Believe it!

"...they refused to believe it." 

Mark 16:11

And who could blame them? "Jesus is risen!" Mary Magdalene and the women revealed to His followers, "I saw Him!" Cleopas and another announced the same thing and they were scoffed at. Finally, when Jesus revealed Himself to the disciples, He took them to task for their disbelief and stubbornness. 

Yesterday I was talking to a buyer from Sydney. He was telling me that in Australia only 16% of the people admitted going to church once or more in the year past. Usually it was for a wedding! He said that statistics show that the people who go to church were either poor, poor in education, sick, old, young enough to be dragged by their parents or migrants. I suppose the filipinos who fill the churches there with song are the migrants! 

He told me of his son who works in Microsoft in the US, making a lot of money. His grandchildren, who play with all the gadgets, have everything. "What else do they need?" he asked me. I said, "God." "Oh, it's a different generation now," he said, "they don't need religion." 

"I wasn't talking about religion," I answered. "They need to have a relationship with God our Father. They need to know Jesus." Of course we couldn't agree, of course our conversation went on and on, and he ended up not ordering a single thing! But the gospel reading today is precisely about people who go about their daily lives not believing even if someone told them the truth. Will they wait for Jesus to come again and rebuke them for their skepticism? Perhaps. But our job is, as Jesus commanded the disciples is to, "Go into all the world and tell everyone that God loves them, that I am alive, their sins can be forgiven, that I want them to get to know Me!" Like Mary Magdalene, we want to proclaim the Good News! But sometimes, they don't believe. We just tell it anyway! 

Lord, I pray for the man I talked to yesterday, and whoever You send to me. May I plant seeds of Your truth in their hearts. May those seeds one day bloom and break free, and enliven their faith. To whom should we go Lord? You have the Words of Spirit and Life!