2nd Sunday of Easter: Cycle C 21-22
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER
Acts 5:12-16 | Revelation 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19 | John 20:19-31
God of everlasting mercy, who in the very recurrence of the Paschal Feast kindle the faith of the people you have made your own, increase, we pray, the grace you have bestowed that all may grasp and rightfully understand in what fount they have been washed, in whose Spirit they have been reborn, in whose blood they have been redeemed. 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.
If somebody would stop you on the street today and ask you, “Oh, you all believe in this thing called Easter. What was it that Easter — what does it say to you? What is it there for? What’s its purpose?” And a lot of people might say, “Well, it’s the story about the fact that this man Jesus was more than just a man, and it was proven, because he was raised from the dead. And the biggest, important teaching of Easter is Jesus did not die a human death but rose.” But that’s not the major teaching, I don’t think, of this very, very important, important season and important time called Easter, because listen to the opening prayer. We address God always in the opening prayer, and it’s, “God, you are the God of mercy — mercy, forgiveness. Please help us to remember, and don’t let us ever forget that we have been washed, we have been reborn, we have been redeemed.” All right, that’s all about us, something happening to us, and Jesus, what he was doing on the cross, was not only dying — when he died on the cross, he was not just going to die there so he could prove that he was more than just a mortal man, that he was also God and that he would rise in the next day, in two days or three days or whatever. But the point being, no, the most important thing to remember is, when he died, he died for our sins so that we would not be held accountable for our sins.
It’s an amazing thing, because I’ve been taught that my whole life. But still, as a Roman Catholic, I grew up in Chicago, and I was taught about sin. And sin was this horrible thing that I did, and every time I did it, I was inflicting some kind of pain, still today I would inflict pain on Jesus, which was confusing for me as a child. But nevertheless, it went on to say that you have to do something to make up for your sins. You have to go to confession. You have to — and going to confession meant that you had to make that firm purpose of amendment. You were not going to sin again. So you had to go and, by your decision, “I will never sin again,” you might receive forgiveness. Well, you were assured of forgiveness when it came to the priest. Okay? What that left me with — and maybe I’m just unusual on this. So if this homily is all about me, I apologize, but it’s been really hard for me to believe that I am always forgiven, completely forgiven by God. I’ve been to confession. I go to confession, but still I can feel — I’m not sure that the sin that I committed is not going to be somehow something that damaged or will continue to damage my relationship with God. And that probably comes from my own upbringing.
I don't know how you grew up, but one of the things that I realized, that I had a family, and it’s not unusual to have this. They were human beings, so I didn’t expect them to be as merciful or as kind or as generous as God, but if I did something wrong, I was not just punished. I don’t remember being punished in any really physical way, maybe grounded or taken privileges away, yeah, but there was something more subtle that was going on when I sinned. And that was some kind of understanding that I got from my parents and the people around me and the teachers that I had that, when you sin, you damage the relationship, and somehow the person that has told you not to sin or the person you sinned against, they don’t have the same affection or attention for you, that somehow sin damages the relationship. And you’re hoping that it can be repaired, and maybe you try to do something, make up for the sin. But this is not in any way, shape or form, in any way that you can ever really have this way of thinking about the way God relates to sin.
And so I want to go back to the scriptures for a minute and look at the first reading. The first reading is a beautiful description of what happened to the people that really understood who Jesus was, and they realized, I would say, in the moment that happened that their sins were forgiven. They knew that they were forgiven, and somehow when they were forgiven, that idea of being forgiven meant that they were loved despite their sin. In other words, forgiveness is not so much God giving up his right to punish you and foregoing that, saying, “I’m not going to do that,” but it’s more about him saying, “When you sin, it never ever damages my relationship with you. I’m always there for you. I reach out to you. In fact, the more you sin, the more my intensity is, the stronger my intensity is to reach you and to sort of draw you out of a place where you feel there’s something wrong with you.” And so when I look at these images in that opening prayer, when it says, “You’ve been washed, cleansed of all your sin. You’re a new person. You’re not the person you were when you sinned, and you’ve been redeemed, which means I paid for everything.” And that’s really difficult, I think, to believe, especially if you come from a world of conditional lovers, and most of us do.
So I want to look carefully then at the experience the disciples had when Jesus appeared to them again, because that’s always been the theme of this first Sunday after Easter. Now remember, every one of them, except for John, who happened to write this particular passage, every one of them had disappointed, in their own minds, disappointed God greatly by denying him. Now, think about that. They spent three years with him. He told them over and over again to be strong. He told them, “I will be the strength for you. I will do everything for you,” all these kinds of promises. But you remember, they hadn’t yet received the Holy Spirit, so the death of Jesus hadn’t fully been incorporated into their very being yet. So they were still, in a way, without the grace of belief and faith, and so they were filled with shame. They had to be filled with shame.
Remember the first thing that God said to the human race when they had sinned in the Garden of Eden story? He didn’t say, “What have you done? You’re disgusting. How could you do this to me?” My mom used to say that. No, it was more like, “Where are you? Why are you hiding from me?” There’s something in human beings. When we disappoint someone that we look up to and we do not perform in the way that we think they demand or would like us to perform, we have a feeling that they are going to go away from us. They’re going to be separated from us. It’s in our DNA, I think. And so there’s a wonderful way in which we need to look carefully at the disciples who must have been filled with a tremendous amount of shame, and they must have sat around thinking, “He was who he said he was, and we didn’t believe him. And what are we? We’re failures.” And when Jesus first appears to those failures, what is his response? Is there one shred of anything in the presence of Jesus, when he returns to his disciples, that’s judgmental or critical or implies how much he was disappointed in them? No. “Peace. Please be at peace. You’re human. It’s normal. That was a lot to ask of you, to believe in who I was when you saw all this stuff happening around you. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” I love that image, and then I wonder about this figure Thomas, the doubter. Why was he the one who just couldn’t let go of his doubts that this could really happen? And I’m wondering if the doubt was not so much that could a man actually rise from the dead. Yes, that was tough for anybody, but think about it. Was it that that was so hard for him to believe, or was it the fact that he came back to his disciples and didn’t hold anything against them? I just want you to imagine this for me. I hope this isn’t playing too much with scripture, but scripture is so rich and so beautiful. You can work with it all kinds of ways. But let’s just say imagine that that was his biggest problem, that he couldn’t believe that God would have come back and forgiven them that easily, and so he wants to be sure. He wants to be sure he’s forgiven. He wants to have God look at him, Jesus look at him and say, “I have forgiven you. You weren’t the worst of all of them,” which is what I do sometimes, or you might do. We’re the worst of sinners. And so he was able to put his hands inside of the wounds that healed him. Those wounds are the reason why we no longer have to fear any kind of punishment. Those are the wounds that he took upon himself that is the impact of every sin we’ve ever committed, and justice demands some kind of restitution. And he took it upon himself. Wow, that’s a very, very different way of feeling the need for absolute, total belief and trust in who Jesus is.
Now, I’ve been a priest for 55 years. I go to confession a lot, maybe not as much as I used to, because maybe I don’t need to as much at age 82, but nevertheless, I still, I know, deep down inside of me have this anxiety that, even when I sin, no matter what it is, I have somehow disappointed God. After all, I’m his priest. I’m somebody that’s not supposed to have any kind of sinful inclinations, but that’s not true, but that’s what some people think, and that’s what I maybe even put on myself. I should not ever sin. And yet what he’s trying to say to you and to me, and he said it to Thomas, “No, look, listen to what I’m trying to say to you.” And maybe if I explain it this way, you’ll understand it. So I’m going to tell you what God has said to me today as I prepared for this homily about what it means that you are forgiven. It means that God has made a decision, in the person of Jesus, to come and make it clear to all of us that he forfeits his right to punish you. He’s decided he doesn’t want to inflict pain on you because of your sins. Does that seem absolutely impossible for a lover like who God really is? And yet I have a religion. I have a conscience. I have people around me. They all seem to imply something else. They seem to imply that there is this thing you have to fix if you’ve done anything negative that God is going to see as negative, and he waits for you to do something to make up for your sin before he’s going to forgive you. And that doesn’t make any sense to me anymore. Either he forgives, because he loves so intensely, and he knows that the only thing that is really going to convince you to not sin again is not the fear of the punishment of the loss of a relationship with him or the punishment of hell, but it’s the fact that you’ve been loved — that you’ve been loved so intensely. And when he talks about forgiveness in the gospel, it’s so beautiful. He said, “If you forgive someone and they know they’re forgiven, the sin is gone, but if you don’t forgive someone, that sin, the separation of sin, the shame of sin stays.” Now, think about that. Do you really believe that God loves you that much, that no matter what you do, no matter how horrific it is, it never diminishes his desire to tell you that there’s still something inside of you, not the sin, which will carry a certain punishment by the very fact that you did it. It’s not that you sin, and nothing happens to you. No, there’s a lot of pain that’s caused by sin that doesn’t come from God. It comes from the nature of sin, but the minute you don’t believe that God looks at you in your worst, when you’re at your worst and the worst thing you’ve ever done, and looks at you and says, “You know what? I love you so much. If you think for a second that I’m interested in punishing you for what you’ve done, you’re wrong. I will do everything I can to get you to see what you’ve done and the pain you’ve caused yourself and others. I’ll do that, but never will I ever pull away from you.” Peace be with you when you’re in that place of shame. Peace with you when you’re in that sense of being separated from God, because you’re human and you fail, and you are selfish at times. Amen.
Father, remove from us doubt and inability to believe in things that seem beyond our way of seeing the world. Help us see the world as you have created it, especially to see you as you are and we as we are. We struggle. We sin. It’s part of our growth. It’s part of our changing and developing, and your response is never condemnation. Bless us with that peace, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.