Fourth Sunday of Easter

The Fourth Sunday of Easter brings Acts into the Easter season not as a pause in Jerusalem’s familiar world but as a call to recognize the life-giving and boundary-crossing work of God. In Year C, its reading of the raising of Dorcas places a woman’s restored life, and the widows whose lives are bound up with hers, at the center of reflection on the Realm and the church’s mission.

Lectionary Setting

The congregation hears the story of Dorcas in Acts 9:36–43 on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C. The account can serve as a starting point for reflecting on egalitarian relationships between women and men and on God’s liberating purposes for women. Because the lectionary assigns relatively few texts whose central character is a woman, this Sunday offers an opportunity to let a woman’s story shape the congregation’s reading of the wider biblical witness. The reading also belongs to a sequence of Acts texts appointed for the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Sundays of Easter in Year C: Acts 9:1–21, Acts 9:36–43, and Acts 11:1–18. Preaching these passages in sequence makes it possible to follow the narrative continuously; representative selections from Acts 10 can supply the setting for the final passage. In this arrangement, Dorcas’s story is not isolated: it stands within a wider movement of changing perception and expanding community.

Dorcas, the Widows, and Restored Life

Dorcas was dead, and her body had been washed, a customary practice in antiquity. Her raising confirms, in the book’s interpretation, that the Realm is real: through the Spirit, Peter exercises the same life-giving power that Jesus had exercised. The episode also looks ahead to a later gentile setting, where God works through Paul to raise Eutychus. Life-giving power, the account insists, has not ended with Jesus or with Peter, but continues through the church. The consequences of Dorcas’s death reach beyond her own body. She was connected to a network of widows whose quality of life was threatened by losing her. The episode therefore presents a vulnerable community as well as an individual in need of restoration. Its contemporary application can attend to people and groups whose lives depend on mutual support, and to organizations or movements that serve life but face diminishing funding or political or cultural opposition. The question is not only who needs help, but how a community can become a source of support that sustains life.

From Jerusalem Toward an Enlarging Community

The Fourth Sunday’s Dorcas reading also gains significance within Acts’ larger geography. The earlier Easter readings in Year B take place in Jerusalem; Acts 8:26–40 is the first story in that sequence to occur outside the city, on the way toward the ends of the earth. The book reads this movement as both the unfolding of Jesus’ commission and a pattern for the church’s mission: God does not leave the community settled in a familiar Jerusalem, but leads it onto unfamiliar roads and into encounters that enlarge its sense of who belongs. That outward movement brings the church into contact with Samaritans, eunuchs, and gentiles, some of whom may unsettle relatively homogeneous congregations. The point is not simply that the church helps those it encounters. Solidarity with others can also become a blessing to the church itself, widening its understanding of the community of the Realm. Dorcas’s story, heard among these Easter readings, joins restored life to this broader vision of a community continually being enlarged.

Ways of Hearing the Sunday

One approach is to let the raising of Dorcas open a sustained consideration of women in Acts and of the liberating purposes represented by her restoration. Another is to preach the three Year C readings consecutively, using selections from Acts 10 to prepare for Acts 11:1–18. Together, these approaches keep the woman-centered account in view while tracing the larger narrative’s movement toward inclusion. The season’s sequence can also prompt a question about the communities threatened when life-supporting relationships are weakened. Dorcas’s death imperils the widows connected to her; the interpretation extends that pattern to vulnerable people, organizations, agencies, and movements facing opposition or loss of resources. The Sunday’s significance lies in holding personal restoration and communal survival together: the Realm is made visible not only when a life is returned, but also when a community learns to sustain those whose lives are intertwined.