10/05/2025

In today's psalm we sing "I will offer a thanksgiving sacrifice, I will call on the name of the Lord." 

The first of today's readings has St Peter nurturing the infant Church outside of Jerusalem. Just as did Jesus he "performs"  miracles of healing and today Dorcas returns to life as had done Lazarus and the son of the Widow of Nain.

The sophisticates of Athens guffawed when Paul told them of the miracles performed by Jesus and of our own Resurrection Faith.

"This is a hard saying who can listen to this" were the doubts raised in the Synagogue at Capernaum by Jesus' statement of his own Sacramental being, flesh and blood and Divine origin. "After this many turned back and no longer walked with him". 

There is never anything pseudo or hesitant about the faith of St Peter. Even in his failures he is forthright and today  "To whom shall we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life and we have believed and come to know that you are the Holy One of God" is St Peter at his best.

His answer is a lovely statement of the belief that I hope I hold in my heart. St Peter's subsequent history of denial, forgiveness and heroic death gives me the confidence to proclaim my own faith in this humble way each morning and place all my hope in "The Lord".

The death of Dorcas and her return to life is an important event in the Church that was still an extension of Jesus' first priority to complete the revelation by Law and Covenant made throughout the Old Testament.

The return to this life of an apparently lifeless corpse is still even in these days of medical advancement a pretty major event but was, as in the case of Lazarus, "in those days" a real attention grabber.

I am not at all a "sophisticate of Athens" but read the readings of this morning's mass as a man who has some of the teaching of Two Thousand years of Church History as part of my consciousness. Lazarus was brought back into the world in which Jesus was still his incarnate self and would thus have been able to be present during the events that were to be the salvation of the whole world.

If Dorcas had been completely dead, would she have had anything for which to thank if brought back to this world?