1 The Second Sunday of Easter 2014. John 20 19-31
The Sunday after Easter has traditionally been called Low Sunday. We crash back into boring old normality after the high of Easter day. Except that we don’t. After Easter we can never go back to normality. In Jesus’ death and resurrection God begins the new creation. God calls us to be the new humanity in the new creation. Many baptism fonts have eight sides. This is because Easter is the eighth day of creation, the first day of the new creation and we are baptised into that new creation, into the resurrection life. In weeks after Easter, the time between Easter and Pentecost we work out what this resurrection life means for us. We discover who we have become, like walking in a pair of new shoes. During Lent new Christians prepared for baptism at Easter when they were received into this community of the resurrection. But there was a further period of instruction after Easter when they reflected on what had actually happened to them, on what God had gone and been and done at Easter, on what God was doing in them now. In to-day’s gospel we have graphic pictures of what this means. The gospel is a remarkable account of the appearance of the risen Jesus. John’s gospel is always at two levels. One level looks back at what happened. The other level looks at what is happening in the life of the Christian community of John’s time. John invites us to discern what is happening in our Christian community and in our lives to-day. Last Sunday the disciples were confused and terrified. They were not sure whether to believe the message of the empty tomb or not. At the end of the day they are still afraid, still behind locked doors. We are there. The church to-day is worried and uncertain about the future holds. The risen Jesus is with them and greets them as we greet each other each Sunday: Peace be with you. Then he shows them his wounds. The Risen Christ is the wounded Christ. Only when the disciples see the wounds, do they rejoice. Only when they see the wounds do they really know that Jesus is risen. Thomas was not there. He knows that if Jesus is risen he will know him by his wounds. When the risen Jesus meets him he shows him his wounds and then recognises him and says “My Lord and my God.” There are sermons being preached all over the world this Sunday about doubting Thomas. The more I look at this passage the more I believe that the whole doubting Thomas thing is nonsense. Thomas had the insight and the faith to recognise the signs of the risen Jesus. When he sees the wounds he knows the Risen Jesus. Then Jesus breathes the new life into them and sends them out to be his risen body in the world. At Easter we met outside the church to light the paschal candle, the sign of Christ’s risen presence among us. Before we light it, we drive in five nails with the words By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ guard us and keep us. It stands in the church as a reminder that Jesus is alive and in our midst as he was with the apostles. We light it at every baptism and every funeral as a sign that Jesus is triumphant over death and opens up new
2 life to us. But the nails are there as the signs by which we know that he is risen. As he breathes his life into us, we become his body. As St. Paul says: We bear in our body the marks of the Lord Jesus. If we are his risen body, the sign of his presence in the world, his wounds are visible in us. We are not people who are good, respectable or virtuous. We are people who know we are wounded. We may carry constant physical pain. We may carry anger about what people have done to us. We may take that anger out on each other. We may be afraid that other people are getting more attention than we are and that makes us pushy. Nasty things may have been done to us when we were children, which makes it difficult for us to trust people. The last thing we should be doing is to hide them under a cloak of respectability. We need to trust each other enough to let each other know who we really are and to accept and forgive and encourage. If we can see each other’s wounds, we know we are the body of the risen Christ. We are able to see the risen Christ in the wounds of others and be a place where wounds are accepted and the gate of new life is opened. A church which walks on water and can do all sorts of wonderful things may actually be drawing boundaries between itself and the wounded people around it. A church which keeps itself nice may be excluding those people who bear the wounds of Christ. If we know our wounds, our quarrels, our tensions, our disagreements, our difficulty in accepting one another, and in accepting ourselves, God can set us free of them and we will know the resurrection life. God sends us to meet the Risen one in the wounded ones around us. The late Mother Theresa dedicated her life to the sick and the dying on the streets of Calcutta. How did she do it? She met the risen Christ in each of those poor wasted bodies. We, the people of the new creation, are called to meet the risen one in the wounded ones close to us. We find them in the Aged care hostels, in hospitals, with people who are depressed or mentally ill, maybe with people we know who are carrying the scars of abuse. In the places to which it is hard to go the Risen Christ will show us his wounds and we will be alive in the new world. We will be free of the need to judge people. We will be much more interested in listening to them. A Christian group goes to Flinders Street Station every Friday night and just hangs around to make contact with homeless young people who are also hanging around, people who have been pushed out of home for all sorts of very painful reasons Valerie Browning, an Australian-born nurse and midwife for 35 years has devoted her life to helping the nomadic Afar clan in north-east Ethiopia, some of the poorest people on earth We remember the nails. Without the marks of the nails Thomas or the other disciples could never have been sure that Jesus is risen. We can only know that we are risen if we know that we too bear in our body, in our church the marks of the Lord Jesus.
Rev. Harry Kerr