My Lord and My God
March 30, 2008
Doug Johnson Hatlem
Text:
John 20:19-31
The Lord IS risen. Risen indeed.
Jesus has emptied his tomb. His body revivified. Death conquered – death, that last enemy, which according to Paul, is now, and shall be, abolished. Here we are a week later. Christ is Risen! The regency of Israel’s Messiah is in its infancy. The world does not yet know that it has been conquered. Jesus has been lifted up. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord. Hallelujah! Death and the gates of hell have been defeated. Hallelujah! As our reading from Acts 2:24 puts it, God raised Jesus up, having freed him from death because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.
Faith and Seeing. Sight and insight. Perception. Vision…Knowledge.
The text of John begins with the simple affirmation that the world did not recognize Christ. As an Easter people it is perhaps a strange thing that on the week that follows the resurrection, we spend a little time contemplating doubt. A lack of sight….
The disciples in our passage for this morning are a sight for sore eyes. They are not in any position, so it seems, to be sent anywhere, let alone to turn the world upside down. Yet almost immediately upon entering the room, Jesus sends the disciples as the Father has sent Him. We might understand this sending better, and perhaps also Thomas’s doubt, if we spend time peering into three rooms. Let us dwell then on the War Room, the Sending Room, and the Prayer Room.
Sending Room
To begin, let us consider for a moment the room in which the disciples are huddled in John 20. This is the central room for our reflection this morning. I am calling it the sending room. For some strange reason it is a somber room. Mary Magdalene has reportedly seen Jesus, but the room is nevertheless full of fear and faithlessness. It is not just Thomas who doubts in this well known passage, the risen Jesus has to appear miraculously because the doors of the room are locked, closed up tight against the possibility that the other shoe is about to fall. The disciples have shut and barred the doors for fear that the powers that be will find them next. Many of the disciples will in fact be found out, many of them will suffer martyrdom, but they are not ready yet. First they must be sent into the world.
We are used to thinking of the Commissioning of the Disciples and the giving of the Holy Spirit as two separate events. The Gospel of John, however, gives them both to us within the space of a verse and a half. Look with me if you will at verses 21 and 22. “ ‘As the Father has sent me, so send I 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.’” Unfortunately this part of our passage is often overlooked. Far more sermons are preached on Jesus’ miraculous Resurrection body that passes through walls, or on Thomas’s doubts, or even on John’s subsequent explication of his purpose in writing down a gospel account. The story of the giving of the Holy Spirit in Acts is far more time honoured. Indeed, our Liturgical calendar assumes a gap between the Resurrection Commissioning and the Sending of the Holy Spirit. Today, for instance, we are beginning the second week of Easter. Pentecost remains seven weeks ahead. Nevertheless we are considering the giving of the Holy Spirit today, for it is the Spirit by which Jesus sends his disciples from this room into the world.
War Room
Perhaps this is the same upper room in which the Last Supper was eaten. Perhaps it had been rented for the entirety of what we now call Holy Week. This is the room for our observation that I would like to call the War Room. I am calling it the War Room because we are so used to thinking of this room as the room that is solemn. We too easily associate our habits in commemorating and participating in the Lord’s Supper with those of the disciples. Perhaps the disciples engaged in deep, silent reflection as they celebrated the Passover, but they in fact seem more concerned, in the various Gospel accounts, with an expected revolution. They want to know who the traitor is among them. They want to know who will sit at Jesus’ right hand when they have overthrown the Herodians and the Romans. They want to reassure Jesus that they are willing to go down fighting with him. This is a War Room. This is a seditious room. It is only on this account the Judas’s betrayal makes any sense. In spite of Jesus’ constant teaching on servanthood, the disciples are quite sure that first, they are going to throttle their enemies.
In The Last Supper Leonardo da Vinci has tried his utmost to capture the reaction of the disciples to Jesus’ insistence that “one of you will betray me.” The posture of each disciple is drawn from whatever material about their character that da Vinci could lay his hands on. Thomas, palm inward, paints a questioning almost accusatory finger toward the ceiling. James clears the air in front of him and casts a skeptical eye. Across the table, Judas leans back with deep-set eyes, and Peter pushes past him clutching a dagger in one hand while leaning over John and his other hand as he asks Jesus who the traitor is. Matthew, Thaddeus, and Simon the Zealot conference with each other over this strange charge. This is a group by and large bent on following Jesus into battle. When the disciples scatter after Jesus commands Peter to put up his sword, it is because they, feel, betrayed. They are ready to die for Jesus’ kingdom. They are devastated when he refuses to lead them into open aggression. The disciples in the Upper War Room are not yet ready to be sent because they are determined to take. They are ready to take the kingdom of God with Jesus by force.
And so it is that we find them in John 20 – dejected, fearful, gathered together again because they have no where else to go. Could they blithely return to their jobs as fisherman and tax collectors after three years with a messianic pretender? The disciples of Jesus on this morning are huddled together. Huddled together in fear. Huddled together indoors. With the doors locked. Locked against those that the Johannine community takes to be its great enemies, The Jews. Jesus is risen, and some of the women disciples have visited the open and evacuated grave. They have encounte
red Jesus in his resuscitated and transformed Flesh.
The remainder of the disciples continue as defeated revolutionaries. Revolutionaries on the run and in hiding. The revolution is over. Not even really begun. They hung the leader of the pack and everyone else flew the coop, fled the cross. Jesus is dead and the irregular Jesus army is completely demoralized. No one here will change the course of human history.
We are simply unable to experience with these disciples a dead messiah. Try as we may during Holy Week, and especially on Good Friday, our coming to the cross can never hollow out our whole world in the same way it did that of the men gathered here. How did the disciples ever move from such utter disillusionment into the third room – the room I am calling the Prayer Room? Before we conclude with an answer to that question, let us look for a moment into the Prayer Room.
Prayer Room
Acts 1 tells us that this room is just a Sabbath day’s journey, approximately a kilometre, from the Mount of Olives. Again, perhaps this is the same room in which the Last Supper was first consumed. We are just a flip of a page or two from John 20, yet the atmosphere in charged rather than sapped. Here the twelve, minus Judas, are gathered together with Jesus’ brother and certain women. Acts 1:14 tells us that “all of these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer.” Ten verses later , after a brief discussion, they “prayed and said, ‘Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the share in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.’” Then they cast lots to determine who would replace Judas.
The story that follows is one of the Church taking flight. In spite of persecution, the disciples together with the apostle Paul and others, follow Jesus’ direction in taking the Gospel first to Judaea, then into Samaria, and then, as Acts concludes in open-ended fashion, to the uttermost parts of the world.
You know we hear a lot in our world about cells. Cancer cells. Jail cells. Sleeper al Qaeda cells. Embryonic stem cells. Fifty years ago or so it was communists cells. Cells are not neutral we are told. Or at least if they are initially, they do not remain that way. They have enormous potential for good or for evil. They multiply at an incredible rate. When they begin to grow too large, they divide, then grow some more, then divide again. Cells seem to have a preternatural ability to manoeuvre around potential problems, to repair damaged areas or replace functionally deficient groupings. Their growth or multiplication is almost impossible to contain. They respond quickly and efficiently to changed elements in their environment while maintaining some sort of mysterious line of signal communication or symbiotic relationship with their master cells. A cell’s nucleus is often hard to isolate, and the cell cycle from mitosis until death is often not well understood
In point of fact, these early chapters in Acts finds us near the beginning of what is the most fecund moment in revolutionary political history. This is a time before the Constantinian sell-out of the Church to state violence. This is a time before a deep rift between Jews and Gentile Christians. This is a time when Jesus’ teachings regarding wealth and poverty are taken so seriously that Church members begin holding all things in common. And this is also a time when the disciples sent by Jesus’ are determined to multiply into militant, even if non-violent, cells. In short, from the Resurrection through the first fourteen chapters of Acts, we have record of a time when a group of pacifist radicals who reject the law of the crown in favor of God’s law are recruiting for membership in their communist collective. Can you even imagine the violence of reactions to a similarly constituted collective in North America today? Communism. Pacifism. Radical Missionary Recruitment. A rejection of imperial Law. Now that is a recipe for a political nightmare.
But all of this begins in a room of prayer, a room in which a group of disciples has once again committed to following Jesus even unto death. This room, however, is a room of Prayer rather than of violent revolution. Here the disciples are prepared to be sent because they have seen the risen Jesus and he has breathed the Holy Spirit into them just as God in Genesis two breathed into Adam the breath of life.
So what happened?
Raised in the Kerygma? Could even the most outstanding preaching bring about the massive change under consideration here?
Mass hallucination, maybe? It would have to be the only known instance in oral or recorded history.
They stole the body? Jesus actually survived the crucifixion? Maybe Thomas isn’t the only twin here.
As modern medical science took off in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, an interesting phenomenon began to occur with alarming regularity. And apparently this sort of thing is still happening in some developing countries. Medical students require human cadavers in order to rigorously study human anatomy. A whole clandestine profession developed for a time. Those who dug up bodies in cemeteries and sold them to students desperate for study material became known as grave robbers, body-snatchers, or, get this, resurrectionists.
Perhaps the disciples huddled together in the Sending Room were about to become the world’s earliest resurrectionists.
While the Gospel of John is rightly regarded as the least historically reliable of the four gospels, there are similar accounts in the synoptics and thus the question persists, what changed the disciples? How did they go from fear to faithfulness, from shame filled deserters to bold and willing martyrs, from defeated revolutionaries to a radical movement which would eventually bring Caesar Almighty to his knees? From day one, and especially with the advent of the enlightenment, there have been piecemeal suggestions. But once you try to cobble them together into a holistic story, naturalistic explanations for what happened at Easter turn out to be far more fanciful, require far more blind and stubborn faith, and invariably fail the test of good history. In fact, even minimally qualified historians have given up. No one of any repute whatsoever tries to explain away what happened at Easter anymore. Even those scholars who don’t profess Christian faith, who don’t attend church, who don’t necessarily attempt to follow the way of Jesus. They avoid naturalistic explanations and simply say such things as “after Easter, the disciples saw something …”
Only the Resurrected Jesus is able to move the disciples from disillusionment to devotion. And so Jesus enters the room and embodies his words: Peace be with you. Jesus shows him his ha
nds and his side and says to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Just as Jesus has been sent as a Peacemaker, so now the disciples have been sent as peacemakers. Then Jesus breathes into his disciples the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Life. What’s more Jesus gives to his disciples an incredibly potent, even dangerous weapon: “if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any they are retained.” A whole other sermon or series of sermons would be required to come to grips with this power of granting or withholding forgiveness. It is enough for now to notice that immediately the text returns to the change wrought in the disciples by Jesus’ Resurrection appearance.
But then there’s Thomas. Thomas has not seen Jesus with the other disciples, and so a week later Jesus stands among them again and for a third time speaks the words, “Peace be with you.” Thomas has become something of a patron saint for that class of Christians who doubt the reality of miracles such as the Resurrection. Jodie and I have many friends who fall into this category. We are apt to say to them: belief is overrated. There is in fact no independent word for belief in the New Testament. The Greek word used over and over again in one form or another is pistis – faith, fidelity, faithfulness. What is essential is the faithfulness of Jesus to his Father. Our faithfulness to Christ, to God’s reign, to kingdom values… Faith is faithfulness. It is not intellectual assent. Its best expression is embodied obedience not creedal affirmation.
And yet, we both believe that the Resurrection happened, that it included, even if it was not limited to, the resuscitation of a corpse, and that it must be at the very centre of the church’s preaching. The empty tomb, as Dave Brubacher said last week, should be the iconic heart of Christian faith. Indeed, the reason that we might give such words of comfort to our friends that have trouble believing in the Resurrection is because we believe that their very lives continue to attest to the truth of the Resurrection. Their lives in fact preach the Resurrection and just are the kind of lives that are impossible with out the basic truth of a real historical Resurrection.
It is possible to believe in the Resurrection and yet to allow one’s life to practically deny its validity. It is possible to live in this world in the name of Christ and yet like Jesus is not the Lord, to testify that the world is ultimately ruled by money and power, disease and death. By dictators and terrorists. By Lordly Politicians and Weapons of Mass Destruction. To practically shout that the life of Jesus was politically irrelevant and mundane. But, I say with a great deal of joy that this is not the stance of those of us gathering here today.
We do not sing like people who believe that Jesus has not been risen.
We do not teach our children like people who believe that death wins the final victory.
We do not live as if there is no hope for the homeless. For the sexual offender. For the soldier. For the political refugee.
We do not preach like people devoid of hope.
We do not study the scripture together like a people lost somewhere between Good Friday and Easter dawn.
What does it matter then if we do not trust the testimony of the disciples; indeed, the testimony of Thomas, who apparently did not continue in doubting? It is good and well to continue “Looking Into Jesus,” but when all other explanations for the movement from the War Room to the Sending Room and from the Sending Room to the Prayer Room have been tested and tried, those who are overtaken by the overwhelming potency of the Resurrection are sent into the world uttering the earth shattering declaration of Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”