Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter

Year B

April 23,2006

Beginning with Easter Sunday we have entered into a new season in the church year. The time between now and Pentecost comprises the Easter season, traditionally, the time in which the newly baptized are led into a deeper understanding of their baptismal incorporation into Christ. In this lectionary cycle, instead of the Old Testament readings we read the Acts of the Apostles, which stress the impact of the resurrection in the newly formed church, and The Gospels, (apart from the gospel of Luke on the Third Sunday of Easter) are from John and contain memorable expressions of Jesus’ care for and presence in the community as well as layers of symbolic language and metaphor in such stories as The Good Shepherd; The Vine and the Branches; the Love Command. There is no temporal sequence as in Advent or Lent, leading to the birth or the death of Jesus. Though the Easter season culminates in the celebration of the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost, in John the gift of the Spirit and sending of the disciples occur on the first Easter evening.

Since we are going to be spending some time with John, I thought it might be helpful to reflect a bit this morning on John and what he is about. So, here goes a short course in John!

John’s gospel is in some ways radically different from the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. While each of them had a purpose in the way they told the story of Jesus’ life and teachings, they were in may ways pretty straight-forward about it. The other three gospels themselves have may things in common, they generally follow a similar timeline and have many of the same elements. No so John. John varies in several significant ways from the other three “synoptic” gospels. In chronology, John has Jesus’ public ministry lasting three years as opposed to a year in the others. Events such as the cleansing of the money changers in the temple appears at the beginning of John’s accounts as opposed to its appearance in the last week of Jesus life, and as the stated cause for His arrest. In the other three gospels, Jesus message if often about the kingdom of, but not about himself. In John, Jesus makes frequent declarations about Himself and especially Himself in union with or connection to God the Father. “I and the Father are one,” whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus makes symbolic “I am” statements in John. I am the “light of the world,” the “bread of life,” the “resurrection and the life,” the “way the truth the life.” John uses rich symbolic language to talk about Jesus, the word made flesh, the light of the world, the lamb of God, the bread of life, the true vine, the door, the good shepherd. He also uses sets of dualistic symbols to talk about Jesus and his message—darkness/light, below/above, flesh/spirit, death/life, falsehood/truth, earth/heaven, belief/unbelief. (Borg, p. 205)

John was, it appears, driven by a different goal. Rather than to simply tell the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and to explain His message, many scholars believe that John’s goal was to lay out a path for the believer of the way to a mystical union with God, or an experience of God that is, as one writer says, “as direct and unmediated as is my experience of myself.” (Countryman, p. 36)

John’s use of language and symbol and story is deliberately crafted to lead the believer to that end.

This way of looking at John’s gospel is not new—as early as the second century, Clement of Alexandria referred to is as the “spiritual” gospel. It’s author John, at about that time came to be called “John the Divine” or “John the Theologian” a term that in that time held the connotation of “mystic” much more than academic.

Evelyn Underhill, an early twentieth century Anglican Theologian believed that mystical experience was the source and viewpoint of John’s Gospel and that the gospel itself was organized in terms of the stages of mystical experience as she understood it.

Closer to the present, William Countryman, a current New Testament scholar, believes that the gospel of John is structured according to the experience of the believer whose existence depends on the union of God in and through “the Word” or Jesus, and that his goal is to delineate a way of bringing humanity into union with God---Father and Son and Spirit through the life death and resurrection of Jesus

Countryman says, “the Logos or Son, now incarnate in Jesus, is the only connection humanity has to the absolute reality of God. This connection is ours merely by existing, but may also become ours in a greater sense by our believing.” (Countryman, p. 39)

Which brings us to this morning’s Gospel. The story from John’s gospel, rich with symbol and metaphor, is really all about believing. It is still Easter day. Mary Magdelene goes to the tomb and sees that it is empty. She runs and gets Peter and “the beloved disciple” (likely John himself), and they look at the empty tomb and assume that Jesus’ body has been stolen. Despite the fact that Jesus has been pretty explicit with them that He will return to them, somehow they fail to see or believe that the empty tomb might be evidence of this. So the disciples go back to their companions and Mary stays by the tomb, probably to mourn. Somehow, in her grief, she fails to notice that angels have appeared before her, and when Jesus appears, she thinks he is the gardener. Until the moment when she HEARS him speak her name—and then and there she has her conversion, and believes and knows him for who he is.

She goes to the disciples and tells them she has seen the Lord. They, however, remain locked in the upper room. Locked away in fear and probably grief and confusion and perplexity. After all, Jesus was dead, killed by the same forces who would like to get them as well. And one wonders, too, if they were not perplexed in some ways by their own behavior in those final days and hours. If some of the fear and distress was not about their own ability to betray and fail the one they had traveled with and professed to believe in and love.

And then suddenly, Jesus is with them! And he says, “Peace be yours” and SHOWS them evidence that it is indeed him, and then they believe and know him for who He is. He says nothing of the betrayals and the denials, nothing of the falling asleep and letting the events of the crucifixion transpire with apparently no attempt on their part to intervene. Instead He offers them peace and gives them power. He entrusts and commissions them, gives them the spirit and empowers them to forgive sin. In the giving of the power to bind and loose sin, John has Jesus bestowing an amazing level of trust on these disciples. This is a power that in human hands alone could be tragic and devastating if misused. John has Jesus give this to the disciples as a sign that they have in some way become one with Him and through Him with the father in mystical union. Despite their human weakness, which we sense is somehow transformed by their conversion. In essence, John is saying that Jesus, in His death and resurrection, creates a new union between God through himself and them. These disciples who only hours before were cowering in fear and despair now believe and are in some way transformed as a result.

All but Thomas, who for some reason is not there. And who when he does return and is told that Jesus has been there, cannot make himself believe it. Well why should he? In reality, this one who gets the label of “doubting” is really not all that different from the rest. Mary only believed when she actually HEARD Jesus and the disciples when they SAW Him. Thomas too, needs an experience. And Jesus provides it. He returns and when Thomas says he needs to TOUCH to believe, Jesus invites him to do just that. And in that moment, Thomas too experiences conversion and becomes a part of that mystical union and he BELIEVES.

Belief. At it’s Greek root, to believe is “to give one’s heart to.” Jesus says to Thomas, “Be not unbelieving but believing” or by this definition, “give your heart to me.” And Thomas responds , “My Lord and my God.” He is truly converted. Not in an intellectual way, but in heart and spirit in that mystical union so important to John.

Thomas was surely not the only one who struggled with belief, with giving his heart over to the mystery of the resurrected Jesus. Mary, Peter, all of them in fact needed SOMETHING to tip the scales in favor of believing in life over death, in the triumph of God’s kingdom over the human one. And the good news is that what they needed was provided. God in God’s love did not withhold from them that which they needed to effect their conversion, but offered the presence of Jesus in His resurrected self so that they could hear and see and touch and be changed. And they themselves in their small community did not condemn or ostracize each other for their varying needs, but allowed Thomas to be among them for eight days as essentially a heretic, one who would not, could accept their word for it, one who, we might assume, wrestled with his inability to believe, who may have even wondered what was wrong with him, why he was so weak in faith….

So what do we need to be converted to belief, to give our hearts? Do we need to hear, or see or touch something? Do we need patience from the community and from ourselves? And if we do come to believe that through the incarnation of Jesus we have been invited into intimate and endless union with the God who so loved the world, what might this mean for the way we live our lives? As we progress through this Easter season, maybe we too can LISTEN and LOOK and TOUCH. And finding the Peace that Jesus offers, maybe we too can say with ALL assurance, “My Lord and my God!”