SERMON
PREACHED at St and St LUKE’S, EAST TAIERI (MOSGIEL)
THIRD
SUNDAY IN EASTER (18th April) 2021
Readings
Acts 3:12-19
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24: 36b-48
When we open the scriptures, particularly
perhaps those of the Second Testament, we need to bring a spirit – the Spirit
too, we might say – of scepticism. Can scepticism be a gift of God’s Spirit? Maybe
that’s the wrong word. maybe like a child we should bring a spirit of open-eyed
curiosity. Who and what is being revealed
in this passage? Why? Isn’t that above all the question that opens the world up
to children’s minds? Except you believe like a child (which probably didn’t
mean that at all, when Jesus said it, but it can).
It’s imperative that we don’t
generate some sort of “tablets of stone” mentality to the scriptures of our
faith. That’s why fundamentalism – a nineteenth century aberration that does irreparable
damage to the scriptures – is so destructive. We can ask another question. What
was the author of our passage wanting to say to his or her audience? Why
did Luke tell us of these scenes, and in this order? It may not matter, and our
best guess is at best no more than a guess, but it may be a guess filled with
the Wisdom of God.
So Luke, like John last week
gives us a series of resurrection appearances. They were writing decades after
the event, but we can be sure the event was firmly ingrained in the corporate memory
of the Jesus community. The writers didn’t dare make things up, because their
words had to resonate as Truth, for Jesus, John suggests, is Truth.
Luke gives a four-part story:
Jesus appears to the women, ineligible witnesses as they were in their culture,
and offers words of hope: ‘He is not here, here is risen.’ Strange words
indeed! I know one very evangelical theological college that has those words
emblazoned across what they would call the Communion Table of their chapel –
perhaps a provocative dig at more Catholic doctrines of the Eucharist. Or
perhaps I’m not being fair, because surely those words are the very kernel of
the gospel: death has not contained life! What more need be said? We whisper
words related to these when we stand at the grave of, for example, a still-born
child and whisper words of hope, offer what Paul called ‘a sure and certain
hope of the resurrection to eternal life.’ I don’t understand these words, and
nor did the women. But the rumour of resurrection has begun. The women are
understandably terrified, as Mark makes clear in his most skeletal of
resurrection records. Yet they do re-tell those haunting words. Do we?
There is too an all but hidden
moment in Luke’s story, next. Peter, too, tantalised by the women’s strange tale,
heads off and takes a squizz. And this once terrified man goes home,
bewildered, perhaps even reconstructed by all that he encounters on that
strange first day of the week. We will hear much more of Ambivalent Peter in Luke’s
Second Volume, the Acts of the Apostles, wherein Deserter, infilled by God’s Spirit,
becomes Rock on which the Body of Christ is founded.
Then Cleopas, and probably Mrs
Cleopas, encounter Jesus, and eventually recognize him when he breaks bread as we
will do shortly. He leaves them though with only – but also absolutely –
the memory of all that he said and did alongside them. The words ‘memory’ and
remember, in Greek terms, mean far more than ‘Oh yeah, I remember you,’ as
erstwhile All Black captain David Kirk once said to me, not as a compliment but
as a definite put-down. ‘Yeah, you perhaps happened and anyway it was long ago
and far away’ is precisely what the Greek word ‘anamnēsis’ does not mean.
Jesus became absolutely present to Mr and Mrs Cleopas as he broke bread with
them, as he does each time he breaks bread with us in the rite of communion, if
we let him.
The chapel of Ridley College
Melbourne was, in a sense, fundamentally wrong: ‘He is here because
he is risen.’ He is no longer limited in space and time but here now and here
tomorrow and there too, and for you and for me and for all humanity for all
time, when we so chose to experience him. But, as the risen Lord reminds Mary
in the Fourth Gospel, you cannot cling to me, for I must be there, in
Bonhoeffer’s words, for all people across all time. Not just Mary. Not just Mr
and Mrs Cleopas, but you and me and every broken person in human history too.
Now he appears a fourth time,
and speaks a word of peace. His appearance is heavier and at the same time
lighter than reality, for he transcends locked doors, and overcomes fear –
because perfect love does cast out fear, as the Fourth Gospel and Johannine Epistle
writer yet again reminds us. And the peace the Risen Jesus speaks, and which we
repeat in our liturgies – is not a gooey good feeling but the radical decision
to do justice and embody hope and be love in our actions and if
necessary our words too.
Luke tells us all this not for
our entertainment because, as Gary Griffith-Smith expressed it in this week’s
gospel conversation,[1] in the resurrection appearances
the baton of Jesus is passed on to the floundering, foundering, disbelieving, doubting
yet Spirit-filled disciples, and even to floundering, foundering, disbelieving,
doubting yet Spirit-filled you and me. Perhaps this Easter we too have found the
same hints of joy that led the disciples to stunned-mullet silence, startled
and terrified, thinking we are seeing a ghost. Or perhaps Easter this year has
seemed to us no more than an old wives’ tale (if you’ll forgive the sexist
expression), as it seemed to the disciples when the women first came to them. Perhaps
we have found only our doubts and unworthiness … yet the risen Lord of Luke’s
and John’s and Mark’s and Matthew’s telling transcends even us, and the baton
passes to us, and we can be sent out on a mission to God’s world.
And there we can, and
God-willing will stumble on, even in this post Christendom, ecologically
and economically imploding world. In the upper room of the world into which God
has called us, God will enable us however imperfect we may be, to continue rumouring
Christ-hope, resurrection hope, the hope of God-filled eternities to those who
encounter us. even in the ordinariness of our unspectacular lives.
The Lord be with you
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