23rd April 20062nd Sunday of Easter
Fr David Cherry
Wounded Glory: Acts 4:32-35; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31
“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light we have fellowship one with another.”
In his glory, Jesus is still wounded.
Farmer Joe looks out the window one morning and sees that all the
cows standing in the field are frozen. He is amazed and
shocked. He sees his livelihood going down the pan. Mabel
says: “Don’t worry. I know just the woman who can
sort this out.” A while later he looks out to see a woman
wondering among the frozen cows. As she passes they start to move
again, the ice melting. ‘Who on earth is she?’ Joe
asks. “Thora Hurd.”
Here on the Octave Day of Easter we are still rejoicing.
We’re meant to be laughing, chuckling with delight, taken out of
ourselves in joy. Through 40 days of Lent we were invited to know
ourselves a little more clearly; to come to a more realistic
recognition of who we are and what we are like; how our desire for God
is often obscured from us – I’m tempted to say, frozen over
– remaining unfelt while the more important things of life, even
the good things, our responsibilities, deprive us of living in and from
our desire for the living God.
Now in the 50 days of Easter, you and I are invited and given time to
deepen our faith in the Risen Christ, illumined by his light. We
acclaimed ‘Christ our Light’ at the Vigil – Christ
our Rabbi, our Teacher. In his light the scriptures are read to
us; the word of God proclaimed. This is why the Paschal Candle stands
here, a physical, sacramental reminder of the Presence of the Dead and
Risen Christ.
The invitation to all the disciples is to enter into his glory, to
enter and share in his risen life; a life which is not determined by
death and fear of death.
There is something strange about the resurrection texts because they
are telling us how the disciples are continually taken by
surprise. The Dead and Risen Christ is not who they expect him to
be. And the resurrection texts are also deeply human. The
disciples are being themselves, drawn by the risen Christ, confused,
disorientated and wanting to ‘get it’.
As we read on Easter Sunday, Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb
mis-recognises the Lord. She sees a Gardner and that is precisely
who he is: God the Creator, walking in the cool of the day as he
did in Eden. St John is telling us that the risen Jesus is
continuing the work of Creation. Look, here is your God and this
is who Jesus is.
Mary, in mourning for her beloved Friend, wants him back, the ay things
were. Perhaps holding on to him she is told, “Do not cling
to me”. I am more, always more, more than you could hope
for, more than you could dream of. You need to let go and enter
into this glory yourself. Strangely, ‘do not touch
me’ is an invitation into more. Perhaps Mary – and
you and I – are being told that while God is known in human
experience, God cannot be possessed or reduced to human experience;
neither can it be achieved or made a success of. God is always offering
us more.
And then in today’s Gospel there is this encounter with
Thomas. I don’t know how you think about doubting
Thomas. Doubting, in my Christian upbringing, was certainly a
no-no. You must have faith. Doubt no longer. But
let’s recall: far from ‘doubting Thomas’, Thomas was
the one who said to the other disciples: Let us go with him and die
with him (John xi, 16).
Faith is the opposite of doubt. Not so. The opposite of
faith is not doubt, but certainty, the certainty that one has God, like
you have a Ferrari. Doubt is the human way by which we come to
believe in another. Who is this person? What is he
like? Doubt is authentic, being true to oneself. We come to
believing in Jesus through the real and actual questions we have in our
life experience. It is the hardening of doubt into an obstinate,
frozen position of skepticism and cynicism that is the enemy of faith.
So Thomas, the authentic disciples with integrity, the one who would go
and die for and with his Lord, says he will not allow himself to
believe lest his hopes are dashed again.
And here we move from ‘do not touch’ to ‘touch and
believe’; from ‘I am more than you expect’; to
‘yes, I am real, physical and wounded.’
The glory of the dead and risen Lord that we invited to share in is not
an ethereal super-reality separate from human life, but fleshy,
physical, wounded. The Spiritual has not got rid of the Physical.
The resurrection was not a miraculous healing or resolution to an awful
story. The wounds are still there.
To enter into the glory of the Risen Lord in Easter is not to side-step
real life, pain, woundedness and all the other elements of being a
human. Not a side-step, but an embrace. Touch and
believe. Come close to your pain and the pain of a broken
world. Thomas doesn’t run away.
So the glory of the Risen Jesus is a strange glory. It is not the
glamour of the silver screen; the constant escape from reality we are
invited to in every advert about success and achievement. In his
glory Jesus is still wounded.
We are reminded again by the Paschal Candle standing here, wounded with five grains of incense.
And the wounds of the crucifixion are what we have done.
He comes into the room, among us, without reprimand or resentment,
without a lofty forgiving tone: He never says ‘I forgive
you.’ Simply: Peace be unto you. He is offering us
time to see ourselves in a new light, to see what we have done and to
touch the wounds of a broken terrified world – and not run away
or dismiss them.
The movement is deeper into the real world, our lives, not out of
them. By facing the woundedness of the world and our own personal
woundedness we can begin to find healing in our actual lives. The
glory that we are invited to share does not dismiss the reality of who
we are and of the pain of the world.
The glorified body of Jesus is still wounded. We see it in the
deep wounds on our world brought about by human negligence and
exploitation of creation, violence and greed. We see what we have
done to the poor and deprived through the dehumanising injustices and
callous methods of our economies and politics; we see the victims of
our aggression and exclusion; we see the lasting impact of our violence
and what our will to dominate the lives of others has done. And Jesus invites us
to come near. Do not turn away.
And this is not easy. Again, the press is beginning to wind us up
about the Anglican Communion and gay priests. While society at
large moves into being able to reverence gay people for who they are,
the church continues to wound itself and others. I want to weep with
her. I cannot run away. I am part of her, part of the
wounded Body of Christ. And I am part of them – those who have
been and are pontificated at, spoke about rather than to, patronized de-humanised into a
‘them’ by those who should be coming nearer not going
further from humanity. We are all flesh of Christ’s wounded
flesh; part of his strange glory.
We stand in the light of the dead, wounded and Risen Lord, in his
Presence, part of, not separate from, in solidarity with the
brokenness of Creation.
Here in Communion the Risen Christ stands in our midst to draw us into
Communion with one another. We are taken into the depths of
fleshiness and physicality. Communion is about being a physical
communion of Persons. It is profoundly spiritual, but
physical. Bread and wine convey to us the new life of Christ,
Sunday, by Sunday; drawing us to share in his glory: less fearful of
our own brokenness and need; less blind to the brokenness of our
society and the world; more ready to participate in bringing Christ
healing and reconciliation to others.
On the island of Iona there is a beach : Martyrs beach. It is a
reminder of the cost of living in Communion with God and others. On
that beach over a thousand years ago 109 monks were murdered by the
Vikings, refusing to retaliate, refusing to injure another, refusing to
make of them a ‘them’ : the enemy, living in the Risen Life
of their Lord.
“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light we have fellowship one with another.”