NewCreation

Homily for Second Sunday in Easter 2022 C

John's account of the resurrection. Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the second Sunday of Easter. And we move straight into John's accounts of the resurrection, leaving aside Luke, which is our Gospel for the year. And because this is the second Sunday of Easter, we get the reading for what happened on the second Sunday of Easter, which was Thomas seeing the Lord. In order to fill that out, let's try and place that in its rightful context, because John chapter 20 is a beautiful diptych really, 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. And it's really only comprehensible if we have both of them, because there are two different forms of presence going on here. There's the ascended presence, the presence of the Lord who is now fully occupying his position. And there are 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. So remember Mary Magdalene — she's the one who comes to the tomb first while it was still dark. It's one of the glories of John 20 that it actually starts when it's dark. It doesn't talk about at first light; it's while it was still dark, so before dawn. And this really is the beginning — this is the Gospel. John 20 is the Gospel of the creation. It's the beginning of everything. So it was still dark. 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, which means 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 believe? Probably 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, 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 he wasn't there, but they understood that it wasn't a robbery. But Mary is still upset, and she says then to the two angels — the two men apparently — 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, if you like, in the Holy of Holies. She sees the two angels and they say, "Why are you weeping?" And she says again, "They have taken away my Lord and 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 he's the gardener. And so she says to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away." In other words, she wants to recover a corpse. But then Jesus says to her, "Mary." She turns and says to him in Hebrew, "Rabboni" — 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," has led to endless ink being spilt. 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 a 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. He's no longer a corpse. There's no longer a risk of any sort of impurity. But the scenario has changed. Thomas has a different problem than Mary. Mary wanted to deal with a corpse. There isn't one. She's being told to look somewhere else and to prepare people for something else. So she does. She goes and announces 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 is still 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 regime and their adepts. So 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. It's amazing how much of Isaiah 26 is being lived out in this last section of John's Gospel. This is the one: "O Lord, you will ordain peace for us, for indeed all that we have done you have done for us." Later on: "Your dead shall live, my corpse shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy, for…" "Your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead." "Come, my people, enter your chambers and shut your doors behind you, hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is passed, for the Lord comes out from his place" — and then of course, 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 slain." So the scapegoat mechanism is finally revealed. So 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 Temple, which only the high priest could go into. And yet here we have a group of lay Jews locked in a house, and the Holy One is in their midst. So this suddenly becomes the holy place in the Temple. This is the most complete — the most, yes, the most highly charged theophany 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, showed the continuity, showed 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. So at first they were aware of a peace-giving sense, but then it began to dawn who it was. Jesus says to them again, "Peace be with you. 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. He has conquered it. He is now about to give the whole of that as spirit to them, so that they may live. He's fulfilled everything that he had to do. That's why this is his ascended self that is speaking. And now, "As my Father has sent me, so I send you." In other words, now this movement is now horizontal. I'm going to push you out towards doing exactly what I've been doing. And when he says this, he breathes on them and says to them, "Receive Holy Spirit" — actually, the Greek is that he breathes into them, because it's into the nostrils; 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, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." In other words, all power in heaven and earth is now in your hands. I'm giving it to you. The Father gave it to me and now I'm giving it to you. What you hold back will be held back, what you open up will be opened up. In other words, no more outside God controlling — "I've brought God to be a within and alongside, an inside God pushing you. All the same forces as have 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: this is the completion of creation by the Creator having put, if you like, the capacity to open up creation into our hands and our lives. "Thomas, also called the twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, 'We have seen the Lord.' But he said to them, 'Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.'" So whereas Mary's problem had been, if you like, controlling her corpse, his problem was controlling an identity – he wanted, he didn't believe it was the same person. And a week later – so that's our week today – the disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, this time there's no question about fear. Why should they be feared any longer? They've been given the Holy Spirit. Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." So then he turns to Thomas, obviously knowing what Thomas has said: "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." So this is the interesting thing: if you stand up and do this – by yourself, if you stand up and put your hands in people's, finger inside – you become their mirror image. So Thomas the twin was being twinned with Jesus. Thomas accepts this invitation, but answers him: "My Lord and my God." In other words, he realizes that this mirroring one is the Lord, and says, "My Lord and my God" – the maximum acclamation of Jesus at the end of the Gospel. We get it at the very beginning of the Gospel of John and here 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 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 he couldn't tell at 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. There'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 become me. You're going to bear the ark of the covenant by becoming that covenant. So 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. And I think that that's what we're going to be seeing throughout this Easter period: 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. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.