Second Sunday of Easter

Acts 2:42-47 | 1 Peter 1:3-9 | John 20:19-31

Oh God, who through your Son raised up your eternal life for all the nations, grant that your people may come to acknowledge the full splendor of their Redeemer that bathed even more in their radiance they may reach everlasting glory 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.

It was just last week that we celebrated the mysterious end of the life of this figure, this Christ figure, this Anointed One that had come onto the earth to accomplish a task, and he accomplished it in the way that the Father intended him to accomplish it.  And if I take us back to that moment on Good Friday, when he died on the cross — you remember the story is that the sky was darkened, and there was an earthquake, and it was like the whole universe understood something had just taken place.  And it was the horror and the reality of the human race rejecting — rejecting the Christ, the Anointed One, and in John’s words, he was truth.  It was like this dark moment that, for a moment, it looked as if the truth had come into the world, and the world simply refused to look at it.  The disciples themselves were hiding as soon as Jesus was arrested.  They were hiding, because they were terrified something like what happened to him would happen to them, and so they hid, except for one.  There was only one who didn’t go into a locked place, and that was John.  He followed Jesus through the whole Passion and then stayed with Mary and stayed with them and pondered and wondered on that Saturday.  What they must have thought and what their mind must have come up with, it’s just fascinating.  Then Easter Sunday morning is when this new light dawned on the world, and this figure Christ appeared first to women and then eventually to his disciples.

So I want to talk about that moment when he appeared to his disciples, because it’s the main theme of this first celebration after we celebrated the entire mystery of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus and are now pondering its impact on us.  How did it change things?  Well, we look at the disciples as a representation.  I never thought of this before, but it struck me, in preparing for the thoughts I want to share with you today, that they ran the gamut of all human reactions to this coming of the truth.  One, absolutely almost no resistance to not accepting it, embraced it and became one with it, and that was John.  And then at the opposite extreme, where there was Judas who completely rejected him and condemned him and even had a part of his destruction, and everyone in between — and the one closest to the bottom, I might say, just from the standpoint of the way I’m playing with the image, was Thomas, the doubter.  So human beings have the potential to surrender completely to this mystery and embrace it and live it and be transformed by it, and then through all different degrees of that, we get to the bottom where it’s simply, “I don’t believe unless I can be convinced by my mind and my experience.  I’ve got to know it’s true.”  So that’s what the church is focusing on today, these twelve.  

When Jesus entered into the room that was locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus entered with no judgment, no condemnation.  He just simply said, “I want you to be at ease.  Be at peace.  Relax.  I’m here with no judgment.”  He might have even implied in his comments with them that what all of them needed, except perhaps for John, was copious amounts of the very gift that he came into the world to give through this action of his surrender to his Passion, and that is the potential, the ability, the capacity in human beings to forgive.  What he gave to the world, to the human race was the power to move from justice to mercy — justice to mercy.  We have no idea how essential that is in the whole process of the Judeo/Christian tradition of revealing the fullness of God’s will for us.  He wanted us ultimately to come to the place where he could bless us with his power, the power to believe in forgiveness, as the essential key to living the life he’s called us here to live. 

So what is this thing called mercy?  What is it that every one of the disciples finally became so infused with as a power that they preached it everywhere?  And we look at the effects of their preaching in that first reading from the Acts of the Apostles.  We see people being radically transformed, and how are they transformed? They became communities, not just friendly groups of people but people who were deeply dedicated to one another.  They were like — this gift of forgiveness created for them this ability to be in an intimate relationship with people without any resistance because of how we performed or what had happened in the past.  It was like everything is forgotten, and when you understand what forgiveness actually does, what it is given to the world for, it’s for union and communion.  Without forgiveness, there can be no intimacy between human beings.  Why not?  Because as high as human beings can go in the realm of being evolved into who God intends us to be on our own — our humanity on its own can get to a point we might call justice — justice, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.  It doesn’t seem to be complete, in a sense, for most of us now that understand the value of forgiveness, but in truth, it lifted human beings out of these self-centered, dangerous creatures who could destroy and turn on one another anytime to a realization.  If we’re going to live in community, we ought to have some kind of regulations and rules.  So we need some kind of device that keeps us from destroying one another, and that was the Ten Commandments and the whole notice of justice.  Justice has to do with fairness.  When Jesus talks about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and justice, he means that the justice is, if somebody takes one thing from you, you have a right to get it back.  If somebody does one thing to you that’s a certain intensity, you have the right to give it back to him in the same intensity.  It’s fair.  It solves a need inside of us for a kind of retaliation, a revenge.  It feeds a certain part of our lower nature, which is our humanity, and our humanity stays with us.  The beautiful thing about the union that God came to create between ourselves and his divinity is not a thing that overshadow — one never overshadows the other.  Our humanity remains always.  Our understanding of justice is as far as our humanity basically can take us, but it’s always there.  And then this partner to humanity, this thing that Jesus breathed into his disciples — he was breathing it into the human race, and at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was breathed into the world in a sense, this power of mercy and forgiveness was infused in a part of us called our participation in divinity.  

And one of the things I love about my humanity and divinity is I’ve embraced both of them as fully as I think I can to this point.  I realize that I can be very much motivated by the divinity in me.  I can feel myself going way beyond my self-centered needs, and then I can find myself the same day falling back into my full humanity like Jesus did.  He lost his patience.  He begged his Father, “I don’t want to do it this way.”  That was his humanity.  He didn’t lose his humanity.  He was always the Son of Man and the Son of God.  It’s a great mystery, but when this fullness of awareness of what redemption really means, what it is really offering us, how it empowers us to achieve the goal that ultimately we’re here to achieve while we’re together as humans is some kind of intimacy, which opens up a flow of Christ’s spirit in all of us, one to the other.  That’s where we have to get.  That place of giving and receiving this breath of God demands that we be a forgiving person, because otherwise, if we allow justice to take over mercy, then there’s always a kind of — I don't know — just an intentional separation.  If you demand constant punishment for who you are, meaning that’s what justice does — it legitimates, gives a legitimate way of punishing someone.  If you live in a relationship where it’s constantly performance, punishment, performance, punishment, performance, acceptance, performance — it’ll never become intimate, and that’s what he wants, intimacy, divinity intimately a part of us because it never, ever judges us as unworthy.  And once we know we’re never judged as unworthy, we have this power to never judge a brother or sister as unworthy of this gift that I carry within me.  And to be honest, we’re not so conscious of the two being separate, and that’s good, because there’s a way in which I don’t think I’m saying, “Okay, now I’m acting as God’s puppet, and then I go back to running my own life, and then he runs it for me.”  No, it’s much more mysterious.  It’s like we become one with that divinity, and when we do, we have this amazing capacity.  So you have to believe this.  You have to believe it, and justice works out of the mind, and it’s logical.  But this world of forgiveness demands that we move away from logic into our hearts where we have this power to intuit what is right without proof, and that’s the example we have in the gospel.  That’s, in a sense, where the human race actually was.  I don’t think they were ready to condemn the truth that Jesus brought.  They were open to it, but they really had a hard — we still have a hard time believing in it.  We still go back to running the world on justice.  

And so what do we see in this story with Thomas?  What’s he really doing?  He’s representing the lower form of our humanity, which needs absolute proof, and what is that part of us?  I don’t know that I can explain it.  I think I want you to join me in pondering it.  Is it that we feel like we’re losing control when we surrender to something we can’t figure out?  When we believe we understand something, do we then kind of — I don't know — own it and use it anyway we want?  You can tell I don’t have an answer, but I do know this: it has to move from that kind of conviction in an experience that proves something to this surrender to something that is like a seed inside of us that just needs the nourishment of our acceptance, our belief, our trust.  And once we start that process, as small and as feeble as it may be, once we begin to say, “You know what?  It really does make sense that this gift of redemption, this capacity to be a lover instead of a simple judge — instead of a just judge, we become lovers, and lovers are irrational in the way that they deal with those who offend them.  Jesus said it in such a dramatic way as he was working with his disciples.  He would say, “If somebody slaps you on the cheek, just offer them the other cheek.  If somebody steals your car, offer them your boat along with it.”  It’s so ridiculous, so irrational, but to the heart, to some deep part of us, we know it’s hope.  It’s union.  It’s communion.  It’s oneness.  It’s the thing we long for more than anything else, and that oneness that we long for is the fertile ground of the way in which God works today, in hearts, in the humanity, infused humanity of another person.  And when we love, that’s when it flows.  When we condemn and judge, that’s when it’s blocked.  So this breath that is poured into the disciples is the breath that we have inside of us that the world longs to receive from us.  That’s discipleship.  

Father, your promise of life is the heart of your message.  You know us.  You know exactly what fulfills us. You know exactly what satisfies our deepest longing, and our humanity, in a sense, doesn’t know it.  It can’t come up with what you’re offering in its place, meaning we can understand justice, but mercy still remains mysterious.  And that’s what we pray to believe in and to trust in and to experience its effectiveness and the way it satisfies a kind of need that is so basic.  We do need each other.  We do need you in us.  We need you flowing between us.  We need life, and we praise and thank you for giving it to us.  Amen.