132/365 Rumination on an old Worship meeting

I don't remember the exact words, but it went something like this. It was last Easter season, or maybe the one before that, and Miguel had just read the gospel for the coming season for us to reflect on before we started our meeting (which seems to happen, and then not happen, depending on the month, or maybe on the attendance--sometimes we reflect, but other times he reads, or has someone read, and then that's it. And sometimes that's good). It was, I believe, the gospel when Thomas isn't in the upper room when Christ appears, and he doubts, and then is proven wrong and all that.

Resurrection became the topic. Hildegard mentioned something along the lines of resurrection being a mystery, how Christ was resurrected but changed--he wasn't the person he had been before. The disciples didn't recognize him on the road, for instance. And then Hazel at the end of the table, who rarely spoke up about anything, just sat listening (and sometimes I think judging, but maybe that's just me being terribly self-conscious), said, "OF COURSE he's the same person. He's flesh and blood. He ate fish on the beach!"

At that moment, and pretty much every moment since, I thought about how ridiculous that statement seemed to me. And then I though about how much I didn't care. About how my faith isn't bound to what form Christ appeared in after his resurrection. For that matter, the resurrection isn't too key to my faith. Voskreseniya. It's a mystery I don't spend much time thinking about.

But what I have spent too much time thinking about was this interchange between Hazel and Hildegard. Why is the fact of the gospel story so important to some and so inconsequential to others (not that I think it's inconsequential, but I think some folks can debate, doubt, reassess, and grow in ways that others just can not)? I wanted to cry out at that meeting, "Why? Why does that piece matter? When you are considering the Word made Flesh, why are we so concerned with the latter part? What about the words?"

But of course, it being Worship Commission, I did not.