The Aroma Beckons
Surely at some point, you have been treated to this experience:
You are just waking up, slowly coming out of the stillness of sleep. What gently pulls you forth from your slumber is the aroma of breakfast. The smell of coffee has reached you. Someone has bacon and eggs sizzling in a skillet. Your nose is delighted, and your brain seconds the motion. It is worth it to rise: your legs are happy to help your feet find the floor.
Even if you are not a breakfast person or a morning person, if a loved one or the host you are visiting is cooking you breakfast, you are happy to rise and greet the day. When you take your seat at the breakfast table with delicious things before you, you will see delivered what that first aroma had promised.
Now, here is a leap to what is central to our faith: I know as much as the next guy about what our resurrection in Christ will be like, which is precisely nothing. We don’t know what that will be like. I have a feeling, though, that it will be a gentle and lovely pull into an unimaginably vibrant life. The highest and best in this life will seem merely a whiff compared to the life we shall come to know. Death will be not an end, but a door, through which we go to enjoy life in all its fullness. We shall wake to fulfillment.
A portion of the Psalm we shall say together in worship Sunday is a song of surprise, relief, and joy. It would fittingly be our song as we come to the table once wakened and moving through the passage of death:
O Lord my God, I cried out to you,
and you restored me to health.
You brought me up, O Lord, from the dead;
you restored my life as I was going down to the grave. (Psalm 30:2-3)
Each of the passages of scriptures this Sunday show themes of movement from the hard struggles of life to the glorious. St. John is given a glimpse of the Lamb of God, enthroned. Peter goes from his self-image as the one who denied Christ, to a new image: the loving and faithful shepherd, tending Jesus’s sheep and feeding his lambs. This is right after Jesus treats him and all the disciples to a breakfast of broiled fish on the beach. Paul goes from the steely-eyed persecutor of the followers of the way to the new helpless blind servant of God led down Straight Street by his host. This host, Ananias, will nurse Paul toward a new laborious and fulfilling mission of the Good News.
Christ is moving you further into your mission of the Gospel and will at length meet you at the gate of death, and welcome you to the aromas, the tastes, and delights of Life eternal. Let us pray one of the prayers for the Weekdays of Easter:
O Lord, you have saved us through the Paschal mystery of Christ: Continue to support your people with heavenly gifts, that we may attain true liberty, and enjoy the happiness of heaven which we have begun to taste on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.