READINGS

John 20:19-31
Isaiah 26:20 and surrounding
Genesis 2:7

HOMILY

Second Sunday of Easter, which was Thomas seeing the Lord.

John chapter 20 is a beautiful diptych, with Mary Magdalene on one hand and Thomas on the other, and in the middle in between them there is the central moment of the Lord making himself present to the disciples in the room on the first evening of the week.

diptych: a painting, especially an altarpiece, on two hinged wooden panels which may be closed like a book.

It's really only comprehensible if we have both of them because there are two different forms of presence going on here:

The ascended presence: the presence of the Lord who is now fully occupying this position.
Remnants of the Lord reaching down as it were to help people up to understand what's going on, who are individuals who need pointing towards what's going on. In this particular case, Mary Magdalene and Thomas and next week we'll see the same with Peter.

Mary Magdalene is the one who comes to the tomb first while it was still dark.

One of the glories of John 20 is that it actually starts when it's dark.

It doesn't talk about at first light: so before dawn.

This is really the beginning.

The Gospel John 20 is the Gospel of the creation, it's the beginning of everything.

So it was still dark when she comes to the tomb and she notices the stone has been removed and she runs and tells the other disciples they've taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him.

So she's probably not alone, she's with others and the concern is what have they done with him

She thinks obviously in terms of a corpse.

The other disciples come. They see the linen behind. They can see that there was no robbery, because it was neatly left and it says that the other disciple (probably John) saw and believed what did.

He probably believe that the Lord had not allowed his Holy one to see corruption.

If there had been corruption, the linen garment would have been stained and couldn't have been left up rolled up by themselves

So then the disciples returned to their homes.

They didn't understand what this meant in terms of him rising.

They just knew Jesus wasn't there, but they understood that it wasn't a robbery.

Mary is still upset and she says to them about the two angels, the two men apparently whom she sees when she looks into the tomb, which has now become the Holy of Holies.

She looks in and she sees the place where Jesus was the empty presence.

I feel like, in the Holy of Holies, she sees the two angels and they say why are you weeping and she says again they've taken away my Lord I do not know where they have laid him.

So again she's interested in trying to find out where the corpse is and then she turns around and sees Jesus, but she thinks it's the gardener and so she says to him sir if you've carried him away tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away.

However, then Jesus says to her Mary, and she turns and says to him in hebrew rabune, my teacher.

Jesus said to her do not hold on to me, do not grasp me because I have not yet ascended to the father, but go to my brothers and say to them I am ascending to my father and your Father to my God and your God.

Now this famous phrase do not touch me, do not grasp me leads to endless ink being spelt.

As far as I can see, part of it is Mary's conviction that she must control a corpse.

She's got to do something about a corpse, whereas Jesus is effectively saying I'm not a corpse and He's saying there's nothing here, there is not a corpse to control.

If she had touched a corpse she would have rendered herself impure for seven days and it's quite important that Jesus is saying don't touch me.

Her imagination is that she will be making herself impure by touching her corpse.

He's saying no, I'm not to be found in that way.

Strangely, a week later He will allow Thomas to touch him by that stage. The seven days have passed and He's no longer a corpse. There's no longer a risk of any sort of impurity.

Anyhow, Thomas has a different problem than Mary.

Mary wanted to deal with a corpse. There isn't one, so she's being told to look somewhere else and to prepare people for something else.

She then goes unannounced to the disciples: I have seen the Lord, and she told them that He had said these things to her.

So for some of you that was our dawn reading last Sunday. Here we have later on the same day: this were still on the first day of the week.

The doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews.

And the Jews obviously meaning the the regime and their adepts.

This locked room which is an ordinary room does two things:

It immediately fulfills a rather wonderful passage which I didn't discover until this time preparing the Gospel, which is Isaiah 26

[!tip] Isaiah 26

O Lord you will ordain peace for us for indeed All that we have done you have done for us

Your dead shall live My corpse shall rise Oh dwellers in the dust awake and sing for joy if you're due as a radiant do and the earth will Give birth to these long dead

Come my people enter your chambers and shut your doors behind you Hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is past For the Lord comes out from his place

Because this is still Isaiah, to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, the earth will disclose the blood shed on it and will no longer cover its slaying.

So the scapegoat mechanism finally revealed.

The actual prophecy about going to a room until the wrath has passed is there in Isaiah and here they are, but it's also a pun on the fact that there was a particular closed space that Jews feared to go into, which was the holy place in the temples which only the high priest could go.

And yet, here we have a group of lay Jews locked in a house and the Holy one is in there.

So this suddenly becomes the Holy place in the temple.

This is the most complete, the most highly charged apotheosis in the whole of scripture, this is the theophany.

Jesus came and stood among them and said peace be with you.

He actually has to say that twice.

After He said this, He showed them his hands and his side.

In other words, He identified himself and showed the continuity that he had actually fulfilled death, that he had brought death captive: death was his trophy.

Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

As the father has sent me so I send you so.

He's completed what the father sent him to do: he occupied the space of death and of shame, filled it completely, conquered it.

He's now about to give the whole of that as Spirit to them so that they may live.

He's fulfilled everything that he has to do.

This movement is now horizontal: I'm going to push you out towards doing exactly what I've been doing.

When He says this, He breathes on them and says to them receive Holy Spirit.

It's the same verb for breathing into the nostrils of adam from the book of Genesis.

So this is the Lord creating by putting the Spirit of life that has now been made complete into the disciples.

If you forgive the sins of any there, forgive them. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

In other words all power on Heaven and earth is now in your hands.

What you hold back will be held back; what you open up will be opened up.

In other words, no more outside god controlling things.

All the same forces that has been moving me, will now be moving you; and you will have the power to do all these things.

So this is the most sensational thing: it is the completion of creation by the creator having put the capacity to open up creation into our hands and our lives.

Thomas was not with them when Jesus came, so the other disciples told him about Jesus, but Thomas rebuked: we have seen the Lord, but he said to them unless I see the mark of that nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails my hand inside, I will not believe.

So whereas Mary's problem had been controlling the corpse; Thomas's problem was controlling an identity.

Thomas didn't believe it was the same person.

A week later, the disciples were again in the house and Thomas was with them, and Jesus came and stood among them and said peace be with you.

Jesus then turns to Thomas, obviously knowing what Thomas has said, who then answers Jesus with a my Lord and my God.

One interesting thing: if you stand up and do this by yourself; if you stand up and put your hands in people's inside you become their mirror image.

In this way, Thomas the twin was being twinned with Jesus

In other words, he realizes that this mirroring one is the Lord and says my Lord and my God.

We get this maxim acclamation of Jesus both at the very beginning and hear it at the very end of the Gospel of John.

The word was with God and the word was God.

One of the little things I love about this passage is that the putting of the finger into the holes corresponds to the same words in the the Greek of the way staves were put through finger holes in the ark of the covenant to bear it.

So curiously, Thomas is being invited to become the bearer of the identity of the Lord.

That which Thomas couldn't tell first, he's becoming the bearer of it.

And then Jesus says to him: have you believed, because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

Why? Because you're going to be bearers of my identity.

There's not going to be an outside me for you to be worried about.

It's going to be me recreating myself inside you, so that you will actually become me.

There's no possibility of you being my rival.

You are actually going to be become me.

You're going to bear the ark of the covenant by becoming that covenant.

These two moments in which people who haven't quite grasped what this is about are taken beyond themselves.

Beyond what they needed to control

Beyond what they could understand into becoming something much much more.

How the Lord comes to us and turns us into more than we can imagine, opening us up to begin to live with death as something that has been occupied turned into his trophy.