Easter: Cycle B 23-24
Easter
Acts 10:34a, 37-43 | Colossians 3:1-4 | John 20:1-9
Oh God, who on this day, through your Only Begotten Son, have conquered death and unlocked for us the path to eternity, grant, we pray, that we who keep the solemnity of the Lord’s resurrection may, through the renewal brought by your Spirit, rise up in the light of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.
The way the church celebrates this great feast of Easter is more than just Easter Sunday morning. After Vatican Council, we renewed so many of the traditions that had somehow gotten lost over centuries, and one of the things that we recovered after Vatican II was the fullness of the celebration of Easter, where we focused primarily on the three days, not just Easter Sunday but Thursday night, when Christ instituted the Eucharist and revealed the heart of his ministry to his disciples and then his death on Friday and then his resurrection on Sunday. It’s one story. It’s a beautiful full revelation of what we believe in as Christians, as believers of this mysterious creature that came into the world, this God/man who is just like us but also God and that he did this thing for us out of his humanity. It just revealed his divinity that was hidden inside of him.
And I love that phrase from the opening prayer when it said that Easter is this celebration that brings us into the light of life, and to me, light of life sounds so much like entering into enlightenment, full consciousness. So my intention then in this homily this morning, on Easter, is to give you a perspective on who this figure is and what he was really leaving us with and what he’s inviting us into now, a life in him, he in us, we in him, this oneness, this commingling of two spirits, divinity, humanity. Jesus lived that life, and he is the example of how we’re to live the same kind of life, even though we’re not — in terms of intensity, we’re not divine, but we are infused with the light, the enlightenment of what it means to be in touch with the divine. We can use all kinds of images for what the divine is, but the one I love the most is when we think of divinity and who God is, he’s also, as John says in his opening gospel, that this Jesus that came into the world is the incarnation of truth, reality.
I’ve spent so much of my life looking and struggling for perfection, no mistakes, no sins. And that may not be necessarily a bad goal, but it’s incomplete when you realize that we’re not here to stop sinning as much as we are to be shown by God, by divinity inside of us the illusion that sins carry and the lack of their ability to give us what they promise. And it’s like the gift of divinity is to expose all that isn’t real, isn’t true. And isn’t it interesting? When you look at the world today, it seems like almost every institution, whether it’s politics or medicine or the church or religion, whatever, it’s all — we’re aware so much of what is in those institutions and those kind of ministries that is impure, that is not what it should be. And that can be a depressing time, in one sense, but in truth, it’s the way people enter into the light of life to see the darkness and to name it and to not be afraid of it and to not be ashamed of how we participated in it, because the greatest goal of this God/man Jesus was to come into the world to convince us of a couple of things that are very simple and very direct. One is that God is living with us and guiding us. He’s our mentor, our teacher, our friend, our advocate, and also he forgives us of everything we’ve ever done.
So I want to take you back then to Thursday night, because I believe that night is so essential to understand the person of Jesus. He’s with his disciples. He wants to spend the last meal with them, and during that meal, he did two things that seemed completely confusing to his disciples, which means they hadn’t grown enough in consciousness and awareness of who Jesus is. If you see Jesus, as we do now, and we know who he is, the things that he did make total sense. But to them, it must have been strange, because when they went through the Passover celebration that was a part of their tradition and Jesus did the ritual, as it was always done, and there was a cup of blessing, and there was bread that was always there, and these were blessed. But Jesus said the most bizarre thing, in a way, to them. He said, “This blood — this wine, it’s not just wine. It’s not just blessed wine. I want you to realize this is my blood — my blood. This is part of me. It’s the life force in me, and what it does for you, if you let it course through your veins, if you let this life-giving red liquid that brings oxygen and cleans all our cells constantly, 24/7, if you let it into you, my blood, it is going to do something for you. And the blood of the chalice is for forgiveness.” So Jesus makes a profound statement by asking them to drink of the cup, when he said, “If you don’t drink this cup, you have nothing, none of my inheritance. You have to believe you’re forgiven. You have to believe that.” And I don’t know why forgiveness is a very difficult thing for us. Because of our minds and the way our brains work, we can understand justice. It makes sense. You do a good thing; you get rewarded. You do a bad thing; you get punished. That’s clear, but it’s only the heart that can understand what it means — this God/man wants us to believe that, no matter what we do, no matter how far we drift from him and from the truth and from reality, no matter how much damage we do, it never, ever changes the intention in his heart that he wants to be there for us and lift us into the light of life. That’s hard for us to understand, but that’s what Jesus was establishing that night. And then the bread, the bread is his body, he said. Take it and eat of it, and what he’s saying is that this bread, which is a nurturing element in our life — it’s food, and it’s for our strength. So it’s so interesting. He’s saying, “If you’ll eat this break and drink this cup in memory of me, you will have the inheritance I promise you.” And that has become the ritual of so many Christian churches and especially Catholicism and major sacramental religions. Without that, I can’t imagine us being who we are without the Eucharist daily, every Sunday. It’s the most amazing promise, and that’s what Jesus was establishing that night. “I want you to know something about me. I’m going to leave you.” And he knew he was going to die, and he knew they’d be scattered. He knew they would doubt him, and so he had to say these things, and even though they didn’t comprehend it, they went back, and they did comprehend it. And when they were infused with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, they saw the light. They saw the truth. They saw who he is. They saw what he’s doing for them. They saw what they have to do for others. It was a powerful night, that night that he spent having dinner with his disciples.
But then there was the other thing, the most interesting one. It’s funny that John’s gospel, which is the most spiritual, I think, basically when he recalls that dinner, he never mentions the Eucharist, but he does mention the next thing, the strange thing, that after Jesus dined with his disciples, he stood up, took off his cloak and put a towel around him and said, “I want to wash your feet.” That seemed very strange to all of them, because that’s the role of a servant, and probably the least attractive for the servants themselves, which job they were going to get when someone held the banquet, was the guy who had to — the couple of men who had to sit at the doorway and wash dirty feet that had come in. If it was a rainy night, they were muddy feet. Otherwise it was dusty feet, but they had to clean the feet, because people reclined at table, and they didn’t wear shoes and socks obviously. So it was the kind of thing like washing your hands before you sit down if you’d been working in the fields or something. Why would he do that? Why would he say, “I want you to let me wash your feet”? It becomes clear in the conversation because — particularly between Peter and Jesus, because Peter just said, “Absolutely not. You’re not going to wash my feet.” And the interesting thing about that is Jesus’ response. He said, “Look, unless you let me wash your feet, you will have no inheritance from me. You won’t receive what I’m leaving you as a legacy, as a gift when I die.” It’s like the person who leaves their wealth to their firstborn son. Well, he’s leaving the thing that made him so powerful, so effective, so life-giving. He’s going to give that to human beings if they allow him to do what — to be a servant to them. What? A servant? You notice, when Jesus is talking to Peter, he said, “Yes, I’m your master. You call me a master. You call me a teacher. Yeah, I am all that. You’re right, but I’m also a servant. And you, who are attached to me and who are looking forward to the kingdom,” and looking forward to a political kingdom, as they did, thinking they were going to be in positions of authority and power in the world because they followed the Messiah, and they would be the ones in the temple, running the whole operation — they thought all that. And what he’s saying to them is, “That’s not it. You’re not being empowered with my life and my blood and my body inside of you, my nourishment to be a master. Here’s the secret: you have to understand that you are empowered for one reason only, and that’s the minister to the needs and the wants and the desires of other people, not any of their whims but what they really need, what their heart longs for, what their souls are meant to be. You need to help them be that. You’re not their master, but you’re their servant.” And Jesus himself said to Peter, “Look, you call me master and teacher. That’s right, but I want you to be a servant.”
But the interesting thing about that image to me is that, when you look at what Jesus was doing and saying to Peter, it’s almost like he’s saying, “Look, I know you have an ego,” like everyone has an ego. “You’re looking forward to being a master over others, and that’s normal. But what I’m calling you to is to be a servant to others. Okay?” But then the interesting thing is it seems that, when someone refuses to allow another to serve them, then there’s often — you see that resistance reveals something. And what it means in the relationship with God is, if you don’t let God serve you, if you don’t accept his service humbly, then you can’t be in his kingdom either. That means, unless you allow God to be the source of life in you for the work that you have, you’ll never be able to do that work, and the thing about being effective in this world — and everybody, I think, that’s honest, knows that human nature loves to be effective and loves to be held up as somebody who is effective and powerful and helpful. It goes right to our head and not to our heart. Our head just says, “Well, I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.” Well, everything we do that’s powerful and transformative and brings people into the light is not us. It’s us with God, and so the idea of being a servant means you have to receive the gift that comes from the master to the servant, who gives the servant the ability to do the work that they do. So there’s something very much hidden, in a way, but not hard to see, that this whole idea of service is essential to this relationship we have with God. Let him serve you. Let him be the source of the healing power in you. Always acknowledge it’s him in you doing the work, and then do it in a way that is generous and wanting only the goodness that the other needs to be there, not to make you good or not to look good. So to move from master to servant, to move from somebody who is on their own to somebody who realizes that everything I am is because of God’s nourishing love and his life-giving forgiveness. When we have that rooted in us, we are then capable of becoming the servants that God intends us to be. That’s the mystery of Easter, this transformative union between God and man. Without it, we end up being people that control and people that tend to use and people that tend to be self-focused.
Father, the fullness of your revelation, the God that you are was shown to us in this mysterious creature, this God/man Jesus. There’s so much about it that’s hard for us to grasp and hard for us to comprehend, in terms of the reason you do this is so that we can become ministers just like you were, and it’s so easy for us to create a God that is more like a master than a servant. Help us always to be servants, servants to each other but most especially allowing you to serve us. So we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.