“Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’”
*************************************************
“A week later his disciples were again in the house”.
And here we are, a week after our varied experiences of celebrating the one universal mystery.
And what is this Easter life, this life lived by the Resurrection of Christ, supposed to look like?
What is our life, as sons of the Resurrection, to be?
Is it a life different from any of our lives lived before or elsewhere,
or from other lives lived ‘in the world’?
Should it feel different?
Is the world different this week for having celebrated Easter – indeed, celebrated Easter together, East and West – last Sunday?
Well, it may be does feel a little different – unexpectedly, perhaps.
Pope Francis offered the occasion for this.
On Easter Day he gave God’s Resurrection blessing to the world.
He died the next day – and somehow the world, this world, felt opened to heaven.
Did you experience that yesterday at his funeral?
With the world gathered in Rome and Mass being celebrated under blue skies, once again it felt that our world was strangely opened, pervaded by more,
by life that does not end, and by a dimension of peace.
To help us be orientated in this new world, this life made new in Christ,
the Church has given and received the Resurrection accounts in the scriptures. As many say, they are like no other writing.
Try and grasp a solid sequential historical account and it slips away.
Yet they are clearly not allegories of abstract constructs of the mind – works of logic or philosophy.
Nor are they of the imagination, as if they were some world-building fantasy.
We hear them every Saturday night at the Vigil, and they get under the skin,
like a stranger arriving unremarked and we find ourselves saying, “It is the Lord.”
These scriptures poke us out of spiritual inertia just when we have locked the doors of our common life against challenge and against the disturbing virtue of hope.
God is there; the initiative is wrested from us.
So, I want to identify two notable, and perhaps surprising, characteristics of these Resurrection accounts, ones which may shed light on what this Resurrection life is as lived by us here and now,
as spring comes and the universe continues to expand.
One is that the world remains a world of difficulties.
Before seeing the risen Lord, those who loved Him were full of fear and doubt, and dismissive of idle talk.
But even after seeing Him, what do we find? They’ve locked the doors. Some doubted. A night of utter frustration with no fish caught. Peter feeling hurt.
Yes, these texts provide a strong literary contrast with the effect of seeing the risen Lord, but they are more than that – they remain an abiding experience of human living, even for those initiated into the new world.
Ezekiel’s vision of the open Temple filled with divine glory, and life-giving waters teeming with fish, the Vidi Aquam, is only one way of seeing all that is real.
The other notable feature of the Resurrection accounts is the physicality.
The references to this start straight away early on Easter morning with the earth quaking and heaven’s messenger dazzling the eyes.
The disciples touch, or restrain themselves from touching.
There is fire,
and breakfast,
and a too heavy haul of fish.
They have to consider their clothes.
And they are breathed on,
like Adam gaining sensory awareness of life in Genesis.
And this is in addition to the risen Jesus’ own physicality: the one who ate and drank, who did the breathing and who was the one being touched.
These two aspects of living the resurrection life, that it includes difficulties and that it encompasses embodied physical experience – they are both significant in today’s resurrection gospel of the risen Jesus meeting Thomas.
Thomas too has a problem, and the only solution he will admit requires a new seeing – the experiential illumination of physical sensation. In the aftermath of the cross and the crazy things his friends are saying, Thomas has a heightened sensitivity to life’s hardship and to the physical.
And it is that heightened awareness which becomes the very occasion for the overthrow of Thomas’s settled sense of what the world is like, of what works and what doesn’t, of what’s possible and what is not.
Into the place of physical constraint and mental anguish
“Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’”
Thomas’s narrative of life, of his own life, his dread of hoping falsely – all this is overthrown.
Seeing, he knows with utter clarity that God is Author,
that Jesus’s own passion is re-written, as means of peace and freedom,
and that he, Thomas, is safe – as but a character in his own life’s story, with God as his Author.
The account of mental and physical struggle is re-written; they are not ultimate realities. They are more like the colouring which gives God’s story of redemption, of Resurrection, of life, its hold upon our minds.
They give shape to the experience of resurrection as we receive it now.
And Thomas responds: “My Lord and my God.”
Henceforth, the Apostle lives from here, from this truth.
The stone that enclosed the grave of his hope and of his faith is rolled away
and he comes forth anew into the world made strange.
And so it is for us, sons of the Resurrection.
Thomas is our twin.
And it is in the midst of our constraints and trials daily
that Jesus comes and stands among us and says, “Peace be with you.” As He does now. Amen.