Holy Mysteries: Encountering the risen Jesus

Holy Mysteries

Encountering the risen Jesus

Frank & Victoria Logue

The scripture quotations in this book of devotions are from The New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright ©1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

©2025 Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

All rights reserved

Cover Art

The cover painting is Christ in the Wilderness by Kelly Latimore and is used by per-mission of the artist with all rights reserved. Kelly writes of his work, I do not wish to approach Iconography as an art form that simply follows an inherited tradition, knowledge, and practice. I want it to be a ‘holy pondering’, meditation, and process that potentially brings about a new way of seeing for the viewer and me. Discover his powerful artwork for yourself at

kellylatimoreicons.com.

Unless otherwise noted in the caption, all other art-work in this book is courtesy of The Met, from the 492,000 of works of art that the museum has placed in the public domain. Photos are courtesy of the authors.

Contents

Dedication 7

Introduction 9

Week I—Mystery 13

Monday – Introducing Mystery 13

Tuesday – Frank’s Reflection 16

Wednesday – The Earthquake 20

Thursday – Quotation 25

Friday – The Linen Wrappings 27

Saturday – Victoria’s Reflection 29

Sunday – Mystery Revisited 33

Week II—Water 36

Monday – Introducing Water 36

Tuesday – Victoria’s Reflection 40

Wednesday – The Gardener 45

Thursday – Quotation 48

Friday – Frank’s Reflection 50

Saturday – Apostle to the Apostles 55

Sunday – Water Revisited 57

Week III—Feast 60

Monday – Introducing Feast 60

Tuesday – Victoria’s reflection 64

Wednesday – The Walk to Emmaus 70

Thursday - Quotation 73

Friday – Frank’s Reflection 78

Saturday – The Breaking of the Bread 81

Sunday – Feast Revisited 85

Week IV—Oil 87

Monday – Introducing Oil 87

Tuesday – Victoria’s Reflection 91

Wednesday – The Breath 95

Thursday – Quotation 99

Friday – Frank’s Reflection 101

Saturday – The Touch 105

Sunday – Oil Revisited 108

Week V—Participation 111

Monday – Introducing Participation 111

Tuesday – Victoria’s Reflection 115

Wednesday – The Strong Net 120

Thursday – Quotation 124

Friday – Frank’s Reflection 125

Saturday – Breakfast on the Beach 130

Sunday – Participation Revisited 132

Week VI—Sacramentality 136

Monday – Introducing Sacramentality 136

Tuesday – Victoria’s Reflection 139

Wednesday – Feed my sheep 143

Thursday – Quotation 146

Friday – Frank’s Reflection 149

Saturday – The Great Commission 153

Sunday – Sacramentality Revisited 156

Week VII—Vocation 160

Monday – Introducing Vocation 161

Tuesday – Victoria’s Reflection 165

Wednesday – The Ascension 168

Thursday – Quotation 171

Friday – Frank’s Reflection 173

Saturday – Pentecost 177

Pentecost – Vocation Revisited 181

Epilogue – The Road to Damascus 184

Dedication

We dedicate this book to Joni Woolf, friend, and a parishioner of Calvary Episcopal Church in Americus. We are grateful for her editing this Eastertide book as well as our previous devotional Feast of Feasts: Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany with St. Francis. We appreciate not only Joni's editorial expertise, but also her support and encouragement.

You call for faith:

I show you doubt,

to prove that faith exists.

The more of doubt,

the stronger faith, I say,

if faith o'ercomes doubt.

-from Bishop Blougram's Apology by Robert Browning

The Lamentation from the workshop of the Master of the Virgin among Virgins. (Netherlandish, active ca. 1460–95)

Introduction

"I have long been wishing,

O true-born and dearly beloved children of the Church,

to discourse to you concerning

these spiritual and heavenly Mysteries;

but since I well knew that seeing

is far more persuasive than hearing,

I waited for the present season."

-Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lecture 19: On the Mysteries I

"To us that speak daily of the death of Christ

(he was crucified, dead, and buried),

can the memory or the mention of our own death

be irksome or bitter?"

-John Donne, in his sermon Death’s Duel

Our story begins in the silence of the night, in a garden near the Place of the Skull. Jesus lies dead in a tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea, a religious leader who had kept his faith in Jesus a secret until the unthinkable occurred. After Jesus had been tortured and killed, Joseph asks boldly if Pontius Pilate will let him remove his Rabbi from the cross. Jesus, who was the most gracious of hosts, was always in need of hospitality. He had described himself as the Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head. On this longest of sabbaths for his followers, he lies wrapped in linen cloth in a new tomb where no one had ever been laid.

The disciples who scattered on Jesus’ arrest are joined by John and Jesus’ Mother, Mary, and the other women who stayed near their hoped-for Messiah when he suffered and died. They are back in the upper room where they had all celebrated the Passover on an evening that must have felt a lifetime ago. Everything had changed so quickly in the day that followed.

This is not a once upon a time story. That there was a historic person named Jesus of Nazareth is as well-documented as the lives of other historic people of his time. Besides the Bible, we have records of Jesus from other sources, especially from people who were not Christians. Both the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius wrote about Jesus, as did the Jewish historian Josephus. Jesus was an itinerant preacher known for working miracles who was proclaimed as a Messiah before being put to death as a threat to the status quo in the uneasy peace of Jerusalem.

Jesus was not the first or last person hailed as the promised anointed one, the Messiah. The unusual part of the story is that he is remembered by more than a few experts on the history of the Ancient Near East. The Jesus Movement persisting centuries after his death is what points us back to that Upper Room in Jerusalem on that first Sunday morning and again the next week when Thomas was present. Something happened that transformed human history as the first followers of Jesus experienced something so amazing that they gave the rest of their lives to spreading the Good News. They tell us that Jesus appeared among them and said, Peace be with you.

That the disciples did not go home and continue the lives they had before encountering Jesus is the first proof we have for resurrection. Something transformed their lives and sustained them for the persecution that followed. Jesus’ first followers did not have to tell a story of resurrection at all for their movement to continue. Neither Buddha’s followers nor those of Muhammad made such a claim of appearing bodily resurrected. The disciples proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection, not because everyone expected this of the Messiah, but because it was so life-changingly unexpected that they couldn’t avoid talking about it. It would have been easier if they had just claimed that Jesus’ message was still valid; that his teaching should live on. But that is not what they said. The apostles preached that Jesus was and is the firstborn of the dead; the until now still unrepeatable example of the resurrection to come at the end of time.

We wrote this book of devotions to allow us to spend the Great Fifty Days from Easter to Pentecost reflecting on the resurrection through the lenses of scripture and the early church tradition of teaching about the holy mysteries of the sacraments in Easter Week. We weave together the strands of the resurrection appearances found in the Bible with the teachings of some of the notable witnesses to this Easter season throughout church history. Each week, you will read two of the fourteen scriptural texts that make up the Stations of the Resurrection.

We also bring in early Christian teaching. Cyril of Jerusalem gave his five mystagogical lectures to the newly baptized in The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. These well-documented lectures on holy mysteries by the Bishop of Jerusalem bring us into the Church of the Resurrection to learn of the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, and confirmation as they were taught in the Fourth Century. Given this was a few decades after the Emperor Constantine ended the persecution of Christians with his Edict of Milan in 313, these texts preserve the understanding of the sacraments at this important moment in church history.

A personal reflection each week on how we have encountered Jesus is also shared with you in the hope of prompting you to consider the ways, both mundane and surprising, when you have experienced the risen Jesus. As we move through these meditations from sacred mysteries through the sacraments to vocation, we also want to encourage you to encounter Jesus in new ways.

Week I—Mystery

Monday – Introducing Mystery

We (the authors) enjoy mystery novels with the quirky, yet determined, detective doggedly pursuing clues to discover the truth. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is a fun twist on the gentleman detective. She is a careful observer of human behavior who knows the people of her village of St. Mary Mead so well that it gives insight into all people. She sees through the lies people tell to the character of the person beneath the surface as revealed in little inconsistencies. Across sixty-six novels and fourteen short-story collections, Christie offered every permutation on the twist ending for a murder mystery from every suspect as one of the killers to every suspect dying.

Movies, television, and novels are full of mystery. Just as the sun once never set on the British flag, the TV show Law and Order and its spin-offs are always playing in reruns on some channel 24/7/365. Within the hour, the truth is revealed and justice served. While acknowledging issues that can arise in the justice system, the viewer is consistently soothed that most everything is well as we are in the hands of the good guys who usually end up getting it right. For the two of us, this is not our favorite form of whodunit.

We love to read a sub-genre of novels usually called Nordic Noir. These morally complex books, set in the bleak landscapes of Scandinavia are not such a sharp departure for us as Victoria always enjoyed Ed McBain’s police procedurals. Many see McBain’s 87th Precinct stories as a source for these straightforward narratives about the monotonous, day-to-day work of police that results in uncovering a killer. The prose is as bare as the scenery in these dark mysteries that void metaphor in favor of a Joe Friday just-the-facts style. The bland surface covers the secret hatreds to contrast the Scandinavian ideals of social justice and liberalism with the reality of misogyny, racism, and xenophobia.

Authors like Iceland’s Arnaldur Indriðason and Norway’s Karin Fossum are less interested in whodunit than in revealing the why that comes from the inner life of the people populating an isolated village where the unspeakable has happened. The relatively low crime rate allows for a detective to push forward at a glacial speed not just to an arrest, but to an understanding that often still eludes the detective. Nordic Noir usually avoids tidy endings.

All of these types of stories inform our understanding of mystery, but they bear only the slightest resemblance to mystery as we mean it when we say The Holy Trinity is a sacred mystery or when we write of the Holy Mysteries of the sacraments. Here we hope that the contrast between Miss Marple and Law and Order as they contrast with Scandinavian crime fiction is instructive.

The goal in the examples of Agatha Christie and television procedurals is to explain the mystery. The dogged detective, or the team of police and attorneys, discover The Answer. The mystery is a riddle with a single, set solution. It was: Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick. The cold-hearted fiction from the north shows that there is always more to learn. Even if Miss Marple understands her village completely from her own perspective, she still does not conceive all that her butcher knows, or what the returned war veteran who can’t keep consistent work sees. We learn that it is beyond the powers of detection to fully appreciate how a murder transpired in this case, and in another instance an even more despicable person maintains a careful façade to be lionized on their death by natural causes. There is more present in the lives of even a tiny, isolated village than one can comprehend, much less in our actual circles of family, friends, and co-workers. This comes closer to the Holy Mysteries.

We work throughout our lives to learn more and more about