Going Where Jesus Has Gone

In the accounts of the Resurrection, I have always resonated with these words from the angel at the empty tomb in the Gospel of Matthew: “He is gone ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him” (Matt. 28:7). These words arrest me because of the sense that Jesus is always going ahead, drawing us forward to the next part of God’s will for us.
I have travelled the road from Jerusalem to Galilee. It is not an easy journey. You travel down from Jerusalem to the edge of the Dead Sea. Then you turn and travel along the Jordan River. It is a dry place, arid and dusty. The Jordan is not broad and deep. It is narrow and muddy. Surely there are good places to stop and rest, but to move from Jerusalem to Galilee takes a certain resolve.

To go to Galilee for the disciples would have meant going back to where their time with Jesus began. It was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus called Peter and Andrew and James and John out of their boats to be fishers of men. Galilee is the place the disciples knew; Jerusalem was unfamiliar to them. And yet, when they arrive in Galilee after the resurrection, there Jesus instructs them to go out and make disciples of all nations. Although in familiar surroundings, back where their life as disciples began, they are sent out to do a new thing.
The work of following Jesus brought the disciples out from the familiarity of Galilee and back down to Jerusalem. The disciples gathered there for the festival of Shavuot, the feast celebrating the covenant made between God and Israel at Sinai. And at that moment, God offers a new aspect of that covenant – the promised coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples. It is by the power of the Spirit that the disciples are able to come together, to be united as a body of believers. And in that divinely strengthened unity, the disciples are empowered to do what Jesus commanded them – to take the good news to Jerusalem, to Galilee and to the ends of the earth. The story of the disciples continues as it has since the beginning of their time with Jesus, moving between the familiar and the unfamiliar, called to trust in the power of God as they move forward.
Let this be our Pentecost story – knowing where our Galilees are but remaining faithful to the work of God in Christ to respond to the actions of the Spirit among us. Let us go, knowing that Jesus has gone there ahead of us.
 
Dr. Joslyn-Siemiatkoski (@danjoslynsiem) joined the seminary faculty in Fall 2014 following his tenure since 2005 on the faculty at Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. His areas of interest include Jewish-Christian history, the history of Anglican ecclesiology, and contemporary interfaith dialogue.