Back to St. Joe’s, to the early mass, 8:30 a.m. It’s lightly attended and there’s no music, which oddly enough makes it so very solemn and lovely.

The Gospel reading is from St. John, where Mary of Magdala discovers the empty tomb and runs to tell everyone. Peter and another, un-named disciple come running. Poor St. Peter, always the schlub, loses the race, of course.

But somehow, to me, thinking of poor St. Peter the schlub, thinking about he so often gets it wrong but keeps going, it just makes Acts or his epistles so much more real to me. To think that likely St. Paul never met Jesus, pace that encounter on the road to Damascus. But St. Peter really was there so much of the time. And so he can say,

We are witnesses of all that he did
both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem.
They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.
This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible,
not to all the people, but to us,
the witnesses chosen by God in advance,
who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
He commissioned us to preach to the people
and testify that he is the one appointed by God
as judge of the living and the dead.

and he’s being so entirely literal, you know? “We are witnesses to all that he did.”

Happy Easter, folks.