Author: Bryan Richardson

Re:Verse passage – Acts 2:1-13, 36-47 (day three)

“And how is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born?”

“Tongues of fire” is right: the words the apostles spoke burned through the cultural, linguistic, idiomatic barriers that always plague societies as people try to find hope and safety and acceptance and wholeness but end up clashing each other and feeling more alone than ever. The voices of these disciples rose above all the noise of everyday living with the clarity that immediately grabbed the hearers’ attention. The audience was thunderstruck. It was if somebody actually knew how they used to talk at the old home place or around the campfire – the way they used to wonder about the world with their friends before drifting off to sleep. This was good news spoken like a native. God’s word had their attention.

Re:Verse passage – Luke 24:45-53 (day three)

“You are witnesses of these things.”

The passage states that Jesus “opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” This action Jesus took was not a hidden, mysterious process. Rather, the gospel writer goes on to explain what Jesus actually did in opening the disciples’ minds: he identified recent events with the scriptures’ teaching about the Messiah, and he confirmed that they had experienced what it’s like when prophecies get fulfilled. In other words, he reframed everything they had been through so that they could see it in a new way – if they would. The Lord continually brings people to this new kind of sight. Later, Paul says, “in my weakness I am strong.” That’s not a word game. He’s saying that weakness partners him with the Lord in a way he could not have otherwise experienced. God can reframe your life that way.

Re:Verse passage – John 16:5-16 (day three)

“I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

The Lord tenderly cares for you. He doesn’t overwhelm you, but remembers you are dust, as the Bible says. That’s not patronizing or disdainful. Rather, God’s care for you points to how deeply he treasures those whom he has made, as an artist would treat his or her works with great caution and alertness. When the Lord says the time is not yet right for you to experience this or that, he’s cherishing your existence, lest what comes harm you. When the time does come that the Lord allows you to see and know what’s next, that’s the time that he knows you can live fully in that moment with great strength. He knows how he made you, and he stands by his work with confidence.

Re:Verse passage – John 21:1-19 (day three)

“None of the disciples ventured to question him, “Who are you?” knowing that it was the Lord.”

One might capture the disciples’ experience with this question: how is this even happening right now? They were grappling with the dawning of this long-promised age of history. Once, dead people stayed dead. Now, they no longer do. What was once impossible is now possible. If Jesus — publicly condemned, sentenced, and executed — now lives and breathes, what else that was hopeless now has hope? Indeed, what good thing is ever beyond reach again? It has taken 2000 years to take it all in, and even now it seems unreal sometimes. But 2000 years has also shown that this gospel will not fade. You really can count on this good news.

Re:Verse passage – Luke 24:36:-43; John 20:26-29 (day three)

“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.”

The first disciples believed in God, whom they had never seen, so they did have the ability to believe without sight. And Elijah’s and Elisha’s bringing back the dead, and a dead man living again after grazing Elisha’s bones – they believed these accounts. They had seen Jesus raise Lazarus and the son of the widow in Nain. So resurrection wasn’t off limits in their belief system. But this experience with a person they had known and loved and who had upended their lives for three years – this brought resurrection fully into the mainstream. Resurrection wasn’t just a rare miracle anymore. It was now the only way the human race would go on. All who count on Christ will be raised. Good news takes a while to sink in.

Re:Verse passage – Luke 24:13-35 (day three)

“And they stood still, looking sad.”

Wherever there were broken hearts resulting from his absence, the pain of those hearts reached the sensitive soul of the risen Savior like an SOS beacon, and he drew close. As the two men on the Emmaus Road paused their stride to update this stranger on the substance of their conversation about the chaotic reports of Jesus sitings, Jesus could see their downcast faces, feel their deep sense of loss. He responded tenderly: “And you feel like you’d be fools to believe these reports, even though you yearn for them to be true. You’re trying to slow your heart from running to embrace what the scriptures have said, afraid that it might not be real.” Jesus’s compassion tracks your sorrow, slowly opening up your life to possibilities you had not previously let yourself believe.

Re:Verse passage – John 20:1-18 (day three)

“They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

Mary’s statement here radiates helplessness. She had grown accustomed to living as a powerless, insignificant, unnoticed person of little value in her society. That is, until Jesus saw her. For the first time in her life, she had felt what it is like to matter, to live as something other than a cipher. But now the one who had seen her was apparently gone, himself the victim of that same uncaring world which had tried to teach her that she had no worth. “They have taken him away” mourns that the world has reasserted its position as an overwhelming force that swallows hope whole. In short order, Mary would encounter Jesus and find that the world is powerless after all.