“Preaching happens wherever people are hungry for freedom, and someone is given a Word of freedom to preach,” writes Anna Carter Florence in Preaching as Testimony. In Luke’s account of Jesus’s resurrection, the women are given a Word of freedom to preach. The centering of these women is not only unique but liberating. In his Interpretation commentary, Fred Craddock notes a key difference between the resurrection story in Matthew and Mark and Luke’s version. In both Matthew and Mark, the women are commanded to “go and tell the disciples” what they have seen. They’re sent to run an errand. In Luke, the women are the disciples. Given this Word, and the authority to preach, the women “told all this to the eleven and to all the rest” (v. 9); they are empowered to share the Good News. Luke’s Gospel frequently highlights the poor and marginalized, and here he has given them the microphone. It’s as if he thinks those hungry for freedom – like women oppressed by patriarchy – are best equipped to proclaim the good news of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the angels ask these perplexed women. “He is not here, but has risen.” The tomb does not contain Jesus, his life or his ministry. Death does not hold God captive, nor God’s son, nor God’s disciples. In Christ’s resurrection, God reveals that there is no chain God can’t break, no prisoner God can’t liberate. God’s love sets us free in Christ. Oftentimes, I take my freedom for granted and must be reminded why the Good News is so good, how it might matter even more to those imprisoned by walls, culture or oppression. Recently, I’ve been reading Against Forgetting, an anthology of 20th-century poetry. This collection, compiled by Carolyn Forché, includes poems written from forced-labor and concentration camps, from the repressed in Eastern and Central Europe and Latin America, from those trapped by the ravages of war in the Middle East, Korea and Vietnam, from those enslaved and held captive by racism in the United States. In one poem, Nazim Hikmet, a Turkish poet imprisoned for “radical” writing, celebrates the arrival of spring from solitary confinement with its “smell of fresh earth, birds singing/ And inside … the water jug no longer freezes.” ...
Read the rest of the commentary on the website. | 
2024 Advent Resources Advent Candle Litanies “Hope: The First Sunday of Advent” “Peace: The Second Sunday of Advent” “Joy: The Third Sunda...
No comments:
Post a Comment