Easter 2, Year A
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
Acts 2: 14a, 22-32, Psalm 111, 1 Peter 1: 3-9, John 20: 19-31
The core of today's gospel reading - underscored in Peter's first letter - is pretty obvious, isn't it?! "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."
That message makes this passage from John's gospel one of the more beloved in the New Testament...."Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."
And since 99.999% of Christendom for 99.999% of its existence - nearly two thousand years worth - fits into the category of "have not seen" - all but a handful of individuals, in fact - I guess there's no surprise that this would be so!
I also suspect that there are a lot more "Thomases" out there - and even in here - that we might think - now, in this modern scientific, industrialized age more than ever
It's hard to know what really happened from this distance - except to say that something did happen, and it was an amazing "something"!
If you look at the biblical record what emerges about this moment, this resurrection, is a rather muddled bundle of traditions which seem to agree on only one thing: that what occurred on the Third Day - all the things that occurred on the Third Day - came as a total and absolute surprise to all the participants.
There is, as one scholar has said, "a central silence" about the actual event of resurrection that doesn't get broken until the second century - as much as a hundred years after that moment in Jerusalem in the early part of the first century of the Common Era.
I suppose that shouldn't really surprise us. With the resurrection we have entered a place that is beyond the ability of mere words to describe. Language is not adequate, and even the early writers - the evangelists - knew that.
Yet it's not accurate to say that language is never adequate, nor that words always fail to describe. Our need to explain conveys us to a place of where we have to use the tools we have to describe the new possibilities opened up to us by the events that we celebrate today - we have to take "mere words" and mold them into something that conveys meaning for us.
So what the Church says is something like this: "We will die. We can't avoid it. We have to let go. But God remains. As the Archbishop of Canterbury has said: "God's unshakeable love is untouched by death, and all we do and all we care about matters to [God]. [God] and [God] alone is free to make us afresh, to re-establish the world on the far side of every catastrophe."
So it is, we can know, that "Jesus rises from the dead so as to find not only his home in heaven but his home in us."
Jesus rises from the dead so that we, too, may rise out of those graves of guilt, those prisons of anxiety, or self-obsession, that are so much a part of our daily living.
But what we have to remember - what St. Paul continually reminds us of - is that we have to get used to dying, to parts of us dying, on a daily basis, just as Jesus died. That's what Paul means when he says we have to be buried with Christ in baptism so as to be raised with Christ. Baptism is a little death - a death of the old ways of living - as well as new life.
And we have to get used to dying. Period. No where in the bible does it say that we can cheat death, can avoid death. No where in the bible does it say that those we love can cheat death, can avoid death. No where in the bible does it say we will be spared the pain of loss and separation.
But God's gracious message does come though loud and clear. "When you face death I'm on the far side of it'"
That's why we hear so often the same message throughout the various resurrection accounts - even from Jesus himself: "Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid".
For with death we enter the resurrection life, we enter the borderlands of the Holy, the undiscovered country of grace and truth that lies beyond. There can be no resurrection without death.
But with death there is resurrection. Not, "will be", but "is" - "Resurrection..presumes the start of cosmic transformation, not just the promise of it, not just the hope of it, not just talk about it, and not just theology about it." (John Dominic Crossan) - Resurrection presumes, in the words of a prayer book collect that: "things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which have grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by the one through whom all things were made...Jesus Christ..."
All of which is to say 'don't think that resurrection' is something that only happened 2,000 years ago, or something that will only happen sometime in the future. This is not just an old story, or a future story, but a "now" story.
And Easter is not as the end of the story, the destination that we travel each liturgical year to reach, the happy ending after which we can all go home feeling good about ourselves and the world.
In fact the empty tomb is the beginning of the story. The beginning of each of our stories. The new life of the Spirit, the life we share with God in Jesus.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
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