RCL - Easter 2 A - 30 Mar 2008

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
RCL – Easter 2 A – Sunday 30 March 2008

Acts 2:14a,22-32
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31

The Incredulity of St Thomas by Michelangelo Caravaggio, 1601-1602,
Sanssouci Castle, Potsdam, Germany
The actual prodding of Jesus' wound expresses Caravaggio's artistic license. The gospel text does not say that Thomas actually did put his hand in Jesus' wound.

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Beloved Lord of All, grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith.

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Today’s Gospel brings us to look again at our own journeys of faith. And it does this in three movements and a conclusion.

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First, Jesus appears to the disciples assembled behind closed doors and commissions them to do the work of God.

Second, Thomas who missed out on Jesus’ visit puts his own conditions to belief.

Third, Thomas is given the opportunity to have his conditions to belief satisfied and then gains unconditional belief.

Finally, the last two verses of Chapter 20 of the Gospel expose the program of the writer for the whole Gospel that comes here to an end. The Gospel was “written so that you may believe… and have life in [Jesus’] name.”

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First, let’s go back to the room where the disciples are assembled. They are trying to come to terms with their memories, their emotions and their fears. The last 72 hours have been harrowing and frightful for all of them. After the foot washing and dinner with Jesus, everything went from bad -- to worse -- to horrifying.

In those 72 hours, Judah betrayed Jesus, Peter committed violence against an opponent, most of the disciples abandoned Jesus, Peter publicly betrayed Jesus, the women and the disciple whom Jesus loved have seen Jesus’ death on the cross, they have received help in taking their dead rabbi down and they have put him in a tomb.

Now, on this first day of the week, Jerusalem winds down from the Passover festival. In the midst of their fear, grief and pain, Mary Magdalene has brought to the disciples hope in which they don’t dare to believe.

They are in a state of disoriented unbelief, locked behind closed doors for fear of the Judean authorities. The authorities who have had Jesus crucified by the Romans and might very well come for them next.

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In the midst of their angst, Jesus appears amongst them and greets them with “Peace to you”. This conventional greeting probably never carried so much truth and weight for them.

Peace indeed, the peace of God that passes all understanding, the peace that ignores obstacles such as walls and locked doors, the peace that comes from struggle-free belief.

But even so, the disciples need to see the imprints of the nails and the gash of the spear on Jesus’ body to recognize him as whom they know him to be. And Jesus says again “Peace to you”.

Only now do the disciples shed their gloom and find their joy.

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Jesus then proceeds to commission the disciples to continue the work of God. They are to bear the fruit of his victory into the world, beyond this room, and into time, beyond this moment.

The night before he died, Jesus had prayed: “As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). And now, the commission rolls on to you and me who hear the evangelist’s witness to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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And as Jesus had promised, he gives us the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, the Advocate and Comforter who will be with us till the end of time to help us go into the world for God, as Jesus did.

The Evangelist uses the image of Jesus breathing into the disciples; evoking for us the image of God breathing life into Adam (in Genesis 2:7) or of Ezekiel prophesying to the breath in the valley of bones (Ezekiel 37).

This reminds us that, in Jesus, we receive new life.

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The assembled disciples who saw Jesus on the day of his resurrection are not much different from Thomas. They needed to see Jesus’ wounds to accept what all their being told them already; he is risen, as he promised!

Thomas holds to us the mirror of our own doubts and control needs. Have you never doubted God? Have you never demanded that God meet you on your own terms?

Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus first came to the assembled disciples. Could he have been the courageous one, out there in the world, facing the risks of being a Jesus disciple, while his friends cowered behind closed doors? Wasn’t he the one who said “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16) when Jesus decided to go back into Judea, to Bethany?

Could Thomas have been the distraught pessimist who needed to nurse his grief alone? In any case, Thomas wasn’t there the first time around.

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But when Jesus comes back to the disciples a week after his resurrection, he addresses Thomas’ needs. Jesus understands our doubts. God is willing to accompany us beyond our doubts. Jesus encourages us along the only path to abundant life: “Do not doubt, but believe.”

This is not a very good place to insist on empirical, scientific methods of knowing. The text does not tell us that Thomas actually did test Jesus’ wounds. It rather seems that faced with Jesus’ presence, he came to immediate and unconditional belief: “My Lord and my God!”

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Jesus says “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” In the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (NRSV), he says: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”



I have no knowledge of greek translation, but I sense that this “have come to believe” is faithful to the Evangelist’s intent. The Evangelist (through all of Chapter 20 of the Gospel) shows us the passage from unbelief to conditional and then unconditional belief in most of Jesus’ disciples; Mary Magdalene, Thomas and most of the other disciples. God honors our journeys of faith.

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We, here, today, can no longer see the embodied Jesus and we can not yet see Jesus in the flesh to sustain our faith. But we can buttress our faith on a host of witnesses who passed on their experience of the live and risen Christ. And we can buttress our faith on a host of witnesses who experience the living Christ even now, maybe even here.

May you also have life in Jesus’ name.
May our life into the fellowship of Christ’s Body show forth in what we profess; in deeds and in words, by faith.

Amen.

RCL - Easter Day A - 23 Mar 2008

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Reginald Martin Crenshaw

RCL - Year A – Easter Day – Sunday 23 March 2008

Acts 10: 34-43

John 20: 1-18

Yesterday I was crucified with Christ; today I am glorified with him.

Yesterday I was dead with Christ; today I am sharing in his resurrection.

Yesterday I was buried with him; today I am waking with him from the sleep of death. Amen.

These words from Gregory of Nazianzus are an invitation to us to be lovers of God and as lovers to rejoice in this beautiful event. It is also an invitation to witness the magnificence of God’s creation.

And the words, “Yesterday I was dead with Christ; today I am sharing in his resurrection speaks of God’s love for us. It does not matter when you’ve arrived to Christ, be it today, yesterday, last week, last month, two years ago, whenever, you are invited to celebrate this Easter joy with thankfulness as you continue on your journey for nearness to God. The resurrection event is not a lament but an announcement of the universal kingdom of God in which we are all heirs and participants.

The first response to the resurrection is fear, fright, and absolute dumb struck ness. How did this happen we ask to cover a myriad of emotions and responses we may have to this event. And it doesn’t matter how you understand this event, i.e. a belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead, or you interpret this an allegory to describe the continual presence of Christ within us etc. The end result is still a fear, an anxiety, and the obsessive need to continue questioning of the meaning of the event in abstract terms. All of this contribute to a real confusion concerning the meaning of the resurrection event. But the angel reassures us with words of power and assurance. There is nothing to fear here, the spirit says, I know you are looking for Jesus, the One nailed to the Cross. He is not here. He was raised, just as he said. Come and look at the place where he was placed.”

I remember with awe, wonder, as a young pious Catholic boy the mystery and the power of this resurrection story. Encountering this mysterious event through the liturgy showed me how much power this event had for me and many others. In fact, visually the power of this and other biblical events could be seen in the numerous Cecil Di Mille movies which were attempts to make the bible stories come alive, particularly the life of Jesus and they did in a limited way.

But yet, as I grew older and even now as a mature adult I am haunted by the angel’s, message of power and purity. The angel’s words are spoken in the spirit of hope and assurance with a power not known to most of us until now. “He is not here; you’re looking for Jesus who has risen from the dead as he said.” And then I remember the words from this morning’s Act’s lesson. “He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.”

That means that this resurrection event must move us to preach and to testify that Jesus is the one ordained by God. The intense emotional experience of Holy Week was to push me (us) to the edge of our ourselves and then out of ourselves. Yes, we know doctrinally that we have been redeemed, saved, restored, to God, not just as individuals but as the human race. But there is more that, and, further redemption my brothers and sisters turns us around and moves us in directions we have previously not traveled.

The resurrection event is an overwhelming experience and as it provoked fear and joy so it does to us as well. The most overwhelming aspect of the resurrection is that once again Jesus has destroyed all the structures of fear that we have been socialized to live with. All the symbols of hierarchy, fear, anxiety, oppressions of various types have been pushed overboard by his death and resurrection. Certainly, they have not all disappeared but their power to hold us hostage has. We have been emptied of all that stuff we have carried with us. And that is frightening because our identity has been shaped by all of that chaos and now we are emptied of all we have known and carried thus far. But the angel’s message of power and purity comes with hope and an assurance that rather than being empty our spirits and souls have been filled with something else—that something else is a share into the divine, a glimpse into the eternal. A new day has been created in which the human story, both on the individual and communal, have become restored, renewed and transformed.

We are the new beginning. And what is this new beginning? Jacqueline Lewis describes this process of beginning this way: “We must now live on earth as we will live in heaven. We must now become the community that is a rehearsal for the reign of God.” We are called to be “as Lewis says, a “Pentecost paradigm Church”: a cooperative, communal, celebrative church. The Church is a liminal space, a community in which diversity and difference means joy and opportunity, surprise and creativity. It is a place where the people of God are able to be on earth as they expect to be in heaven. They can, and must, in other words, begin to rehearse the reign of God. Pentecost becomes the experience of the freedom from death and the beginning of the reign of God[1]

And the Surprise and Opportunities?

Well, It means the creation of new symbols, new and creative and different ways of relating to others, it means the development of a new discourse and by discourse I mean more than words but actions, ways of behaving, new ways of understanding all of God’s creation in which all forms of oppression, injustice, and otherness are turn around in such a way that our lives individually and communally truly becomes nourished by our faith and resting on the knowledge of the power of the resurrection event and experience. We know that death, in all its manifestations, no longer has a hold on us and death has been vanquished.

We can remove fear and death from our world only by God’s Spirit. Again Lewis helps us here. “We do this when we develop empathy, a genuine care and concern for the otherness of the other. We walk a mile in their sandals. We find empathy for the other because we search deep and discover the otherness of ourselves. When did I feel left out? When did I feel down? Where has my journey, my story, had turns in it that left me feeling disenfranchised? Our own otherness, our own sense of being the stranger, is strength as we seek to develop a border consciousness.”[2] The result is that the rehearsal of the human community becomes a living, breathing incarnation of the reign of God.

And so, my brothers and sisters,

Yesterday we were crucified with Christ; today we are glorified with him.

Yesterday we were dead with Christ; Today we are sharing in his resurrection.

Yesterday, we were buried with him; today we are waking with him from the sleep of death.

Amen.

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[1] Jacqueline Lewis Guest Editorial in Theology Today, Volumne 65, Number 1, pp 1-7.

[2] Ibid. p. 5.