Easter's not over, you know . . . we have another six weeks of it . . . while our more evangelical brothers and sisters have put away the lilies and bonnets until next year, while they're sharpening the blades on the mower and getting ready for Summer we who follow the church calendar are still singing Easter hymns and contemplating the resurrection . . . and that's how it should be, isn't it? Easter is the most important time of year, it's the time when we celebrate the fact that separates us from all other faiths: we worship a risen God, a God who has conquered sin, who has triumphed over death. It's from Easter, from the fact of the resurrection, that we derive that most characteristic of Christian qualities: hope. Hope that this is not all there is . . . hope that – in spite of everything we see and hear – evil is being routed in the world . . . hope that like Jesus, the first fruits of the resurrection, we will be resurrected some day as well.
Hope is our song, our poem, our anthem . . . but after Jesus' death, there wasn't a lot of it going around . . . when we left off last week, Mary Magdalene had seen the empty tomb, but at first she’d thought his body had been taken . . . even after he appeared to her, she thought he was the gardener, until he called her by name . . . and so, as that first resurrection day comes to a close, Mary knows, but no one else . . . Oh, Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, had seen an empty tomb, but it’s unclear just what they thought about it, and even more unclear what they’d gone and told the others. So we don’t know what they thought as they gathered that evening in a Jerusalem house, maybe they were discussing it, trying to decide what to think of the empty tomb . . . John says all the doors were locked, and he says it was for fear of the religious authorities – and suddenly, without warning, Jesus appears and stands before them. Just like that, right through a locked door. And he could have said a lot of things, like "How ya'all doing?" or "Behold! I have returned," but the first words out of his mouth are "Peace be with you."
And he shows them his nail-scarred hands and his sword-pierced side, and they rejoice when they see that it’s him . . . and he says again "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." And right here we have John's version of the great commission . . . it's not at his ascension, as it is in Matthew, it's right here in the quiet lamp-light of their gathering place . . . "As God has sent me, so I sent you." The disciples are sent to the world just as Jesus was sent . . . by God, the Creator almighty. And to power them, to animate them and sustain and comfort them as they do the work of God, he breathes on them, literally giving them his spirit, his Holy Spirit . . . and notice again that it's not like the other accounts we have . . . particularly Luke's, where the Spirit comes down upon the disciples in fire and tongues at Pentecost . . . here it's literally the breath of God. Breathe on me, breath of God . . .
I wonder if they saw anything? I wonder if they saw the spirit pass from Jesus into their bodies, into their hearts and minds? Pam and I were at a revival in Mississippi with a friend of ours, a communications professor from State, and it was a Pentecostal revival, and there was a lot of flinging the spirit around . . . and at one point the revivalist threw the spirit with great vim and vigor up into the balcony, and you could hear the folks swooning up there, and our friend turned to us and said "I thought I saw something that time," and I don't know, maybe he did, but I don't think it was like that in the house where the disciples had gathered . . . this seems like the antithesis of the flashy-show-biz spirit, the opposite of the public Pentecost event Luke describes in Acts . . . Jesus breathes on them, quietly, without fanfare, without muss or fuss , and they receive the spirit of God . . .
And this Spirit empowers them to do . . . what? Jesus gives some specifics: "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." Whoa . . . sounds pretty serious . . . sounds like the Spirit gives the apostles the ability to forgive sins or not forgive them, as the case may be.
I was having coffee with a guy I know, and the subject got onto the Roman Catholic Church, somehow, and the role of priests . . . and my companion said "I don't need any priest to forgive me," and so I said sweetly – this is before I figured out the absolute futility of these things – I said "have you ever read John 20:23?" and he admitted that he couldn't recall the exact verse, and I heard later from his wife that he went home and read it and was mightily troubled for awhile . . . and rightly so. This is one of the scriptural foundations of the priestly role as confessor/forgiver . . . and one of the reasons the Roman Catholics insist on Apostolic succession. This spiritual gift to forgive and retain sins is limited in their theology to their own priests, who are – according to them – in the direct line of succession from those disciples gathered together on that Easter evening.
Well. There was one of those original disciples, one of the original twelve, who was missing that night, and it was Thomas, who was called not "doubting," but "twin." And the others tell him about it, about the appearance as if by magic, right through the walls of the house, about the nail-scarred hand and the sword-pierced side, and about the Spirit bestowed upon them, light in their master's breath . . . but the Twin refuses to believe unless he sees the hands and touches them and slides his hand on up into that sword-sliced side. And here, of course, is where he got that nickname "doubting," because he refuses to believe unless he's seen it with his own eyes . . . but I think it's kind of a bum rap, myself. I mean, would any of you out there believe if one of your favorite teachers came back to life, and you heard about it from some of your friends who'd been at a dinner party – where there surely was a little wine going around? I can see it now: Andy says "And there we were, chatting away, and all of a sudden there's Ruby, big as life, back from the dead, and she lifts up her shirt and shows us the embalming scars, and the tire marks on her legs . . ." I'd probably feel ol' Andy's forehead, like are you sick or something, man? Just what had you all been smoking, anyway?
I suspect that none of us would believe it if our friends told us of a resurrection . . . and so I don't tend to blame Thomas for not believing just on the testimony of some eyewitnesses . . . In fact, in this respect Thomas is the very model of a modern man, only about seventeen-hundred years too early . . . like us moderns, he demands hands-on proof before he’ll buy into it . . . if he can’t touch it or feel it or put his hand inside of it, he’s not going to believe . . . it’s like he’s a charter member of the show-me state of mind, and of course that’s kind of like who we tend to be . . . especially since the enlightenment, if you can’t prove it scientifically, it didn’t happen . . . if it’s not corroborated by eyewitnesses, if there’s not a physical chain of evidence, you just can’t prove it . . . and in those days of course there was no DNA or fingerprint lab, no C.S.I. Jerusalem, no quirky – yet serious – forensic scientist, who can leap tall hypotheses in a single bound . . . but even Grissom would have trouble with the empty tomb . . . he’d have no problem identifying the grave as Jesus’ – they’d have his DNA from his time in custody – but he’d be looking for a dead body, not a living, breathing human, especially one that looks so different his closest friends can’t even recognize him.
And that’s why all the gospels relate post-resurrection experiences. They’re critical to the Christian tradition. After all, without these appearances, there’s just the empty tomb, with the neatly-folded grave clothes. In the first weeks after the crucifixion we can imagine all kinds of rumors, flying around Jerusalem . . . competing stories about what happened to his body. Bandits took him away, or maybe wild dogs? It could even have been the religious authorities, or the Romans, trying to deny the Christian movement its martyr . . . nobody was looking for a living, breathing resurrected body, even disciples like Thomas, who should have known better . . .
A week after his first appearance to the gathered disciples, Jesus materializes in the upper room again, this time with Thomas present. Once again the doors are locked, and once again – for the third time – he says "Peace be with you" – I guess they don’t call him the Prince of Peace for nothing. He goes right up to Thomas and offers himself up for inspection: "Put your finger here and see my hands; reach out your hand and put it in my side . . . do not doubt, but believe." But Thomas is convinced just by seeing him – and note that in this, he’s no different than the others, who believed when they first got a load of him the week before – and Thomas confesses his faith right on the spot: "My Lord and my God!"
And Jesus, who knows a teachable moment when he sees one, says "Do you believe because you’ve seen? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe!" And right here is the theological punch line of the whole story . . . the Greek word we translate as "blessed" connotes more than just "fortunate" or "happy" . . . it refers specifically to having favor bestowed upon you by God. And that divine favor is belief in a risen savior . . . Jesus is not saying that you are blessed as a result of believing without seeing, but that you are blessed in that you believe and yet have not seen. Believing without seeing, without touching, without stuffing your hand down inside a sword-riven side, is a blessing, it’s a gift from God.
And what a blessing it is, especially in these skeptical, 21st-Century times . . . and that’s how it’s often preached . . . we’ve been given that ultimate blessing, that ultimate gift of belief without seeing Christ standing before us in the flesh, aren’t we lucky? And yet, is that really true? Do we really not see our risen Lord, all around us? Did he not tell us "I will be in you and you in me?" And so is he not right there, in our friends next to us in the pews, in our brothers and sisters across the aisle? And did he not say “as you do it to the least of these . . . you do it to me?” And so is he not also in the homeless that wander our highways and hedges, also in the abused and neglected children of our suburban and inner-city streets?
If we look at the beaten, if we look at the depressed, if we look at the victims of war and genocide and economic oppression we will see and touch the nail-scarred hands, and we will bury our arms up to the elbows in his wounded side . . . that’s where Christ is, in all the victims, all the scapegoats, all the widows and orphans and children who ever lived. That’s where he is and that’s where he’s always been.
I guess, in a funny kind of way, we’re the reverse of Thomas . . . he saw Christ, he spoke with him and broke bread with him and only then did he believe. We’re given the wonderful gift, the marvelous blessing of belief without all of that, and now we can see. We can see the world the way it really is, we can see – as Calvin might have said – through Christ-colored glasses instead of the lenses of sin . . . we can see the risen Christ wherever we look . . . in our neighbor, in our kin, and in ourselves. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment