Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
The Second Sunday of Easter - April 19, 2020
Acts 2:14a,22-32
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31
Click here for an audio version of this sermon.
of thee three things I pray:
to see thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
follow thee more nearly, day by day. Amen.
If you have been following the readings for the daily Eucharist and daily Offices appointed for this past Easter Week, that week that the Eastern Orthodox tradition calls Bright Week, you will have heard or read no less than thirteen Gospel accounts of various appearances of Jesus after his Resurrection. And this is in addition to the passage from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians that we read on Monday, one the earliest text we have attesting to the Resurrection, where Paul tells us:
“…I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.”Paul adds that sometime later, perhaps several years later, Jesus also appeared to him on the road to Damascus, an event which Paul understands to be of the same nature and magnitude of those Gospel stories and making him an apostle in his own right.
These thirteen accounts overlap and, as you know, the details do not always agree. Through the ages there have been numerous attempts to construct a ‘harmony” of these accounts, to make them orderly, to assign a time and place for each, and to mold them into a coherent whole. But in truth, this is virtually impossible. And to say this is to say no more or no less than that these Gospel narratives of the appearances of the Risen One are exactly what we might expect in ordinary human experience.
I am thinking here of reports of accidents or crimes or other sudden, dramatic events. Those directly involved or even more distant observers often have strikingly divergent accounts of what occurred. It is now generally accepted that people see and remember things differently or fail to see certain things at all or forget or embellish or even create important details.
If you, for example, have taken an introductory psychology course in the past 20 years or so, you have probably been introduced to the Invisible Gorilla. This is a fascinating video test of perception, of its power and its limitations. The subjects are asked to watch a video of two teams of three people each pass around a basketball. They are instructed to be attentive to how many times the team in white shirts did a pass. It lasts for about a minute. And about halfway through, a woman dressed as a gorilla walks into the middle of the group, faces the camera, beats her chest, and then exits. The amazing thing is that, when shown in a classroom setting, about 50 percent of the classroom subjects do not notice the gorilla. They were too busy counting the number of passes. If you’ve never seen this video, you can watch it on YouTube. Just enter “Invisible Gorilla.” You will find yourself asking, as did I: how did they ever not see that?
Another equally famous experiment involves a journalism professor delivering a lecture. In the midst of it, an accomplice enters the classroom, a mildly charged verbal exchange ensues between the professor and the accomplice, who then pulls out a banana, “shoots” the professor and exits. The class is then immediately asked to write down what they saw. And not surprisingly, perhaps, many saw not a banana but a gun. Now admittedly the banana was painted black, but still. What do we really see and how trustworthy are our perceptions? And what do we miss? And when and how often?
And then of course there is the recognized fact that memories can be and are modified and change over time and under certain conditions, often tailored to what we would have liked to have happened or what we think the inquirer might want to hear. Certainly, the older I get, the more dramatic this appears. I am now often surprised at what my sister remembers of our childhood and at how different it is from my own memories. Hers are often more textured or nuanced and certainly different.
There is an extensive literature in the social, psychological, and medical sciences surrounding this that touches on all areas of our life, from the reliability of eyewitnesses in criminal or civil investigations to community relations to, yes, even biblical truth.
Should it surprise us, then, that the various stories of the Resurrection diverge in details both small and great, and that individual and communal memory over time has shaped and reshaped the narratives of these biblical authors and their sources? I think not.
In today’s gospel, Jesus tells Thomas and us: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Nevertheless, we prioritize seeing. We still say, “Seeing is believing.” Though again we must ask: what is seeing? Just what kind of seeing are we and Jesus talking about? Are we like those subjects who observe an event and miss the gorilla right in their midst? Or like those who see a gun where there is only a banana? Are there deeper, more adequate ways of understanding seeing and sensing Truth that go beyond crude experiments?
In his weekly column posted on Good Friday, New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni profiled Cyrus Habib, the young lieutenant governor of Washington state. And in a follow-up newsletter, Bruni reminds us that Habib, who is not yet forty:
“…went blind at age 8, graduated from Columbia University, won a Rhodes scholarship, got a Yale law degree and made a big splash in politics, then decided that ambition was consuming him. He recently announced that he would leave office later this year to begin the roughly 10-year process to become a…Jesuit priest.”Bruni continues:
“Because of space constraints, there was much about Habib that I didn’t get to share in the column. For instance, I mentioned his trek last year to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro but not his revelatory, gorgeous explanation of what a blind climber experiences in lieu of a conventionally defined view.Bruni's title comment for this is: “We see with more than our eyes.”
“You feel it,” Habib told me. “You feel the whole world dropping away. I have a sense of spatiality, based on acoustics and maybe even other types of senses that I can’t scientifically describe. I can feel when I’m in a huge cathedral. I can feel when I’m in a small bedroom.” At the top of Kilimanjaro, he said, “It felt to me like I was on the moon, because of the thinness of the air. You’re kind of high — lightheaded — and you feel this sense of vastness that’s not just around you but also below you. You can feel it in your body.”
Cyrus Habib certainly sees with more than his eyes. Mary Magdalene saw with more than her eyes. And so did Peter and Thomas and the other Apostles. And the women at the tomb and maybe even those 500 disciples that St. Paul refers to. And so, my brothers and sisters, do we. Our seeing, our faith is never perfect. We sometimes see guns where there are only bananas and we miss the gorillas. But we do see Jesus, somehow, with more than our eyes, though we may not be able to describe it scientifically. And that seeing is for me, at least, at the very root of faith. That is why I am here today. And probably why you are as well. And that may be enough for us to know now, today in this very strange season.
What then do I say of the Resurrection of Christ? I say: Yes! But what exactly that Yes entails is often quite unclear or downright opaque. Some days I’m ready to affirm the words of the 39 Articles of Religion that: “Christ did truly rise again from the dead, and took again his body, with flesh, bones and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature.” And on other days, all I can manage is simply to confess that “Christ is risen” and trust that he will, in his tender mercy and at the right time, fill in the details. In either case, however, and in any case, I need to be prepared to see with more than my eyes. And so must we all. We need to sense with our whole being and, as Cyrus Habib says, feel in our body the advent of the Risen One who comes to us in our upper rooms or on our road to our Emmaus or who meets us in Galilee, wherever that might be. We must keep our eyes open, all of them. We must, to paraphrase the Prologue to Rule of St. Benedict, gaze with the eye of the heart.
Once again I find myself challenged and comforted by the words of Archbishop Rowan Williams who said, “No matter how early you go to the tomb, God has already been there first.”
It’s not about getting up early enough or getting there fast enough, is it? It’s about opening our eyes to the One who, no matter how early or late we arrive at the tombs or graveyards or dead places in our lives, is there ahead of us preparing a place, longing to greet us, to feed us, to heal us, and embrace us and who is content to abide with us forever.
If only we could see this. If only we could see him. If only we could learn to see with more than our eyes.
Day by day, dear Lord,
of thee three things I pray:
to see thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
follow thee more nearly, day by day. Amen.
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