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The
Geelong City Parish, UCA |
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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen
Well the chocolate
festa that is otherwise known as Easter is finally over, thank goodness!
The last of the easter eggs are vanishing from the supermarket shelves
– at heavily discounted prices, I can tell you! - diets are
being reassessed, blood sugar levels are returning to legal limits.
A good time for us to turn with renewed focus to the real
point of Easter, as we reflect over the coming weeks of the Easter
season on just what it is what we have to celebrate.
The Lord is risen! This is the way Christians have greeted one another since the very first Easter, Christ is risen from the dead! That’s the very heart of it all – the central affirmation of the Christian faith, the very essence of the Churches language and culture. He is risen. It is the foundational mystery – and it is just that, a mystery – something we are meant to struggle with, wrestle with. As many of us no doubt do!
I mean are we modern, sophisticated, mostly intelligent people seriously meant to believe that this crucified man who is quite definitely dead on the eve of Good Friday is yet somehow miraculously restored to life by Easter Sunday morning?
Well, in a word, yes! – that’s exactly what we are invited to believe. Which means we secularly educated bi-products of modern and post modern skepticism are put on a very steep learning curve!
And one of the first things that need to be learned is how to hear stories like the resurrection. Which means developing something like a ‘theological imagination’: you read and hear poetry with a poetic ear, a poetic imagination, and you read and hear theological narratives with a theological ear and imagination – your ear is tuned to a different kind of facticity than simple historic or scientific fact – which is not to say that there will not be elements of each of these in a theological reading. But we are to read them asking ‘what kind of insight do these stories offer into a Christian understanding of God?’ A fascination with questions like: how is something like a bodily resurrection is possible - while interesting - are in danger of missing the point entirely.
So what is the point? Well there are entire libraries dedicated to exploring the possibilities – and I’ve got about 5 minutes left– so we’ll stick to just three today suggested by our reading from John.
Firstly – for John there is a very definite sense in which Jesus is present to his disciples after his death – definite, but certainly not straight-forward. It is a mysterious presence – it is not simply the same as his pre-death presence. Jesus suddenly appears to his disciples in a room which has its doors locked - in other words he doesn’t come to them through the door which one might usually expect a person to do, that is he comes to them in a way that is not the same as the way he related to them prior to his death. It is the same Jesus, as we know from his showing of his wounded body – but he comes to them in quite a different, more ambiguous, way. He is most definitely present with them, but in a new way.
Secondly, when Jesus comes to his disciples, he comes bringing peace. Three times Jesus says this in our reading this morning. And this is not the Helen Steiner Rice school of Christian theology kind of peace – you know, fluffy clouds, on a pale blue horizon, fluffy white doves, fluffy rabbits – a pretty fluffy kind of peace, if you ask me!! This is something quite different – this is a peace that is clearly identified with the Jesus we encounter in his ministry – the Jesus who brings hope and healing to the sick and suffering, who gives life where there is no life, who draws together a diverse group of people and makes a community of them – and a peace which ends up ruffling the feathers of the powerful and leads to the events of Good Friday. ‘My peace I bring to you, my peace I give to you…’ says Jesus earlier in John’s gospel. And here that promise is fulfilled as Jesus appears amongst this group of frightened, grieving disciples, reestablishing that peace they experienced with him prior to is death.
And this peace that he brings we are to understand as the peace of God – for Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, as God’s act, is God’s vindication of Jesus message and ministry - that all are destined for fellowship with God; and which finds its concrete expression in the experience of peace of those gathered in the presence of Jesus.
Finally, when Jesus appears to his disciples he brings with him the Holy Spirit – he ‘breathes it’ into the community. In a ‘little while’ the resurrected Jesus will no longer ‘appear’ – as he does in this story - yet in his absence we are left with this Spirit which mediates to us, and in our midst, the ‘peace of God’. Yet this spirit is not unambiguous either, as we learn from Thomas. He greets the disciples’ claims to have seen the risen Lord with a fairly well developed skepticism – this even after they have received the gift of the Spirit! ‘I’ll believe it when I see it!’ says Thomas in essence. And if the Christian community is the place where we encounter the ‘peace of God’, then it is understandable that skepticism is increasingly the response to the Christian message. ‘Peace’ is not something that readily comes to mind when we look at Church history, or the past and present divisions of denominationalism.
But again we have to beware of fuzzy notions of peace. The peace that Jesus brings and the Spirit mediates does not dissolve differences of opinion, doesn’t dissolve conflict between members of the community. Rather it does not permit these to be the final arbiters of what constitutes this community. We are made into one fellowship by the gift of the Spirit, breathing new life into us - not by our own capacities to find agreement with one another. Our communal existence is God’s gift, not our creation!
The eucharistic
table is the sign par excellence of that gift: Where we come with
all our differences and yet despite all these share together the
body and blood of Christ which alone makes us one holy community.
This is not an ideal political organization – an attempt at
a human utopia. It is the peace of God offered
to us in the body and blood of God’s Son, who, rising from
death, becomes the basis of a peace that transcends even our best
efforts, and in that sense, is truly mysterious, surpassing all
understanding!
That is mystery, in the very best sense of the word – the
overwhelming, gracious, healing and peacemaking love of God that
is able to be present with us in unexpected,
unexplained ways – that is able to
break through all our limits and boundaries, our closed doors, our
closed minds, our closed hearts, and bring the light of new life
to us: life that is raised above and beyond anything we would hope
to imagine.
He is
risen! The life of justice, peace and love that he lived
is still with us – in extraordinary and sometimes very ordinary
ways. He is with us, as we gather together and
share in his spirit, living - by the power of that spirit - the
life he has called us to live. That is the mystery, that is the
promise, that is the blessing of our Easter faith. And we are all
sent into our world, so in need of hope and promise and new life,
to boldly affirm in word and deed: The lord is risen! He is risen
indeed! Thanks be to God.
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