessed the dead man coming out of the tomb, covered in the face cloth and burial cloths, which smelled so bad Jesus immediately ordered that they be taken off.

Peter witnessed a resuscitated Lazarus. In the tomb of Jesus, empty but for the burial cloths, he witnessed the resurrected Jesus.

But WHY is the face mask rolled up in a separate place? Recall Exodus 33:20-22: God told Moses, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”

The Resurrected One leaves the face cloth behind because, when he goes to the Father, he can take the heat.

            Are you ready to see Jesus face to face?

Kathy McGovern c. 2025

The entire Passion account moves so quickly. It begins with a peaceful Passover meal, then moves to the Garden, where, after his Agony, the soldiers come with swords and torches. He asks why they put on such a big show when they could have arrested him at any time during the day. But, he says, “This is your hour, the time for the power of darkness.”

There are times when the power of darkness seems to take hold of previously good and reasonable people. Nazi Germany comes to mind. Looking at videos of those ghastly rallies, with thousands giving the Nazi salute, it’s impossible to imagine that darkness could take hold so quickly, but in less than six months the concentration camps were turned into extermination camps.

When we visited Yam Vashem, the museum in Jerusalem that remembers the Holocaust, our guides wondered that Germany could have been the locus of the viciousness against the Jews. It had, just before Hitler took power, been the image of democratic discourse.

Perhaps the most compelling moment of Luke’s account, though, remembers that there were two thieves crucified on either side of Jesus. One was belligerent until the end, while the other was profoundly moved by his encounter with Jesus.

I want to be the thief who is deeply touched and converted by Jesus. I want to release all my defensiveness and arrogance. I want all my sinfulness to melt at the feet of Jesus. I want to say, “I am guilty, after all. Please heal me, Jesus.”  

Are you ready to release all your unhealed wounds unto the foot of the Cross? Jesus, remember us when you come into your kingdom.

What bitterness are you willing to release this Palm Sunday?

Kathy McGovern ©2025 

Reflecting on John 8:1-11

That poor woman. How terrifying to be dragged in front of all those righteous men, so thrilled to finally have an actual, breathing sinner in front of them, and stones to boot! But I’ve always thought this event was a set-up. Yes, they may have known that a woman was consorting with a man not her husband. But perhaps this situation provided the perfect trap for Jesus, the Jew who preached compassion when faced with the rigors of the Law.

It must have been soul-deadening to walk around under the weight of those 619 laws.

I imagine those scribes and Pharisees had to have found the Law onerous as well. Had they noticed Jesus during the Festival, and assumed he’d be back in the Temple area the next day? Did they take advantage of the situation with the woman, and use her to force a confrontation with Jesus about compassion? The truth is, there isn’t a single known event of Jews stoning a woman caught in adultery.

I wonder if that proscription, coming all the way back in Leviticus 20:10, was something that bothered the Jews. Were they hoping Jesus would give them a way out of a terrible death penalty they would never have exacted anyway?

He did give them a way out, twice. The first was when he suggested that the one who was without sin throw the first stone. Whew! We’re all saved! We don’t have to pretend that we were actually going to kill her.

The second time Jesus offered a way out, of course, was on the Cross. That’s our way out from revenge, and violence. We should go, then, and not sin anymore.

How does your compassion offer a way out to people in your life?

Kathy  McGovern ©2025