3rd Sunday of Easter: B 23-24
3rd Sunday of Easter
Acts 3:13-15, 17-19 | 1 John 2:1-5a | Luke 24:35-48
May your people exalt forever, oh God, in renewed youthfulness of spirit so that rejoicing now in the restored glory of our adoption we may look forward in confident hope to the rejoicing of the day of resurrection. 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.
We continue to reflect upon the experience of the early church, the experience that must have been so incredulous, where this figure, this wisdom teacher that they spent time with, who surrendered himself to evil, was destroyed seemingly by that evil, his life taken away, comes back and is so full of life and full of wisdom and longing to open people’s eyes to what they had not seen before. And so we see story after story in this time in the church year, where we see this Christ coming back, and I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have a teacher that you saw seemingly destroyed by evil, and you thought the whole thing was now over, and you were distraught and frightened and confused, and all of a sudden, there he is, looking at you, talking to you. And what is it that he’s there for? Why did Jesus rise from the dead? Well, multiple reasons perhaps, to prove that he was who he says he was, but the thing that’s more interesting to me is what happened to the people that were living at that time when they encountered a risen Christ, and what was his response to them, at least the disciples in particular?
They had failed him, and they were filled with fear and shame and confusion. And all he does is he comes back, and he said, “Look, I understand. I understand your condition. I understand that you made this decision. You were frightened, and you fled. And I understand, because you were caught in confusion and sin and ignorance, but I want you to know who I am. I want you to believe in everything that has been said about me. And what’s so interesting to me about these post-resurrection experiences as we have in these stories of today’s liturgy of the word, it’s like he comes, and he said, “Look, I know what you did. I know your weaknesses, and you acted out of ignorance when you weren’t there for me. And I want you to know me, and the thing about me is, if you could just understand that everything that happened to me,” Jesus is saying to his disciples, “It was all planned that way. There was nothing about this that was a mistake.” And he keeps going back to them, as he did in the scriptures today, and he said, “Go look and listen again to everything that was spoken about me in the Old Testament. It’s all there. You can see exactly that I was living out the way God intended me to live. It was intended that I be seemingly, in the eyes of the world, cut short — my life would be cut short because of sin, because of evil, like evil destroyed me. No, no. Evil has no power over me. What I’m trying to do for you is expose evil for what it is. I want you to see how this world that God has created for you really works.”
And what Jesus is saying to people over and over again, and the church continues to say it to us today, and every religious person, every spiritual person hopefully is saying something like this to us, the challenge of being a believer in God is to believe in the world that he created, the world as it is. And sin is that weakness we all have to create a world of our own, the world that we want to be there, the world that we think is there, the world that we were taught is there, and if it’s not the world that is, we’re somehow at an enormous disadvantage. And so I want you to just imagine with me that a spiritual person, a person who believes in God, who is open therefore to the truth is open primarily to the way the world works. A spiritual human being is the most realistic person in the room. They’re the ones that embrace the world as it is and surrender to it, and the thing that’s so fascinating about the world that is, is the ingredient called sin, evil. Why is it there?
I don't know if you’re like me, but you sometimes pick up the paper, and now you listen to the news, and it seems like one thing after another, you’re hearing story after story about people who are either abusing each other, murdering each other, institutions that are found over and over again completely filled with corruption. And we constantly see evil and sin and destruction all around us. I don't know if you get the feeling sometimes. You’re saying, “Well, things are just getting worse.” Things are getting worse? What if this is the way the world is? What if a world of sin and goodness is the world God created, and what if we stop trying to destroy evil? Because the one thing you can say about evil is it has an intention. Its intention is primarily to separate things, to isolate things, to break them up into parts and to call some good and to call some evil and to set up this binary world and to somehow convince us that there’s a way to deal with everything in the world that we don’t want to be there, and that is to do exactly what evil does, to try to destroy it. Evil seeks destruction. Grace seeks healing.
So the unconscious thing that we get caught up in is that we end up trying to destroy evil by using evil, and that’s the great illusion. That’s the great lie that we get caught up in, and religion sometimes has a way of increasing that by giving us this false notion that the world that God wants us to have, the world that he created for us is a world of union, communion, perfection. If you look at the world at times and say, “This is so frustrating. It’s still so corrupt,” well, that’s the nature of the world. It will always be corrupt. And why would God allow corruption unless it had a purpose, a reason for being here? I know this might sound strange, but what I’m trying to say to you is evil is a part of the way the world is, and unless you embrace it and understand it and refuse to get caught up in its ways, you can’t really live and grow in this world as God intended you to grow and live. We’re here not to stop sinning so much as to stop being caught in lies and illusions. We’re here to grow, to evolve into full, conscious human beings aware of reality, the way God created the world to be, and the world that God created will always have — while we’re in this state of human beings living on this planet, there will always be evil. And to try to destroy it is to get caught up in the very thing that it wants us to get caught up in.
Think about it. When you listen to a story, the story about somebody doing something wrong, what’s your reaction? When you do something wrong? What’s your reaction? Forgiveness is what God teaches us to have, but what’s the opposite of that? Judgment, condemnation, a desire to punish, but even more deadly, to destroy. Even if you’re looking at the world today and reading the paper and listening to the news and saying, “I want this all to stop. I want to destroy all these people that are destroying other people. I want to destroy all those elements out there that are negative. Let’s get rid of them.” Think of the illusion that people get caught up in when they try to create a loving, Christian community separate from the evil of the world. You end up with a cult. Now, evil has got to be embraced for what it is for it has a purpose, and what is that purpose? The purpose is it’s part of the way in which God is inviting us to go through a process in this world where we are becoming more and more conscious of what is, what is true, what is real.
Can you imagine growing in your wisdom as to what is right and wrong without making mistakes? Can you imagine what it’s like to simply be told what you’re supposed to do and then blindly say, “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll do exactly what you tell me to do.” That’s not what God wants. He doesn’t want us to be people who are blindly obedient to a higher power. He doesn’t want us to follow him because he tells us to follow him. He wants us to discovery why, what he’s calling us into, the life that he wants us to live. He wants us to know why it is so important and why we should be motivated to do it. It’s not because we’re told to. It’s because something inside of us knows. We know what it’s like to be the person that God created us to be. It’s called wholeness, holiness, consciousness. Can you become fully aware and conscious of what evil is and what your choices are unless you experience them? And could it be that the reason evil is in the world is because it’s there so that we can experience what it is that it really does, what it really does to us, our human nature? It flies in the face of everything that we are.
I sometimes hate myself for being the person that I am when I see myself not being who I think I should be. Now think about that. I hate myself for being who I think I am. God knows who I am. He knows my goodness. He created it. So when I hate that which he creates, I’m caught in what? Evil. I’m doing the very thing that evil longs to do. It longs to enter into us and to make us into people that are like evil, and again, evil separates, isolates, wants to destroy. You can’t destroy evil using the tactics of evil. You can only destroy evil by taking away its power, and what is its power? Its desire to destroy, to punish. That’s why, from the beginning, it’s so clear what Jesus came into the world to do is to radically change our response to evil. So he does it in a way that seems absolutely incredulous to everyone watching it. He gives in and allows evil to do all of its negative stuff to him, to isolate him, just separate him, to make him into something evil, to incite people to want to destroy goodness. And then when he’s in the middle of all that, he just drops this explosive bomb, which is forgiveness. He said, “Look, I’m not going to be what you are to me in this moment, this destructive force. I will not turn around and seek to destroy you. I will allow you to be who you are, because I believe that, if you are a human being and you can experience the impact, if you can experience consciously what sin actually is, what it feels like to want to destroy, to want to kill, to want to remove, isolate someone, if you experience that and you feel it in your gut that it’s somehow wrong, then you’ve grown up. Then you’ve become more conscious.” It’s essential that you taste evil in order to get past it, because the taste is bitter. It’s awful, but somehow we live in a mild form of it, my prejudice, my way of denying people rights and — All the stuff we do that is negative toward ourselves and others is somehow participating in evil, yet we do it with the sense that this is what God calls us to. We need to hate sinners and get rid of them, hate sin and get rid of it. I guess we can say, “Well, Jesus said don’t hate the sinner, but he does say hate the sin.” And you’ve got to be careful of that, because do you hate the fact that we’re given a world in which our experiences are the best teachers? Are we supposed to hate the fact that the world is imperfect? Are we supposed to deal with it as an imperfect world that is trying to awaken us to something that’s so wonderfully freeing and mysterious, surrendering to evil, not buying into it, not becoming it but becoming something radically different? Evil’s role is always to be hidden and to pose as something else, but to taste it, to know it, to experience it through sin is sometimes the best teacher, because to be told what to do is one thing. To know in your heart what is the only real thing you really want to do, that’s transformation. That’s holiness. That’s the goal of spirituality.
Father, you tell us that we need to know you in Jesus. We need to pay attention to all that he is and all that he longs to open our minds to and give us the freedom to let go of misconceptions, lies, illusions and enter into the world of truth. The truth is that you have come in the world to save us all from the kind of world that we tend to create that is never going to fulfill our longings and our desires. Make us open to your wisdom, your truth, your life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.