Third Sunday of Easter
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Gospel reading: St. Luke 24: 36B-48.
It’s the Third Sunday of Easter, and we stay with the events of the first Easter day in the gospel. The passage we heard from Luke follows that wonderful account of the two disciples on the Emmaus Road, who recognise Jesus later at the breaking of the bread in their home. They immediately return to Jerusalem to tell the others what had happened, and that is where the story continues in today’s passage.
It’s quite similar to last week’s gospel passage from John, which covered the same situation. The disciples are gathered together on that first Easter evening, and suddenly Jesus appears among them. As with John’s gospel, Jesus shows the disciples his hands and his feet. Here he invites them to touch him and see that he is real – ‘a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Jesus then asks to eat a piece of fish – something else a ghost wouldn’t do. Later he tells them that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. And the disciples will be key in all this, because, he said, “You are witnesses of these things.”
It’s significant that John also talks about the disciples having power to forgive sins or not to forgive sins. So this element of the Church’s mission – urging repentance, forgiving sins, trying to bring about reconciliation – is obviously close to the heart of Jesus. If sometimes it is difficult to keep up the joy of the Easter season, it may be helpful to remember that the Easter gospel we proclaim came about through the reconciliation Jesus brought about through the Cross.
This year, too, I think, has been difficult for keeping our Christian hope buoyant amidst depressing world affairs and the conflicts that rage; about our own country where so many things that seem to be going wrong; for new problems that seem to be thrown up as technology marches on, leaving many of us bewildered and trying to catch up.
So at the same time as Easter sermons proclaim a new beginning, with the resurrection changing the world, it sometimes feels as if nothing has altered. We feel threatened by global instability; we despair as we hear of the poverty many around the world live in; we hear of deterioration in the nation’s mental health; these things can get on top of us.
We proclaim Jesus Christ risen from the dead, and I’m sure most of us will go on doing that by our church attendance and membership. But we can sometimes hear the taunts that the Israelites heard when in exile, where they felt God had abandoned them and didn’t answer their prayers; taunts from their captors “Where is now your God?” If we struggle with faith and belief sometimes it may be timely to recall that Jesus himself felt remote from God at times. Easter didn’t come before Jesus underwent his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane; it didn’t come before he cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We sometimes forget that Jesus must have experienced the human characteristics we all share – to know joy and sorrow, despair and hope; anger and humour; we know how he gathered friends around him, and knew the hurt when they deserted him. While Jesus was on the cross, the soldiers jeered him – “Come down from the Cross, if you really are God’s Son.”
But God didn’t halt the suffering of Jesus there. God chose to give humans absolute freedom and in doing that involves risk, limitation and self-sacrifice. As Ian Bradley wrote in The Times last week – there is vulnerability in the heart of God, and so in the figure of Jesus. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann suggests that God is not so much the almighty and omnipotent deity loaded with the many attributes that we have piled on him over the centuries, but rather a generous, ever-loving, vulnerable creator and sustainer.
I think we have to acknowledge the fact that the resurrection is not a conjuring trick that magically ends all suffering and pain. As St Paul writes in Romans: the world remains groaning in travail. Humans remain with free will and the capacity for harm as well as good. Jesus’ rising from the tomb does point to the fact that death is not the end, and gives us the promise of a future life beyond this one. It also points us to see how life comes out of death in both a physical and a spiritual sense. Does not this apply as much to our own inner lives as to the biological cycle of death and rebirth?
So even after Easter with its promise of new beginnings, we may feel a bit ordinary at times. Jesus has been there. But we also hang onto the sense of hope that Easter brings; that it is all a part of God’s Grand Plan of which we see only in part. Hope in this sense is different from optimism. We put our trust in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus; that his suffering on behalf of others is vindicated; that all this is written in the scriptures, in the very scheme of things, as Jesus told his disciples in the gospel.
Quite a long time ago, I was given this card which features the ‘Breakthrough Cross’. It is a symbol of the resurrection, but the cross is still very central. In fact, you could say that cross has been shot through. It’s column and arms are empty, but the missing figure of Jesus is etched in them; the breakthrough couldn’t have happened without the Cross being there. Jesus won the victory, but experienced all the circumstances of being human. As a verse in Hebrews relates, he is able to sympathise with our weaknesses, as he has been there.
It is always a challenge to proclaim Christ risen in the face of a very troubled world, but Christians have never stopped doing that. If there are days when you find it difficult to proclaim joyfully “I believe…”, remember that all over the world there are Christians saying “We believe…” It may help us, too, to think of others in sorrow, and to know that Jesus identifies with them in his great love. A Church of Scotland minister wrote recently “This Easter may we be still and more loving, as we listen for the world’s tears, for somewhere in their midst are the tears of Christ, and they companion ours in the mystery called hope.”
A prayer for our life of faith at this time: Grant me, risen Lord, trust in your resurrection. So inspire me with the breath of your Spirit; so bless me with your peace; that my fears and doubts are transformed to joy and trust. And help me to bring the Easter hope to the sorrowful and helpless, and to express your love to all I meet. Amen.