That he still bore scars is what I’ve always thought so beautiful. It’s what’s intrigued me more than almost anything else all these years about the story so many celebrate at Easter all over the world, believers, half-believers, unbelievers too. The story of resurrection, the idea of it, the hope of it.
“Discipleship is not an offer man makes to Christ,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And it’s the point of this Sunday’s passage from Luke, about being “fit for the kingdom of God” (Lk 9:62).
In the final months of my life as an Anglican minister, in spiritual distress, I made my way to Walsingham in Norfolk to the shrines there dedicated to Our Lady—“England’s Nazareth,” it’s called.