Day: April 8, 2024

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Every year on the Sunday following Easter Day–commonly called Low Sunday–we hear the same Gospel reading, St. John’s account of the Lord appearing to “Doubting Thomas.” So, I’ve preached sixteen sermons about this text, and usually it’s about Thomas’ doubt and belief and how we should be a bit more understanding of the poor man, because he’s more like us than we’d like to admit. I want to do something a bit different this year.

This morning I want to focus on a matter we see running through all our readings today, namely the oft-overlooked affirmation in scripture of material reality. I say it’s overlooked because sometimes Christians, even relatively well-catechized ones, make this assumption that ours is a primarily disembodied faith.

Some years ago I even had two seminary-trained clergy (I note, not Episcopal clergy, though this confusion is not unheard of among clergy in our own corner of Christendom) who were shocked to learn that I believed Christ’s Resurrection (as well as ours on the last day) was a fundamentally bodily, physical Resurrection, not something merely spiritual or spectral. Christianity is a profoundly body-affirming faith, even in its most ascetic movements, which seek to deny not physicality but fallen fleshliness. More about that in a moment. The opposite, the rejection of material existence and the Creation which, though fallen, God deemed good, is not Christianity but Gnosticism.

Let’s consider this morning’s readings. In his First Epistle General, St. John writes:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.

The word of life, the second person of the Trinity, was not merely a principle or a spiritual force. It, he, was “made manifest” such that he could be seen and heard and touched.

In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, however one may feel about the economic policy which it may imply (and that, I think, is complicated, and we’re not well served by trying to fit this neatly into modern political terms), one thing it does make clear is that the life of Christians is communal and has material implications. We do not see these early disciples each going his or her own way, becoming hermits, and living on bread and water to simulate a total detachment from physical existence. Whatever else might be said of the economics of early Christian community, it at least recognizes the fundamentally physical nature of existence, the understanding that possessions (however personal ownership and distribution is handled), are gifts from God created to enable human flourishing and require that we view them with a more nuanced moral and spiritual approach than simply saying “I detach myself from life and call these things illusory or somehow “less real” than some primal spiritual force, that they are some gnostic demiurge which must be shunned to enable us to disinterestedly float in the lotus position or something.

And finally, we have that famous story we hear this Sunday every year, but don’t worry right now whether Thomas was really doubting or believing (again, that’s a worthy question for a different sermon). Instead consider what Jesus does. On his first appearance in the upper room, he empowers the Apostles to forgive and retain sins by breathing on them. At his second appearance, when Thomas has joined the other Apostles, Jesus offers to let him touch his wounds. Jesus is making clear that his risen body is a physical body, and he continues to teach this message in the remainder of the Gospel, eating and drinking and building fire by which to warm himself and cook his breakfast.

There is one peculiar element of this story, and I love the answer one of my professors in seminary gave in a course I took on the Gospel of John. The doors are shut and locked, so how could an embodied Jesus get in? Is this not evidence that he is some kind of apparition or specter. Our prof said something like, “of course not; the point is that Jesus is even more solid than the door.” I don’t know whether explanation this holds up. I just know (1) I love it, and (2) John goes to such pains to affirm the physicality of the Risen Christ’s body that there must be some explanation like this.

Anyway, why is this all important? Why does it matter that Christ came back bodily and that we will too at the General Resurrection on the last day? It matters because it reminds us that Creation is not some inconvenient realm in which we can never live with purpose and gratitude. We are not just biding our time in some fleshy layover between states of pure spiritual existence. This life is not some mere test to see if we can become fully detached and join some kind of Nirvana or else get reincarnated as a slug or a chicken or something. God created the heavens and the earth and called them good. Our forebears’ fault caused it and us to fall, but God’s answer was not to dispatch some phantasmal lifeboats to get us out, but rather to redeem all of it. That redemption begins with God himself not only choosing to come to us as a man, but to die as one and to come back just as much of one. It will end when all other things end, not by God or entropy blowing it all up, but by the heavenly city coming to this earth that we might dwell in it, not as ghosties but as men and women, for all eternity. And our moral obligation is not to take this earth or our bodies or the well-being of our fellow human beings as soteriologically insignificant.

Sometimes poetry says it better than my theological ramblings, and so I’d like to close with the great 20^th Century writer and Episcopalian John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter.” I cannot remember if I’ve ever included this in a sermon before. (To be honest, sometimes I can’t remember if I said something in a sermon, put it in a newsletter article, or just posted on Facebook at one point or another). So, if I’ve shared this before, forgive me, but it’s one of those texts which I think bears repeating, anyway:

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Alleluia, Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I recently read that Mel Gibson is making a sequel to his controversial 2004 film about Jesus’ crucifixion and I’m concerned based solely on its title– The Passion of the Christ [colon] Resurrection [hyphen] Chapter One. Now, I have a soft spot for the biblical epics of old Hollywood, and I think it would be great if that genre had a resurgence, but I have my doubts about this one. For one thing, the movie-going public seems to have tired of film franchises, and I’m not so sure the “Jesus Cinematic Universe” will reverse this trend.

On a more serious note, I suspect one element of the Resurrection accounts will be difficult to capture–namely the fact that over and over again the Risen Lord is not at first recognized by those whom he visits. He spends a great deal of time on the road to Emmaus with some disciples and they don’t know it’s him until he breaks bread with them. Other disciples are fishing unsuccessfully, Jesus instructs them to cast their nets again, and they only realize it’s him after a miraculous catch. And most dramatically of all, in this morning’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize Jesus until he calls her by name. I just hope Gibson’s film doesn’t rely on cheap tricks to try to explain this away–say, having Jesus hide behind a bush in the garden or making the Magdalene so weepy that it blurs her vision–because there is something different happening here.

On one level, it makes sense that Jesus’ risen body is different from the one he had during his earthly ministry. He has not merely been resuscitated; his body has been recreated and perfected. It will be so for us, too, at the General Resurrection on the last day. He went and we shall go from a corruptible body to an incorruptible body. You’ll not need to worry about your trick knee or lower back pain or whatever in Paradise. We will be changed, just as he was changed.

More interesting, though, is the means whereby Mary and the others came to recognize Jesus. Jesus was not playing tricks on them, but I think he was teaching them and us something important here. It was their prior experience with Jesus that had permitted them to see him–a shared meal, the miraculous provision of something needful, the gentle way in which he addresses Mary Magdalene. It was Christ relating to them as he had always done during life which finally opened their eyes. It was because they had all been in relationship with Jesus that they were able finally to see him for who he was. This is God’s promise to us, too. In his First Epistle General, John writes “When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” This recognition is contingent, however, on our having known him on this side of eternity.

Because he has called us by name in Baptism, because he has broken bread with us in the Sacrament of the Altar, we have a good start, but in what other ways might we strive to come to know him more fully, more intimately?

There is an unfortunate reticence among us mainline Christians to use the language of personal relationship. I’m not guiltless on this count, and I’ve made bad jokes in the past about how I have an institutional relationship with Jesus. It is perhaps more accurate to say that I am so constituted that I find having an intellectual relationship with Christ more natural than having an emotional, personal one, and this is not to my credit. The fact of the matter is that Jesus wants to be on a first name basis with us, just as he was with Mary and with John, his beloved disciple. Yes, he is our Lord and God and Master. He desires also to be our dearest friend.

This only makes sense. If we’re to spend an eternity with somebody, it might be wise to get to know that person, right? Thanks be to God that we have this opportunity, because Jesus is alive. He reigns in glory from his throne in heaven. He gives of himself in the Sacrament. He is alive in the hearts of all who would abide in his love.

When I was a young man discerning a vocation in the church I had a spiritual director, a monk from the Order of the Holy Cross in New York. He told me that if I were to go down the path toward this peculiar life, as I ultimately did, the only thing that was going to see me through it was if I regarded my relationship with Jesus as what he called a “primary relationship” equivalent to the sort of relationship one would have with a spouse or a blood relative or a best friend. He was right, but I think he didn’t go far enough. Yes, that sort of relationship with Jesus is necessary for one in Holy Orders, but it’s no less necessary for any Christian man, woman, or child. For even those closest to us are capable of disappointing us or hurting us or abandoning us. This is simply the nature of fallen, sin-sick humanity. But there is one who loves us who will never, who can never, do these things–the sinless one who lives and desires only to be our companion in this life and in eternity. What’s more, maintaining this primary relationship makes all those other relationships easier, because we can look past those things which disappoint or annoy in them and in ourselves, knowing that we have all been caught up in the perfect love of Christ, which makes them and us lovable despite all the human nonsense that might militate against that fundamental reality.

My prayer on this day of triumph and joy for all of us is that, being convinced that we have a Savior who lives, we will be renewed in heart and mind to do those things which nurture our love of him and our recognition of his perfect love for us. As I am want to say, while the finer points of theology and Christian ethics may be complicated and difficult (precisely because they are important) this most important thing really isn’t that complicated. It is not “rocket surgery”, to use my favorite mixed metaphor. It’s as simple as coming to church and reading your bible and, most importantly of all, going to Jesus in prayer and speaking with him honestly and sincerely and simply, as one would speak to a friend.

He hears you, because he is alive. He will visit you in your times of greatest joy and of greatest sorrow, because he is alive. When friend and neighbor have been put far from you and darkness seems your only companion, he stands by your side, he will not abandon you, and you will see him if only you open your eyes, because he is alive. And at the last, when this life draws to a close, when this old world ebbs away, suddenly our eyes will open, and the first thing we see will be Jesus, and the first thing we hear will be those words he has desired us to hear all along: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the Kingdom which has been prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“What is truth?” It seems a rather modern sort of question for Pilate to ask Jesus, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, I cannot read this bit of John without thinking of one of the professors in a team-taught, interdisciplinary course I took back in college The prof was a video artist and self-labeled hippy who came back from Vietnam with more than just the unkempt beard he still sported. He came back with a cynicism which caused him to reject the faith in which he was formed, to the point of having dreamed as a child (believe it or not) of being a Lutheran pastor. This professor would stop in the middle of his lectures at sometimes appropriate and sometimes inappropriate points and say “’What is truth?’… -Pontius Pilate.” He, like many of his generation, was struggling (seemingly without success) at either figuring out the answer or else rejecting the question as meaningless.

Indeed, this is perhaps the central question of our age. Get beyond the particular controversies of the culture wars, and the question is there: “what is truth?”. Is truth simply that which is empirically or rationally verifiable, as the logical positivists claimed? If they’re right, claims like “two and two make four” or “John is wearing a black stole” are true, but any theological claim is properly meaningless. Is truth simply a human construct, as some postmodernists would claim? If that were the case, my truth and your truth would be so potentially divergent that Pilate’s would be a question without any meaningful answer.

Needless to say, I’m not buying either of these theories of truth. Nor, however, would I be comfortable saying that truth is simple. It is both objective and complex. Now, that’s all well and good for a philosophy class, but what do we say about truth when faced with the beauty and the horror of everything we Just heard in John’s account of the Passion? I think most of us (though perhaps not all), because we find ourselves in church on Good Friday, would say there is a powerful truth in what we just heard, even if we couldn’t put it into the most theologically elegant terms. But imagine how the story would sound for one who is either unable or unwilling to muster up a commitment to the central convictions of our faith, one who hasn’t annually gone through the highs and lows of the Paschal Triduum (these great three days we’re in the midst of). I would imagine that the story would not strike them as hopeful. I would imagine that the only truth they could glean might be the facts as we are presented them. A great man suffers a defeat. All is lost for this man and for those whom he had led.

What is truth? Jesus had answered the question already:

Ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἡ ζωή

“I am the way and the truth and the life.” Here, Jesus discloses two very important things for our purposes tonight. First, he reminds us of his divinity. “Ἐγώ εἰμι” is a reduntant way of saying “I am” in Greek. He constructs his language, however, to remind us of God’s answer to Moses, when he appeared to him as a burning bush in the third chapter of Exodus:

Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

God’s answer was four Hebrew letters “yod, he, vav, he”. It means “I am who I am”. God simply is. He is “Pure Being”. Existence is itself affirmation, and thus Christ (who calls himself Ἐγώ εἰμι) is the “yes”, the affirmation, the truth of existence.

If that’s a bit too heady, look at the another word Jesus uses- ἀλήθεια. It’s the Greek word for truth, but it means a great deal more than how we tend to use the word. It doesn’t just mean a correct proposition. It means disclosure, revelation. It literally means “the state of not being hidden”. Christ then, is the truth of God. He is a God whom we can see and touch and taste and love with all our hearts.

I think this can help us look at Jesus’ death in a new way. He was crucified for our sins, and it was our love of sin which killed him. Sin is like a blindfold which shields us from the light of truth. Truth set us free to love, yet we seem to prefer our bondage.

Even with its last breath, though, truth continues. The reality of God’s love is not fully hidden until it is pushed into a tomb and shielded by a stone. What is the last thing Jesus says to anybody that is not specifically to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies?

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”

Even with Jesus’ dying breath he reveals the most moving sort of love. Truth gets its final word.

And then we find ourselves at the tomb- not the joyful empty tomb of Easter, but the dark, dank depth of despair. Our Lord and Our God, Our Way and Our Life, Our Love and Our Truth lifeless and dim and obscure. Here is our God, rejected and killed. Here we are, derided and rejected and hopeless. We cannot skip to the happy ending today. Today we die with Christ in his death. Today we mourn. We mourn for ourselves and for the children whom we brought into this cold, unlovely world, this world permeated by death. Who now can save us? We wait and we watch and we try to keep some glimmer of hope amidst the encroaching darkness.