Acts 2:14,22-33; Ps 16; Mt 28:8-15
I like taking some Ginger Drink before going to bed. And, there are many packaged combinations which can be purchased. I enjoy the pungent spicy taste of just pure ginger. It is soothing. Then, I tried a combination which came with honey. It brought some added flavour, but compromised on the spiciness which began to fade a little. After that, I tried another combination which came with honey and lemon. The lemon also added a distinctive alteration on the palate, but masked the pungency of the underlying ginger. It was no longer ginger but something else all together. I decided to go back to pure ginger without honey or lemon, and I can experience that soothing sensation after each sip.
Ginger with honey and lemon; Faith with Awe and Joy. Honey and lemon were additions which polluted the true taste of ginger. On the contrary, Awe and Joy are two ingredients that reveal the true taste of Resurrection Faith. Filled with Awe and Joy, the two Mary’s ran to announce the news to Jesus’ disciples. But, the connection between Awe and Joy in the two women is not accidental. It is necessary and is related to a genuine experience of faith in the risen Lord. If we experience merely JOY without AWE, then we have mere ecstasy. And, people mistake this to be the JOY of the resurrection. It is basically masking RAGE in a person.
We then have un-resurrected faith, clinging on to the body of Jesus before the resurrection, clinging on to our own bodies, to the body of our own convictions and our own experience of God. When this clinging is disrupted, we fall into turmoil and RAGE. On the other hand, when we have AWE without JOY, then we fall into hyper-resurrected faith, a faith which denies the body, which denies any attachment to Jesus in His ministry, passion and death. AWE, without JOY, leads to hallucinations, hearing and seeing apparitions and prophecies and oracles which are projections of our own rejection of our own experiences, because they are painful. And, when we experience the risen Jesus, we are most certainly not hallucinating.
A Faith with AWE, but without genuine JOY, is also not faith arising from an experience of the risen Lord. Resurrected Faith in the Risen Lord is shown in and through both JOY and AWE – it makes us see more clearly Jesus in His humanity, in His ministry, passion and death; but also, helps us go beyond enslaving Jesus to His body and what He had already said and done, and see His divinity as God’s Son, as the one who continues to say and do new things in and through us. Unlike GINGER which is polluted by HONEY and LEMON, FAITH becomes itself in both AWE and JOY when together, just as COMMUNITY requires both my personal convictions and the ability to see outside them when I am with another.
Lord, I set your risen presence ever before me; with you at my right hand I shall not be disturbed, my heart is glad and my soul rejoices, my body, too, abides in confidence. Amen.
De Vita Christi 