Sermon for the third Sunday after Easter- 16th May 2021: Acts 3, 12-19; Luke 24, 36-48.

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens and on Zoom

 

From time to time the author of some great TV drama will tell us that she or he has written more than one ending to the story, allowing time to see how the series develops and how people respond to the developing plot. Actors will actually film several endings, and won’t know which one will be used until it is actually screened. This gives the directing team and the author the final word on suspense. In a sense this is what we get with the four gospel writers as they present to us what happens after Jesus walks away from the empty tomb.

Mark’s version is short, and the experience of the women who go to the garden is expressed in powerful words – alarmed, terror, amazement, afraid. In fact ‘afraid’ is the final word in St. Mark’s gospel.

Matthew says little more than Mark, but his gospel ends with words like, direct, worship, go, make disciples, baptize, obey, command. Matthew leaves us in no doubt that the new way of following Jesus is missional – we are sent out – go and baptize. We are given our gospel orders by Matthew.

In a sense, John ends as he begins. He informs us in his first chapter that Word has become flesh and dwells in our midst. It is this same Word that has ‘spoken forth’ from the empty tomb, and he still dwells among us in full physical presence. John has not retreated on his initial convictions. Mary of Magdala is told ‘not to touch’ – Noli me tangere – ‘do not hold on to me’. He stands in the midst of his disciples and shows them the marks of the cross – this is the same me! To Thomas he later says, reach out and touch. Again, he appears by the lakeside and lo and behold he is presiding over a charcoal fire cooking some fish. So for John, the Word has indeed remained flesh and continues to dwell among us, full of grace and truth.

This leaves us with St. Luke, and his ending; again, quite distinct. He tells the lovely and very human story of the Walk to Emmaus. There are the two downcast followers, low in spirits, despondent perhaps, because the one around whom they had gathered, and in whom they had invested so much hope, had died on a shameful cross.

They are joined as they walk by a stranger – someone they did not recognize. Now that is strange, especially just after we have briefly mentioned the way St. John handles the material with his emphasis on the same Jesus, before and after. But it suits St. Luke’s method to keep the identity hidden initially. Besides, we are told elsewhere that Mary of Magdala didn’t recognize the Risen Lord until he says her name. So the two walkers to Emmaus are not unique.

Cleopas and his un-named companion don’t get mentioned by name by Jesus but at a supper together, the act of blessing the bread, breaking it and giving it to them, brings back powerful memories – the memories of what we refer to as the Last Supper. This is one of the ways St. Luke presents the same Jesus before and after – through the sacred actions of the meal, and of remembrance.

Luke tells us something else though. Having poured out to the stranger all their anguish as they journeyed, Luke informs us that the stranger begins from Moses, works his way through the prophets, and somewhat elliptically says that Jesus interprets all of this – the history of our salvation –  about himself. What a mammoth bible study that must have been!

The two return to Jerusalem at great speed to say that the Risen Lord had appeared to them in the action of breaking the bread. Back in Jerusalem Jesus appears to all the disciples gathered together. He affirms he is not a ghost – look at my hands and feet, touch me, ghosts don’t have bones. The Risen Lord consumes some broiled fish – ιχθύς οπτός – and I guess we can say that ghosts don’t stoke charcoal fires and eat fish.

 

Jesus then goes on to reaffirm that everything about him in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled. There is a re-assertion of the continuity between Judaism and the Risen Jesus standing before them. He is the fulfilment of everything in those holy scriptures, a profound connection for those first Jewish Christo-centric believers. Remember this always – the followers of Jesus are Jewish. St. Luke informs us that after these wonderful revelations of the Risen Lord those joyful Christian-Jews were continually in the temple blessing God (Luke 24, 53). We have so Christianized all these circumstances that we have a sort of corporate amnesia about this central fact.

 

At the Liturgy on Good Friday, the intercessions include prayers for the Jewish people. In the first example we pray for ‘God’s ancient people, the Jews, the first to hear his word’, and secondly, ‘Lord God of Abraham, bless the children of your covenant, both Jew and Christian.’    (Common Worship Times and Seasons p317).

In St. Luke’s finale of the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the author sets himself up very neatly for the sequel. Films nowadays often have sequels – Jaws 1, Jaws 2; Mission Impossible 2, Mission Impossible 3, and so on. St. Luke leaves his gospel ready, like an open book with the next page yearning to be written, and he continues his story in what we know as the Acts of the Apostles, or maybe we could call it ‘Luke 2 – the Sequel’.

These four gospels with their different powerful endings, are of course ironically just the beginnings, because the resurrection story has never ended, and there can be no final chapter. This is so because this resurrection story flourishes in each and every one of us, and what happened in a garden that belonged to Joseph of Arimathea continues to blossom with a million blooms on a daily basis, bursting into the flower of faith like a ‘spiritual meadow’ as St. John Moschos calls it in his anthology of holy lives.

In this season of holy Eastertide, we might reflect more on these most wonderful endings of the four gospels – the Resurrection Narratives as they are called – and allow for the reality that these are not the closing chapters of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but all just part of the long introduction that began with Abraham, Moses, the Prophets, all of whom become as one when Jesus is enthroned on the cross, and emerges triumphant leaving the tomb empty.

‘This joyful Eastertide,        (New English Hymnal 121)

Away with sin and sorrow.

My Love, the Crucified,

hath sprung to life this morrow.

Had Christ, that once was slain,

Ne’er burst his three day prison,

our faith had been in vain,

but now hath Christ arisen.         (words GR Woodward 1848-1934