Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter – 24th April 2022: John 20, 19-31

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

Our prayers of shared Easter joy are with the Orthodox Church today, for whom this is Easter Sunday. Καλό Πάσχα. Our prayers of shared compassion on this Day of Resurrection are with all Ukrainians for whom the joy of their faith is profoundly challenged by their plight. Our prayers of shared pleading that the words of the Risen Jesus, ‘Peace be with you, repeated so often in the Easter Narratives, will inhabit the souls and inform the behaviour of Russian state and church leadership.

‘Easter Narratives’ is the corporate name we give to that collection of scriptural material that informs us of the various appearances of Jesus after his crucifixion, death, and his three days in the tomb during which he is redeeming even the depths of hell with his graceful redemption.

This is what we refer to when we say in the Creed, ‘He descended into hell’. I’m sure the inclusion of this line must have generated much thought and speculation. It makes sense though. If God’s redeeming action in his Christ is a universal, and indeed cosmic action of God, then it is essential that those who had passed form this life before this action have to be redeemed also, for ‘that which is not touched by God in Christ is not redeemed’. So the new life of the risen Christ about to emerge into a cosmic action of salvation must be shared by those who ‘knew not Christ’.

So these Easter Narratives are placed in the last chapter or chapters of the four gospels. St, Mark is as succinct at the end of his gospel as he is at the beginning of his gospel – the only one of the four not to give any mention of the Birth Narratives. St. Mark records the appearance to Mary of Magdala and the other women, but this is where it stops, with the rather dramatic ending: ‘they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’ (Mark 16, 8). Perhaps this reaction in the women is understandable.

Mercifully the other gospels share more appearances with us. Our gospel today shares a measure of the Resurrection Appearances. On the evening of the first day of God’s new epoch – the epoch of the Risen Christ – Jesus appears to the disciples. John tells us they were afraid. Fear was there maybe because there was speculation that the authorities had in fact taken the body of Jesus. At this stage, remember, Peter had only seen with his own eyes an empty tomb and some funerary cloths lying around in the tomb.

Could the disciples be next in line for danger, maybe arrest and also death, for being followers of Jesus. This is where we have to deal with some intellectual and theological challenges – challenges about the very nature of the body of the Risen Christ.

In this locked room – St. John emphasizes it –the doors were securely locked – Jesus appears among them. This plays into the hands of those who think that the resurrected body of Jesus was only a spiritual phenomenon, and that the spiritual presence of Jesus is conjured up by the shared needs of his distressed followers. It contributes to those who, in the very early Christian dispensation, rejected the material implications of the Incarnation. In other words the birth of the Word of God in Jesus could not have been fully human, but a semblance of humanity, for it is impossible for God to be material, ie a person.

This interpretation of the Christ event was quickly known as ‘gnosticism’ and this ‘gnostic’ view of Christ was at the heart of many of the well-known heresies over the next few hundred years, the years in which the faith now expressed in the Nicene Creed became the accepted truth throughout Christendom. Yet this self-repeating ‘gnosticism’ is not confined to the first four centuries of the Christian era. It perpetuates right through to our own day as one alternative to the challenging theological paradox that Jesus is fully human and fully divine.

To move on – thank goodness, I can hear you saying – Jesus offers to the disciples the greeting that is in a sense HIS Easter gift to us; ‘Peace be with you’. Here he shares with the disciples the promised gift of the Holy Spirit. Earlier in John’s gospel (John 16, 7) Jesus informs the disciples that he HAS to leave them, and if not then the Holy Spirit, the Advocate cannot be sent to them – the Advocate  παράκλητος will lead them into all truth. So Jesus breathes his divine breath on them, the Holy Spirit that has come from the Father.

One of the disciples, Thomas, is missing from this extraordinary appearance. Since he has not seen this with his own eyes any proof of their claims – stating as he does that he needs to see the evidence of the marks of the body wounded on the cross, ante-mortem wounds, he rejects the reports of Jesus being alive. He has to wait another week. Again the disciples are together in the house – John stressing that the doors were shut – and Jesus appears to the full complement of disciples. The Easter gift is shared again – Peace be with you.

Thomas is then invited to share in the experience that has had so much required in order that he could believe. Not to make light of it – Jesus obliges. He presents to Thomas the bloody wounds on his hands, and side – blood now congealed and crusted, and he invited to touch them. This could not be a spiritual but a material presence. What more does Thomas need? He has his evidence. Evidence that the same Jesus he knew from before the crucifixion, is the Jesus standing before him now, the Jesus who is both human and divine, and who is the embodiment of the new creation.

Thomas, in his profound response to this, in a way offers us a Creed – a statement of faith. In the presence of his fellow disciples and in the company of the Jesus he knew before the cross, and the risen Jesus he now knows and experiences ‘in the flesh’ is none other than his Lord, and his God. Those many hundreds of years where this great debate about the nature of Jesus was thrashed out, is just simply and plainly proclaimed, ‘My Lord and my God’ (John 19, 28).

How are we to deal with the evidence of scripture now? How are we to interpret what those disciples witnessed? How are we to present to our world, where even proof and evidence gets distorted, undermined, and deliberately mis-interpreted, that truth proclaimed by Thomas.

 

In today’s Greek, the word for this evidence or proof would be απόδειξη . Ironically it is also the word, very frequently heard, for a receipt – incontrovertible proof that you have paid for something, and received something in return. You have the evidence. We can’t quite have that level of proof for our faith in the Risen Jesus, but we have the ancient evidence; we have the receipt of scripture –‘were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ (Luke24, 32) that has endured countless generations of telling and re-telling, of sharing, of experiencing, the living Jesus, both individually, and corporately in the life of the Church. We have the tradition, ancient and referred to by St. Paul even before any gospel was compiled, of how Christ has come to us in bread and wine; a pledge from Jesus both at the Supper on the night before he was betrayed and handed over to death, and at a Supper in Emmaus on the day of his resurrection, ‘how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.’ (Luke 24, 35).

Lastly, we have the holy words of Christ as he addresses the reaction of Thomas. ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. (John 20, 29)