John 20:19-30
“Christ is risen. He is Risen Indeed!”
“If you let Easter, and your own experience of Easter, fall away, will you then be able to experience the Risen Christ?”
Today, we hear in the Gospel how it was when the disciples first experienced the Risen Christ. I invite you to join me in going back to the intense and dramatic reality of that day. The disciples are bereft. Their leader has been killed, and before his brutal death on the cross, the disciples had run away and abandoned him.
Truth be told, the disciples, all along, had a great deal of difficulty understanding what it is that Jesus is about. They listened, they witnessed healing miracles, they received teachings, but it was very elusive for the disciples truly to grasp what Jesus was sharing with them. We still, 2000 plus years later, are trying to understand Jesus’s teachings
In our book group, which meets here in the Christ Church library on Monday mornings at 10, we’ve been reading The Last Week, by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Our discussions are lively, while we review the tumultuous events of Jesus’s last week, as chronicled in the Gospel of Mark. Again and again, the understanding of the disciples is presented as a failed discipleship. They mean well, yes. They dropped everything to follow Jesus, yes. But did they really ‘get’ what he was saying and teaching? No, not really.
And, now, Jesus, whom they had seen as the Messiah, who they’d hoped heroically would lead their people out of the oppressive Roman occupation, had instead been killed, hung like a common criminal on the cross at Calvary. The disciples are frightened and agitated. They are gathered together, in darkness of night, behind closed doors. They fear the authorities will come and arrest them for sedition, for covertly working against the established order.
Fearful and agitated, the disciples experience deep grief, a profound chasm of loss, and one can guess that all their spiritual moorings are adrift. Each one may be struggling with a difficult conscience, having gone to sleep in the garden at Gethsamene, and then disappeared, at the time of Jesus’s deepest need for their companionship and emotional support.
If you had left a friend at a time of his or her greatest need, how might you feel? As Christians, we know to love and support one another, most especially in the darkest personal times,…… but, we are human, we are busy, we make excuses, and sometimes we’re simply not able to rise to the challenge to do the right thing at the right time in the right way.
If we then suddenly were to see that person, whom we felt we’d abandoned, standing before us, what complex emotions might stir within us? A fear of rebuke, of being blamed for an emotional and physical abandonment at our beloved friend’s deepest time of need? With our own sense of personal failing and guilt, would we not almost welcome angry blame and rebuke?
Imagine you are one of the disciples, behind ‘shut doors’, and you are frightened, and in intense grief, and confused about what you might have done and didn’t. Imagine that you are there, as
“Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”
No rebuke. No anger. A simple invitation into the deepest peace possible.
“Jesus CAME and STOOD among them and said; ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples REJOICED when they saw the Lord. “
Every single living cell within the disciples must have leapt for joy, at this encounter with the Risen Christ. This living, loving presence was way beyond any of their wildest imaginings. His appearance was outside of any normal frame of reference, and just to absorb it in the moment would require a huge experiental leap into the miraculous.
And what does Jesus then say to them?
He repeats, “Peace be with you” And, then, he goes on to say, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” These 10 disciples, who know they are far from perfect, are being commissioned to carry on the teachings of their Teacher
At this moment, one can only imagine their incredulity. Jesus is here, with them, blessing them and commissioning them to continue his blessed ministry out in the world.
If you were there, if you were one of the disciples, how might you be feeling at this moment?
I know what I’d feel. Me? You are asking ME to carry on your ministry? Oh my goodness, I feel all opened up inside and I would deny you nothing. My answer would be yes, but a timid yes, as HOW could I do such a thing? I’m merely me.
“As the Father has sent me, so I send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
Jesus animates the disciples with the Holy Spirit, and they will go forward inspired by that same Holy Spirit, empowered with a new authority. Yes, only God is able to forgive sins, yet the disciples, at this pivotal moment at the very beginning of Christianity, …….the disciples, now guided by the Holy Spirit, will be able to carry the message of Jesus out into the world. They will invite their listeners to repent and to turn back to God, and so their sin instantly will be forgiven, OR, if their listeners cannot understand and accept the invitation to repentance and forgiveness, their sins will be retained.
Only 10 of the 12 disciples are present at this revelatory moment, as Jesus comes and stands among them. Who and where are where are the other 2 disciples?
One, of course, is Judas, the betrayer, who has suffered a horrific end. The other is Thomas, who has missed this gathering. He did not ‘show up’. We often hear that 90% of life is ‘showing up’, and for Thomas, in this encounter, it appears he has missed out, big time. The other disciples tell him “ We have seen the Lord.” But Thomas said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
Thomas wants proof. He is a rational fellow, and one is very sympathetic to his sense of incredulity at the report he’s receiving of the resurrection of Jesus.
Our Gospel story continues,
“A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”
Jesus invites Thomas to touch him, to put his hand into his wounded side. Surely, Thomas then would believe that Jesus, risen from the dead, stands before him.
Thomas does not need to touch the wound. What Thomas says, in a moment of Holy Awe, ‘is “My Lord and my God.”
Thomas grasps the deepest meaning of what he is experiencing: Jesus has become the Christ. Thomas experiences the divinity of Jesus and instantly he is able to name the experience, “My Lord and my God”
The Risen Christ, in whom the deity dwells, is in their midst, in that room with the shut doors. This appearance did not happen in the temple, in front of thousands of worshipers. It is not carried around the globe in an instant on CNN. It happened in a private place, behind shut doors, to 10 and then to 11, and these 11 will bring forward the beginnings of our shared faith, Christianity.
You might be asking yourselves, “ Did this story as recounted in the Gospel of John really, ‘literally’ happen? In Mark, the earliest Gospel, there is a reference of Jesus ‘being raised, and in Matthew and Luke there are a series of brief ‘appearance’ stories, of the disciples encountering the Risen Christ in their midst. In Luke, Jesus eats a piece of broiled fish—something a disembodied spirit would not be able to do.
Grasping the concept of the living Christ is a leap for us. It was a leap for the disciples. It’s as though our minds need to be stretched beyond our ‘little’ pictures of expectation to the vast experience of transcendent reality in the Risen Christ. Our minds need to be broken open, beyond the here and now of our literal world, to grasp the eternal gift of the Risen Christ, the Jesus who is with us, and not limited by any parameters of time and space.
I have a few friends who tell me they enjoy a personal relationship with Jesus, who comes to be with them at moments, which may be gentle and quiet, or intense and filled with significance. I don’t express my relationship with Jesus in that way….Yet, I do know that after my younger brother, John, who bravely fought cancer for a decade, died a year ago last February,--about a week after his death I was serving as an acolyte at the Ash Wednesday evening service. I was sitting right over there. I could feel the presence of John, who was right there, with me. It was more than a spiritual sense. It was a felt sense, a visitation. Perhaps John came to me then, as he was a devout Episcopalian, and our worship space energetically drew him here at that moment. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I received a precious gift of presence, and an infusion of God’s grace, and that has stayed with me.
In the Gospels the ‘appearance’ narratives happen over a space of 40 days, after which Jesus will ascend to the Father. His disciples are commissioned to carry on his ministry. While inspired by the Holy Spirit, they will not have the living Jesus among them. The work of the apostles, going forward, is to convince those who ‘have not seen’ but will ‘hear’ the testimony of the apostles’.
When you are very frightened, when you are in the deepest grief, when you are all shook up and feel you have lost your moorings, it is exactly then, at that precise moment, that you want to find Jesus at the very center of your life. (softer voice) He is in our midst now, at the very center. The Risen Christ is here in church with us.
Earlier, I asked you, “If you let Easter, and your own experience of Easter, fall away, will you then be able to experience the Risen Christ?
We experience the risen Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist, at the breaking of the bread. We experience the risen Christ, when we extend the Peace to our neighbor. When we sit quietly with a friend, who is agitated, perhaps bereft, and are able to offer Peace, we know that Jesus, the Christ, is present, right here, right now, in our midst. Welcome the Risen Christ in your heart, invite him right into the center of your being, and allow the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to work through you.
Amen
