NewCreation

Homily for Second Sunday of Easter (2021)

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the second Sunday of Easter. Last Sunday, if you remember, we looked at the very end of St Mark's Gospel, and we saw the women who were struck almost silent in fear at what they saw, or what they didn't see, and what they were told. This Sunday we look at a text which happened later that day, and a week later, in which also the note is of fear. The disciples find themselves in a room that is locked for fear of the Jews — that's the fear of the religious and political authorities of the time. What I really like, one of the things I really like about this fantastic passage, is that it's not a quick celebration. I don't know whether you're anything like me, but I'm a very slow reactor to things. And there is something, if you like, about happy Easter liturgies on Easter Sunday that I find very difficult to cope with, because it's suggesting that it's possible to do a quick turnaround from having been sad and lost and baffled by the events of Good Friday to suddenly being happy and everything being okay. And I can't do that myself, and I'm very glad to say that the Gospel text suggests that that wasn't really what happened either. So one of the first things I want to bring out about both last week's and this week's Gospel text is how they presuppose that it takes time to sink into what is happening. And that seems to me to be so important. I even noticed that in today's Gospel we get two mentions of the room in which the disciples are found a week apart. The first time it says "locked for fear of the Jews," and the second time it just says "locked." In other words, a week later there's still an element of fear. Things haven't been sorted out magically, and I think that it's tremendously important for our understanding of the resurrection and the presence of the Risen One in our lives that we recognize and be grateful for that — the slowness, the difficulty, the oddness of what's going on. So, first of all, our Lord appears: the doors of the house where the disciples were met were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." So that's the first thing — they are roiled in one way or another, and peace is going to be necessary for them to be able to get anything of what is going on. After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. In other words, he identifies himself as the one who is crucified and risen. In the Apocalypse of St John this is the vision which is described as "a lamb standing as one slain." It is a vision which to us is simply baffling. You can't be both alive and dead, and yet — Here is the one standing as one slain. But he's clearly alive, he's clearly a dynamic and protagonistic presence amongst them. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. But what strange sort of rejoicing must it have been, if he has to say, "Peace be with you." In other words, he appears to be taking them beyond a certain sort of rejoicing. And then he says this: "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." This, I think, takes us way, way back. It suggests that the one coming into their midst is not one who has just turned up, as it were, as we might turn up to a friend's house in the midst of a party and surprise them. The suggestion is, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you" — I am coming into your midst from a very, very far away place. I don't mean physically far away, I don't even mean chronologically far away. I mean, the place from which I'm coming to is nowhere within your expectations. And I am going to be making you the bearers, the vanguards, the ones who are taking forward this coming in from a very, very far away, very, very distant, very, very different place. You are going to be becoming something quite different to what you could possibly have imagined. It's going to be utterly remarkable. And this is the important thing: who you are going to become now — you are going to be the ones who are going to control this. Because he said this, and then he breathed on them — breathed into them. Same verb in Greek; it's the same verb as in Genesis where the Lord breathes into Adam. So here is the act of re-creation. It's that far back that is being brought into them now. Now, what creation is and has always really been about is being brought to life in their midst, through them. He says to them, "Receive Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." Again, this is the creator Spirit, the protagonist, the one that had hovered over the waters in the beginning, coming into their midst — and now coming in to them, which is to say into us, to turn us into the protagonists of creation. And the radicality of this is very difficult to grasp, because effectively he's saying: let go of any notion of outside-God, rescuer-God, Deus ex machina God. From now on, God the Creator, the full force of the creation, is going to be available to you, in you and amongst you. And in as far as you take the ride, in as far as you allow yourselves to be swept up in this, it'll be opened up — and in as far as you don't, it won't. Your ability to forgive each other is going to be the same thing as your ability to open up creation for each other and to be opened up for each other. In other words, this whole exercise has been an extraordinary entrusting by God of God's self and God's project into your hands, and it's going to take you on journeys, it's going to take you into forms of becoming that you could not possibly imagine, and yet that is what I have been doing for you, that's what I've been doing in your midst. And then we have this wonderful memory of Thomas, who was called the twin, one of the twelve, who was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We've 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, my hand inside, I will not believe." In other words, reasonably enough, he's stuck in the identity that he was. He needs a push, he needs a boost. What they have told him is about seeing someone. They can't yet communicate what this means. So he's reasonably enough in the emotional equivalent of a locked place. A week later the disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut – the same verb as before – Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." So the same making himself known through the presence of peace. Then he takes Thomas exactly at where he was in his stuckness. And this is, if you like, the affection of our Lord, the affection that we saw on the morning of the resurrection shown to Mary Magdalene. He took her where she was. She thought first he was the gardener, and she realized who it was, but thought of him as teacher. She hadn't yet become aware, as she couldn't until after his ascension, as he tells her, what had really been going on, who had really come back. But in his affection he reaches her where she is and starts to move her on. So here with Thomas he reaches him where he is and starts to move him on. But he also gives Thomas the task by making Thomas mirror him, putting his hands in his wounds, standing close up to him, becoming his mirror. He says, "Okay, you're going to become me, and you've been able to believe because you've seen me. But blessed are those who have not seen and have yet come to believe." And this, if you like, is the element that I want to bring out. This is, if you like, the slow train running beneath all this: that there is a Lord coming into our midst. As a friendly gesture, as a peaceful appearance. But what is really going on is the possibility of God having floated God's self into our midst by faith, enabling us actually to become convinced of his presence, and able therefore – without anyone with whom we're in rivalry – of starting to have all our stuckness, being locked in frightened places… is changed, altered from within so that we are no longer run by fear, by loss, by stuckness, and are actually able to start to move each other into the new creation. This for me is part of what John does by giving us Pentecost on the same day as the resurrection. He's showing how the fullness of what the Lord gives is this extraordinary act of gentle opening up of creation, which takes us at exactly where we are frightened, lost, stuck, not heroic, not successful. In the Catholic liturgy this Sunday is called Mercy Sunday, the Divine Mercy. And it seems to me that there is something here about, if you like, the power and the strength of what Jesus is breathing into us. The power and the strength of it is the kind of mercy that undoes our need to be successful, our need to win, that sets us very, very gently free to start to be able to bear witness to it. And the being able to bear witness to it doesn't look like suddenly becoming heroic and suddenly becoming successful. It looks like becoming alive in the midst of failure and not success and not being heroic. And yet knowing we are loved, that the one who has come into our midst didn't do it to turn us into superheroes, that the one coming into our midst did it to show us that we are loved, that it is weak, fallible, not particularly heroic strugglers — people who need to be set free from our fears, our freezing, our sense of loss. That all of that is what very slowly the risen one is producing in our midst, floating us, if you like, off the seabed which we've got stuck on and enabling us to be bearers of life. May God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — bless us. Amen.