Jesus is everywhere trying to open our minds

"When we live in a state of hyper-vigilance toward our sister and brother Christians out of mistrust, we expose our lack of faith and cannot enter fully into God's joy. I can't imagine how anyone finds such disbelief life-giving. For our own health as well as for the health of our community, we need to confront our disbelieving and wondering and invite God's Spirit to get us out of that upper room in which we're hiding.

	Whatever it was the disciples thought about all that had gone before, or for that matter about one another, was subsumed in Jesus' opening their hearts and minds and pointing the way forward.

This week in the upper room, the disciples are getting a report from the two who met Jesus in the breaking of the bread at Emmaus. Jesus appears and they run that same gantlet of emotions we just saw in John's upper room story. Jesus has to eat fish to demonstrate he is real, but then he opens their minds to understand how the scriptures have pointed towards him and towards God's work of repentance and forgiveness. Whatever it was the disciples thought about all that had gone before, or for that matter about one another, was subsumed in Jesus' opening their hearts and minds and pointing the way forward.

I would invite you to reflect on whether or not our disbelieving and wondering about one another might not actually be a challenge to return again and let Jesus open our minds to understanding. To remain engrossed in determining who might or might not be theologically or politically correct (and isn't the latter often a subset of the former for us?) is to remain trapped in the upper room by our need to make others conform to us and rather than to Jesus. Worse yet, such mistrust lays bare our continued disbelieving in Jesus, who we imagine has somehow failed to open the minds of those we distrust.

Jesus is everywhere trying to open our minds. On the road or in Emmaus or anywhere else, in our meals together where Jesus eats fish or breaks bread, in Jesus' willingness to let us finger the nail marks his enemies thought proved his shame --in all of these places and more, over and over, Jesus comes among us to urge us out of our disbelief and isolation and into the joy of being his witnesses in the world. Our real and deep joy will be found as we live into that mission. We will find it as we live into into the love that John so eloquently describes in his epistles, in the mission to all the nations Jesus entrusts to his followers after his resurrection, and in love's finding flesh in deeds of kindness as described by Peter. We may find that joy even in moments of being tempted to doubt our sisters and brothers as we choose to step out in faith, making our prayer "I believe, dear Christ; help my disbelief."

http://www.thewitness.org/article.php?id=1057