God calls each of us to act exactly this way. Go and see for yourself. It looks to you like foolishness and the hysteria of nervous women - go and check. You have complaints against God that the world is arranged unfairly - then go and ask Him yourself what is going on. Someone told you something that horrified you or seemed absurd to you - find everything out yourself from the One who is the source of this strangeness. But do not sit idle; seek.

There are questions whose answers we can receive only by turning to the One who can answer them. Even if the very thought that we need to turn to Him personally, without intermediaries, meets resistance in us. We should not be satisfied with retellings and other people's opinions. In our relationship with God, we must first of all rely on the fact that He came to restore a direct connection with each person. Including me.

An interesting question: why do the apostles walking on the road to Emmaus not recognize their Teacher? Of course, they were not expecting the Resurrection; it seemed to them that everything was over, and to the One they took for a stranger they bitterly told everything "that had happened in these days in Jerusalem." But how can one fail to recognize the One with whom one has spent several years, speaking with Him every day? A changed humanity, not easily perceived by the eyes and senses of fallen man? Perhaps yes, for the Kingdom reveals itself with difficulty, and only in part, to untransfigured sight. But at the moment of the breaking of the bread they see Him with complete clarity. What happened?

A theologian could perhaps build an entire sacramentology on this one fact. But the matter here may be both simpler and more complex: the disciples simply partook of the Kingdom, entered it, and found themselves right at its center, where He, their Teacher, is. And from within the Kingdom the Kingdom can be seen well, so the apostles, of course, immediately made out Jesus without difficulty. But how and why it turns out that the Kingdom now opens to the disciples, then closes again to them, remains something one can only wonder about.

One thing is clear: now it is truly near, so near that one can cross its boundary without even noticing it. Yet, on the other hand, it turns out that one can cross the boundary of the Kingdom without noticing not only the boundary, but even the Kingdom itself. One can pass through it without seeing or sensing anything, without noticing even the One whom, while He still belonged in His human nature to the untransfigured part of creation, it had been impossible not to notice. Apparently what is needed is a relationship actualized here and now, a bond like the one uniting those gathered around the broken bread, in order to experience the reality of the Kingdom. And it turns out to be infinitely great: as soon as the apostles recognized Jesus and found themselves in the same spiritual dimension with Him, He immediately disappeared from sight, dissolving into the infinite distance, for He is at the center of His Kingdom, and the apostles, it appears, are still very far from the center...

And yet the meeting took place. That is the main thing. The rest will follow, for ahead lies an entire life, a life to be lived in the Kingdom.

On the morning of the Resurrection, the women were the first to come to the tomb. It is believed that, according to the customs of that time, women were less threatened than men by reprisals for showing sympathy to one who had been executed, and therefore they were not afraid to come to His grave. Even if that is so, let us not on that basis diminish the degree of their love and devotion to the Teacher. There is a strength that is open, immediately visible and indisputable, but there is also another strength, one that shows itself in apparent weakness. Many times the "weaker" sex has proved strong precisely in situations where this was the exact kind of strength needed, strength made perfect in weakness.

But open strength, required of a man, is not rejected either. We see Peter, who overcame his temporary denial, and again we recognize his character, his decisiveness and impulsiveness. His strength is returning to him.

Opponents of Christianity call it a religion of the weak. No, Christianity makes the weak strong and is itself a source of strength. Only this is not the kind of strength that, like a bodybuilder, shows off pumped-up muscles. The strength of faith is not noticed at once and is often not taken into account. Goliath also never imagined that he would be defeated by the modest young David, who had no heroic musculature.