Mr. Moffatt’s face had turned ash white. 

I had recognized him - our family’s former Winnipeg landlord - at the bus stop and had walked up to him and greeted him warmly. His reaction: shock (maybe even fear)!

Once he had been convinced that I was really me, he explained himself. A couple of years before, our family had moved to Chicoutimi, Quebec, from Winnipeg (I had made the move and then went on to university). The summer of our family’s move, Mr. Moffatt had seen, in the news, that a Michael Gagnon had been killed in a plane crash in the area of Chicoutimi and had concluded it was me. So, when I walked up to him at a bus stop in Winnipeg that day, he thought he was seeing a ghost.

A Christo-centric Perspective

When our perspectives are influenced by clouded understandings and, sometimes, outright mistruths, we can miss out or even resist God’s plan. For most of the people in Judea and Galilee, in Jesus’ day, an ethnocentric Jewish hope for Messiah caused them to resist the revelation of Jesus as Messiah.

For Jesus’ disciples, the Easter account reveals how, they too, were locked into an incomplete understanding of their Master. They had not understood Jesus’ teaching about the resurrection, about his eternal being. They were stuck in the perspective of a human messiah; a hope that had been brutally dashed with the crucifixion.

They were in a state of confusion and fear, not knowing what to do next.

While the apostles huddled together in their profound sadness, some of the women acted out their mourning in a practical fashion, preparing to complete the embalming process on the corpse of their beloved departed. They came looking for a body and found an empty tomb. Their attention was arrested. This was beyond them. They were then directed to change perspective -  to look for a living Lord, as taught to them by their Lord, according to the Word. What a difference!

God, in His infinite mercy, does not leave His own in their confusion and locked into a faulty perspective. The Easter story is a beautiful, gracious account of how He leads His own into seeing more about Himself. (Matthew 28; Mark 16; Luke 24; John 20).

The resurrection of Jesus became and remains the foundation of the message of reconciliation that the Church is called to bring to the world. It formed the basis of the apostle’s preaching and is the foundation of our eternal hope (Ephesians 2:4-6; 1 Corinthians 15:14ff).

This Easter, as we again contemplate the accounts of Jesus’ passion and resurrection, let us ask God to break through our ego-centric perspective and lead us further into a Christo-centric perspective. Let the powerful truth of the resurrection make a difference!

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Michael H. Gagnon has been serving in pastoral ministries in Quebec for over 40 years and has been involved in Simply Mobilizing since 2013. He serves as Quebec/French language coordinator on the National Coordination Team. He is married to Darlene (nee Brooke) and they presently are pastoring a French congregation in Matane, Quebec. They have 6 children and 19 grandchildren. Desiring to see the whole church mobilized to make disciples of Jesus everywhere, Michael is enthusiastically committed to the SM movement.