Sunday, April 7, 2013

How we see the Risen Lord is revealed to us in the signs in our lives


Easter 2-C
April 7, 2013
Acts  5:27-32
Psalm 118:19-24
Revelation 1:4-8      
John 20:19-31

Since we cannot see God, it is only human nature that we should want some sort of sign that God exists and that God loves us. We want some sort of proof, for the realities of human existence can be dismal and anything we are only promised will be good must be touched, felt, tasted, smelled -- somehow demonstrated to be real -- before we can believe in its goodness.

Looking for that sign can make us kind of wacky. Do you know the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian – a bit of a spoof on a sometimes desperate search for a savior, set in 1st century Palestine? The crowd has somehow fixated on an ordinary person called Brian, and they begin chasing Brian through the desert near Jerusalem. He is running to get away from them, convinced he is no messiah. He loses a shoe but keeps running. “His shoe!” they all cry, “A sign!” And they immediate take of their shoes and run with one bare foot through the stony desert.

Or do you know this story, from the Middle Ages? During the Plague, the Pope was saying mass to pray for relief for the Romans, and he had a vision of an angel with a sword floating in the sky over the Castel Sant’Angelo. He knew it was a sign from God that the plague would soon end. And it did.

The Easter story is also about searching for signs – real signs that the promise of Jesus' resurrection from the dead was indeed true. In the Gospel of John alone there are four different ways the disciples come to believe in the resurrection. "[John] comes to faith after having seen the burial wrappings but without having seen Jesus himself. Magdalene sees Jesus but does not recognize him until he calls her by name. The disciples see and believe. Thomas also sees him and believes …” but only after he insists on seeing those actual wounds.

One of the central controversies of the early church was what to believe about the Risen Lord. People went to great extremes on both sides of the argument to make their points: "Jesus was just a vision," was countered with detailed and nearly gory accounts of his death and rising. Late in the first century, around the time the gospels were written, was the time when the eyewitnesses to the resurrection -- Mary, Peter, Thomas and the rest -- were dying. How do John and the other evangelists communicate this truth to the newer Christians -- the ones who were not around to see the signs of the Risen Christ and yet do believe?
After Thomas sees the signs of death in Jesus hands and believes in his resurrection, Jesus says, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." In saying this, Jesus in a sense turns away from the disciples around him (who indeed have or will soon see the Risen Lord) and turns to address us. Christians down through the ages, from the second generation of believers to us here today have not seen the Risen Lord and yet we believe. In our just-the-facts-ma’am-please world of the 21st century, it makes even less sense to say we believe in the resurrection of the dead that it did for those people who lived in the first or second centuries.

What died on the cross was the idea of a God who was also a magical mystery worker. Because we have this story of Thomas putting his finger through the hole in Jesus’ hand, we get the joke behind the story of the one-shoed false messiah. As the English writer A.N. Wilson put it, these stories of the resurrection provide us with no easy explanations or “fake consolations.” He goes on to describe why it is so hard to be a Christian:

The new God was to be found not in control, but in loss of control; not in strength but in weakness. He was no longer an explanation for what happens. He was now a person – a mysterious person who only the minute before had looked very much like the gardener sweeping the path. That has the profoundest implications for the human race and for human history for as long as it lasts. For we can no longer look to an imaginary God to hand out morality, to feed the poor, to heal the sick, to refashion the world along just and equitable lines. That is our responsibility now, and if it seems like a Godless world, we shall be judged – we, not God.

The Twelve did not recognize the friend who had been killed, brutally and savagely killed – they did not recognize him at first. But the one who doubted most of all saw, with the eyes of hindsight, that his Lord and his God was to be found not in the highest heavens and heaven of heavens but in a wounded human body: in bleeding hands, and pierced feet, and wounded side. It was in the presence of that abject vulnerability that Doubt was cast aside, and Faith could say, My Lord and my God![1]

"I shall be there," Jesus says. That is how the gospel of John ends, with Jesus' assurance that his spirit will
remain with us always, until the end of the age. How we understand that spirit -- how we have seen and continue to see the Risen Lord -- is revealed to us in signs – signs we see in our own lives, in the most surprising spots in life where the spirit breaks in – in relationships, and friendships, and moments of grace, in the food we serve to hungry people, in the children we teach, and the sick people we visit, and in the breaking of bread.



[1] A.N. Wilson, My Name is Legion, pp. 300-301

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