Have you ever been asked to do something that you felt eminently unqualified to do? Maybe a step up in a job or a massive project upon which hangs a huge amount of prestige?Imagine how the disciples felt when Jesus visited with them that first Easter evening. They were essentially hiding from the Judeans, in a locked room. Jesus came and stood among them – speaking peace into a troubled situation. The disciples are then tasked, by Jesus, to go spread the Word, to forgive sins (by the power of the Holy Spirit). Yes, Jesus had sent them out before but this time it was different And note that Jesus was not asking if they wouldn’t mind doing all this…He’s telling them to do so.They can only do this with the help of the Holy Spirit – Jesus’ breath, God’s breath enabling them to accomplish an otherwise impossible task. Jesus breathed on them saying ‘Receive the Holy Spirit…’God breathed life into Adam (gen 2:7) and man came alive.Now, at the beginning of the new creation, God’s restorative breath is breathed onto the disciples ‘making new people of them and through them, offering this new life to the world’.As Christians we are to continue the work that Jesus began and that can often be very exhausting. We should ask God regularly for a filling of the Holy Spirit to empower us to fulfil our calling. The Holy Spirit is a beautiful and powerful part of who God is. We need Him in our lives as a conduit to become who God created us to be. Without Him, we are powerless. So it was with the disciples.But while all this is happening in that locked room, there is someone missing – Thomas is not with the rest of the disciples when Jesus first appears to them. Tom Wright describes Thomas’ absence thus: ‘the dour, dogged disciple who suggested that the disciples might as well go with Jesus, if only to die with Him (Jn 11:16), who complained that Jesus hadn’t made things anything like clear enough (Jn 14:5) just happened to be somewhere else on that first Easter day.’ We are not told where……So, when the other disciples excitedly told him what had happened, I wonder what went through his mind……When Thomas finally does see Jesus, and Jesus speaks to him, was he, Jesus, really rebuking him or not? There are differing schools of thought about this. That Jesus is being rather gentle with Thomas almost in a kindly father chastising an stroppy son type of way. Or that He is actually really rather disappointed in Thomas and his doubting. And that doubting is actually shameful, unwanted in this world (David Helm in ‘A Conversation withJesus on Doubt). Personally, I much prefer the notion that Jesus is not rebuking Thomas. It is suggested that some people do, actually, need doubt before they can believe. Doubt can lead to questions, which in turn lead to answers, which if accepted means that doubt has done good work. But when doubt becomes stubbornness which then becomes prideful lifestyle – then doubt has harmed faith. If, or when, we doubt – let’s let our doubt deepen our faith as we continue searching for the answers.Thomas is invited to put his fingers in the nail holes in Jesus’ hands and to put his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side, just as Thomas himself had said he needs to do before he believes. But as soon as he sees and hears Jesus, this need to actually feel the wounds is gone and he openly accepts that this is indeed the risen Christ – ‘My Lord and my God’ – acknowledging the fully human and fully divine Jesus.The link between Thomas’ seeing and our believing is John’s writing, as he explains at the end of today’s reading. If we trust in the veracity of what he has written in this pretty epic gospel we have belief based on eyewitness testimony – actual written testimony. Tom Wright writes ‘the paradox of faith – touching is possible, seeing is enough but believing is best of all.’Let us pray:Lord Jesus Christ, it is hard sometimes to believe. In the face of frustrated hopes and broken dreams, of sorrow, suffering and death, we too, like Thomas, can find ourselves doubting. Help us then, even when faith is hard, even when it’s a struggle to hold on, to put our trust in You, knowing that You will not fail us. Amen.
Every year I write a plethora of sermons for Holy Week. I had one or two less to write this year, thanks to Fr Clive, but it’s still a lot of thought and a lot of typing. We use set readings of course, and most weeks come in a three year cycle, so it might, if you’re lucky, be six or even nine years before I repeat myself, because surely I can think of at least two things to say about each part of the Bible, you would hope. That’s why so many priests move on after ten years – you catch yourself saying what you said nine years ago and think ‘time to let someone else say something new’. Easter though is different, it’s the same readings every year, but because there are so many people who I only see twice a year, I feel an impetus to try and be jolly and brief, to provide an upbeat message of hope and new life, maybe even to bring chocolate eggs and fluffy bunny rabbits into it. Well, I did that last year, so it’s sin this year.Jesus said to Thomas, “You have believed because you have seen. Blessed are those who will not be able to see but will still be willing to believe.” He came to faith of course, through the physical sight of Jesus being alive after being very much dead, but also because, maybe most importantly because, he came to see that the promises Jesus made when he was with them began to come true. That’s why we believe, because we see, amidst all the manure of the world and indeed the manure in the Church of God, that this man on the cross spoke a truth which is still unfolding in our time, to us and with us.The real issue surrounding Easter is not what Thomas or the other disciples did or did not believe; the real issue for us is whether or not you and I believe this same story. Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Do you believe that he lived on this earth as an extension of the very presence of God himself? Do you believe that when he died on that middle cross that all of your sins were forgiven if you just put your faith in him and live your lives in a way which shows that clearly? The blessing is not to those who were disciples, but to those who bore witness to this having not seen it in Galilee and who do not doubt it, to those who never saw it, and yet they are willing to stake their lives and their souls on it. The blessing belongs to you and to me, and to anyone else who stands nearly 2000 years removed from Calvary and who continues to proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord.Easter is about real life, not escapist fantasy. Easter is about God's judgment calling the world to account and setting up his new, glorious creation of freedom and peace, summoning all people everywhere to live in this new world. Easter is about God's rich welcome to all humankind. That is the point of it all, we do our worship and we live our lives for others because Easter is about Jesus who announced God's saving, sovereign kingdom; who died to exhaust the power of this world's rulers; who rose again to be crowned as king over all things in heaven and on earth. God give us grace, this day and from now on, to live as Easter people, celebrating Jesus' love and joy at his table and making his kingdom and justice known in his world, to His glory.What have you come here today to bear witness to? I hope that you are prepared to witness that Christ is lord. I hope you are prepared to witness that because of him your sins are forgiven. I hope you are prepared to say that you will walk by faith and not by sight. Follow Christ today even though there is much that we do not understand and may never fully understand. Follow Christ today as the way, the truth and the life. Follow Christ today, even though everything in your present world is not as you wish it to be. Say what Thomas said after he saw and touched Jesus; my saviour and my lord. Only your blessing will be greater than his, because you did not see what Thomas saw and yet you believed this day.I cannot prove that Jesus was born of a virgin mother, but I believe it. I cannot prove that he made the blind see or the lame to walk or the dead to come back to life. I cannot prove any of that, but I believe all of that. I cannot prove that a prayer spoken in faith is heard by God. I cannot prove it, but my God do I believe it! I cannot prove that the days and days I spend in deliverance ministry has any effect, but my God I believe it when I see lives changed and evil fleeing.Today we stand with Thomas who made his move from doubt to declaration. Today we can stand in the company of the man on one of the other crosses who, when he reached heaven, may have been asked ‘do you believe in the Creeds, in the Bible, in the doctrines of trinitarian revelation and in the deposit of faith given to the Church of God’ to which he would stand and say ‘I do not know what any of that means, but I know that the man on the middle cross said that I could come, and here I am’. Here you are, here I am, because the man on the middle cross said we could be, and that is, I can tell you without any doubt after years of standing in these peculiar little boxes, is the only thing that matters, love is what matters. Alleluia, Christ is risen!
Today we start again to tell the story of a week which changed the world so much that we still have to almost act it out every year in order to begin to comprehend what it meant, to remind ourselves that what happened two thousand years ago was not a dream, not even a nightmare, not the beginning of the end, but the end of the end. Today we do this rather dramatic thing, even bringing a donkey along, and wearing vestments which are blood-red, because at the beginning of Holy Week we anticipate the week’s end. The One who enters Jerusalem today is already a dead man walking. There was no earthly hope for him since his enemies had made up their minds: judicial murder would be his end. And for the judicial murder the instrument at hand would not be a clean or antiseptic one like the lethal injection is at any rate supposed to be. The preference of the Roman authorities for crucifixion was even more blood thirsty than the Jewish method of stoning. And so, it’s blood we’re thinking of already. Soon blood will be flowing. You may say, so what? There’s so much blood shed in the world: in accidents, wars, gang stabbings and murders, natural disasters, political atrocities. Yes, but this blood is different, this blood do we remember after two thousand years, even to the point of wearing clothes to keep that blood fresh in our minds.This is saving, salvific, redemptive blood. It is the blood that came streaming through the firmament, and St Catherine of Siena perceived as soaking the Church in its flow. It is royal blood, the blood of the Messiah, to be shed in a self-giving whose effects are so wonderful that this coming murder is a triumph, and not a defeat. This is not just the red of blood. It is also the red of the victory of the King of Kings.The place where it all happened matters. The location is not without significance – not by any manner of means. Today the Lord sought to enter his own city, Zion, Jerusalem, the holy city. That he chose to do so with such a rag tag army of the dispossessed, the forgotten, the despised and in one extraordinary case, the recently smelly dead, should tell us as much about what kind of King he will be as we could ever wish to know. It was the city of the Most High God whose vocation was to be the dwelling-place on earth of the truth, closeness and love of God. It was a city that belonged to Jesus Christ by right – not only owing to the fact that he was Israel’s true Messiah , but because of the way in which he was so: a way unthought of even by the most far-seeing of the prophets: he was incarnate God and so in his divine-human person he is the measure of all truth, all closeness and all love. The relationship between God and the world finds its highest embodiment in his person which now walks into His own city, to the cries of ‘Hosanna’, which means, ‘save us’. Oh, but that they only could know how that salvation was to be wrought. Oh, that we could understand.But the entry into the city was an echo of the past, Scripture knew of cities that kept their gates firmly closed, to their loss. Jericho closed its doors against Joshua and ensured it would miss out on the moment of divine history sweeping up with the tribes of Israel escaping from Egypt. Despite this morning’s hosannas, later this week Jerusalem will close its doors on Jesus. It will not simply bar him, as Jericho barred Joshua. It will have him contained in the praetorium and crucified outside the gate.We know parallels to such closure in our own lives. We can close the door of our own self, of our hearts, of even our churches, snap them shut, when to open would have meant healing for ourselves and others. On Good Friday the Saviour will do the opposite to what Jericho and Jerusalem did. He will open his arms as wide as they can go, so that all the world may march in through the wound in his side, into the spacious welcome of his Sacred Heart, where all may find a home, and where pain and sorrow are no more. Now we know what kind of King He is to be, we ask ourselves what kind of disciples we are asked to become.
Today in the gospel we hear about standing together and showing solidarity, even when it might be costly to us, and that we can answer our question ‘how can we be more like Jesus’ by standing, or in this case sitting, with the most vulnerable. There is a certain solidarity in sin, as there is, we are told, honour amongst thieves, and equality among all Christian people. As sinners, we know we are in the same boat; we feel solidarity in our weakness and failure. ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom 3:23). That’s why the raging accusers of this woman caught in adultery eventually wander off, unwilling to cast any stones, knowing themselves to be sinful too. The oldest depart first, because they see more clearly the commonality of human failure, they are wise enough to allow this dreadful, staged almost-execution to be called off because they see themselves in the fate of the woman about to be stoned.The scribes and Pharisees are trying to isolate this woman to condemn her. They ‘place her in the midst’ (probably dishevelled and indecently dressed), under the glare of all and the glare of the noonday sun, but they have failed to bring her male partner who should be equally liable to judgement as Leviticus would have informed them (Lev 20:10).Our Lord does not deny that the woman is guilty, but he refuses to go along with that diabolical logic of isolating this one woman as a test case. This is literally a ‘test case’, since he sees that the accusers are doing this ‘to test him’. So, he opposes their tactics with a show of solidarity: he gets down on the ground himself. I imagine the woman as having been thrown on the ground, not daring to raise her head from the dust. Jesus gets down to her level, to show us, also, how we can be like him.In his Incarnation, Jesus had already showed his solidarity with all humanity: ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (Jn 1:14). We remember, especially on Ash Wednesday, that we are likewise dust, and to dust we shall return (Gen 3:19). So, Jesus gets down in the dust, the same dust of which he is made – having received his human nature from the Blessed Virgin – and he starts to write. The coming of Jesus into our sinful world was precisely to save us, not to condemn us (see Jn 3:16-17). Jesus is the New Adam, who is at the same time the Heavenly Man, and in the union of his two natures (human and divine) Jesus opens a way for us to share in the life of God: ‘Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven’ (1 Cor 15:49).The solidarity of Jesus with us goes all the way to the Cross. In his Passion, Jesus, though personally sinless, identifies with sinners: ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom 5:8). So, the last words of Jesus to the woman caught in adultery are her lifeline: ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.’ His solidarity with her is expressed by this call to new life, where sin is left behind and her humanity is healed, and not only that, the humanity of the onlookers is brought to their attention, warts and all, and only the Pharisees are unable to learn from this, because ultimately, they would have had her killed just to prove their point. Who is the greatest sinner here? Maybe for us, these Lenten veilings show us not a lack of an image, but somewhere to project our own image, a dynamic absence for us to fill with our discipleship, rather than gazing upon the impossibility of a perfect looking saint, frozen in time.Our entire belief pivots on the joyful message – and this Gospel is clearly one of joy - that God stoops down low. He stoops so low as to take on our nature and redeem it. He stoops into suffering and death, being brought low because of our sins and is only raised high mockingly upon the cross. Despite the grace of our baptism, we stoop low in sinful ways. Perhaps we are quick to debase others, pass judgement, hold grudges, exact revenge. Perhaps we attract the scorn of others for our mistakes, or are exacting when it comes to sharing mercy. But we can always rejoice in the knowledge that, however low we stoop, that’s how low our merciful Saviour will go to write his law of mercy in the sand of our hearts. He sits with this woman and saves here in so many ways for one reason – he loves her, and maybe he is the only person in this awful scene who truly does love her, and he loves us, and wishes to save us too, so don’t ever think, even when you’re surrounded by hate, that you can’t be loved.Jesus is not swept up in their phony outrage. He does not play their game, as he will evade every attempt throughout history to use him for political and ideological purposes. He is Lord, and he stands apart from our scheming. God wishes to gather us from exile into our home. If we wish to accept his invitation, then we must dare to join the accused woman at the centre of the circle, because that is where Jesus is to be found.
