Third Sunday of Easter
April 30, 2006


On a scale of 1-10, how much regret do you live with?

I find, creeping into my awareness a bit more than it used to, a whole new thing going on. It is called “regret.” Things I wish I had done. It takes shape a bit more in lieu of the things that I no longer consider a wise and prudent activity for my body to be engaged in. So though I have never gone bungee jumping, as that half century mark draws closer, I have pretty much ruled that out as something I will be able to tell my nieces and nephews about. And as a pastor, there creeps in more and more interactions that I wish I could do over, words I wish I could take back, because there were better or other ways to say what I wanted to, without opening wounds or hurting people. On a scale of 1-10, how often do you live thinking about what you could have done, or should have done? How often do you visit the land of “IF ONLY?”

I got to thinking about that because of three words that I never noticed before in my reading of today’s gospel. Toward the end of today’s gospel, we hear Jesus telling his disciples: “Repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” Why those words? Why “beginning from Jerusalem?” The answer seems simple. It was because the apostles themselves needed to hear that message first. Each of the accounts of them experiencing the risen Jesus are not met with the incredulous joy that you and I might expect to find there. Instead, they are ‘startled and terrified and troubled and questioning”. Because they had deserted and denied and betrayed and abandoned him, and because that would have been their last memory of their friend and savior, they were stuck in that land of ‘what if’ and ‘if only.’ They were full of regret and sorrow and guilt for what they hadn’t done, yet had pledged to do – to follow Jesus to the end. So they stood in great need of forgiveness, great need of ‘starting afresh, starting anew.”

And Jesus tells them the place where it ended so badly is exactly the place where they need to begin it again. Luke tells us: “he opened their mind to the understanding of scriptures” – to understand that all that had happened, even their denial and abandonment, had been a part of the plan of God and a part of what was redeemed and brought to life. And the beginning of the way out of the land of regret is to put it into a larger context. It is to trust that God, in Jesus has forgiven it. That is what the cross says: There is no human choice that cannot be redeemed. The other part of getting out of the land of regret, (presuming you have apologized and made the amends the situation asked for); the other part of leaving the land of ‘if only’ is simply to repent and trust in the forgiveness that is there. Beginning from Jerusalem! Beginning from the places of your worst failure. That is where Jesus meets you.

The resurrected Jesus spends no time worrying about the past. He is never chides or chastises the apostles for their abandonment and denial. (With the exception being one excerpt at the end of Mark’s gospel, that was added on, and was not part of Mark’s original text, but something the community put in later for a different reason). It does not matter to him. Instead he greets them with “Peace”. Instead he shows them that he is alive with a new kind of life. Instead, he tells them that what matters is that they begin to live the NEW LIFE, the resurrected life. So, if you find yourself spending a lot of time in the land of regret, the land of if only, STOP IT. The resurrected Jesus spends absolutely no time there. Instead, he sends his disciples FROM that place, from Jerusalem, to be witnesses of his forgiving, saving love.

SO, this week, in your prayer, I invite you to spend a few brief moments calling to mind one of the regrets, one of the ‘IF ONLY’s’ of your life, one of the places where you go back to again and again and again. But only for a moment. And then, invite Jesus to stand before you, and to take that away from you. Invite him, in a resurrection moment, to give you the grace to go from the Jerusalem’s of your own story, and announce the good news. Beginning with your own heart and your own healing. And from there, to be witnesses of that love to all the world.