Running from the past: Breakfast with Jesus II

An Easter sermon from John 21: part II
Our mistakes seem unable to be fixed. Isn’t it sometimes better to give up and move on, make a fresh start elsewhere? This relationship is going nowhere, we have both failed too many times. Mightn’t it be easier if we stopped seeing each other and started new lives with other people? My sister has hurt me so often that it’s better to steer clear of her. This church has become too difficult; too many bridges have been burned. Mightn’t it be easier to switch to one down the road?

Sometimes, even our memories can be too painful to face, and so we push mistakes out of our heads, as well as our lives. How many of us are running from a buried past, trying to make a new start?

Doesn’t Easter give us the story of just such a fresh start? We like the image of the slate wiped clean, turning over a new leaf, leaving our mistakes for dead and being given a new life. But while it works for a while, if we’re honest, the past has a habit of catching up with us.

In what is probably my all time-favourite film, Magnolia, there’s a great line that is repeated again and again by different characters: “we might be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” Is it really possible to escape our past?
Series: I; II: III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX.