by CCW | 3 May 2009 13:16
There is a sense in which the Christian Faith is precisely the needed corrective to the dreaded fatalisms and fears of our world and day. This has been an extraordinary week of fears and worries of global proportions. “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us,” the Litany would have us pray, and rightly so, precisely in the face of all of those things!
They are before us. How do we face tribulations and hardships, “fear in a handful of dust,” as T.S. Eliot puts it? Fear in the air we breathe and in the hands we touch. How do we face the fears of flu and fire, the fears of a troubled world, it seems, where there is only fear? Well, our Scripture readings speak profoundly to these realities. These realities are not altogether new; it’s just that they are before us in a more concentrated way. We are fearful not just about the world, but more profoundly, we are afraid of ourselves and the destructive nature of our humanity. And yet, we have the hardest time being honest about this.
The Gospel sets before us what is, I think, the recurring refrain of the Easter season, particularly of these next three Sundays. It is captured in the phrase “because I go to the Father.” “Because I go to the Father,” our “sorrow shall be turned into joy.” “Because I go to the Father,” the Comforter, “the Spirit of truth,” the Holy Spirit “shall come upon you.” “Because I go to the Father,” you can be of “good cheer” even in the face of the tribulations of the world. “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
It might seem that this is really all about a kind of flight from the world. We just might want to fly away into some other dimension or crawl into some hole, or hide away in a bubble. Anything to get away from a world which seems to be a more and more dangerous place. But that would be to mistake the much more radical nature and the far greater challenge of the Easter message. It is not about a flight from the world and the body as if the body and the world were evil. That’s the way of dualism and Gnosticism. To the contrary, the Easter message is about the redemption of the world and the redemption of our humanity. And it happens to us in terms of our attitudes and approaches to God, his world and ourselves.
There is a fear, I have had occasion to remark in Chapel, that paralyzes and there is a fear which liberates and sets us in motion. The fear that paralyzes is the fear that closes us in upon ourselves, as if we were behind closed doors, huddled in fear. Such is part of the Easter story. The disciples on “the same day at evening” were huddled together in fear. Eight days later, again behind closed doors, the one who was not with them, is now there, the one whom we call “doubting” Thomas. He had been told by the others that they “had seen the Lord.” He refuses to believe unless he sees and touches the wounds of Christ. Jesus comes and says, in effect, see and touch. And yet in the same chapter, he had earlier told Mary Magdalene not to touch him, “noli me tangere.”
Fears that paralyze keep us behind closed doors. Fears that liberate us set us in motion towards God and one another regardless of the circumstances, not heedlessly or carelessly, but calmly and responsibly. “Don’t touch” and yet “touch” bring out another aspect of the paradox of redemption. It is really about a new way of thinking reality, a new way that means rebirth and renewal. It changes how we deal with things. It is about the fear of the Lord, which is not about cowering in fear. It is about worship and awe.
You see, Mary, the disciples and, then, Thomas are all changed by the encounter with Christ from sorrow and fear into joy and delight. They are no longer paralyzed and, as it were, buried in themselves. The Resurrection does not hide the wounds of our sinfulness, the wounds of a broken and sorry world where there is fire and plague, earthquake and tempest; a world, in short, where there are lots of uncertainties because we are out of joint, the “bent world” as Hopkins puts it. There can be no denying or minimizing the element of tribulation and uncertainty. That, too, belongs to the same overconfidence in ourselves and in our technological reason which contributes to our contemporary problems. In a profound sense, it is the problem. We have seen the enemy and it is us! Nothing really new about this except, perhaps, our own reluctance to name the idol, the idol of technocracy.
What is the counter? It is really about our looking to God in the course of our everyday lives such as Peter suggests in the Epistle. We have duties to God in our duties towards one another. This changes the nature of the dynamic of our relation to powers and authorities by allowing us to recognize that all human power and authority is both given and limited by God, the true author of all and every good. The psalmist in this morning’s gradual[1] captures the sense of our approach to life, calling us to public praise: “O praise our God, ye people, and make the voice of his praise to be heard; who holdeth our soul in life, and suffereth not our feet to slip.” Wonderful and powerful words. Do we believe this? Are we open to the truth of God?
To be open to the truth of God is to enter into the transformative power of the Resurrection. Jesus, in speaking to Thomas, demands that he see and touch his wounds. Jesus, in this morning’s gospel, too, is blunt about suffering and hardship. Such things do not disappear because of the Resurrection.
For me, one of the most compelling images of the Resurrection and, hence, of the power and truth of the Christian religion is that the wounds of the crucified do not disappear; they have become the marks of love. Look and see, Jesus is saying, not run and flee. In Christ our fears, too, are overcome. “Be not afraid” and “peace be unto you” now give way to a new perspective, “because I go to the Father.” What does it mean? That everything is to be gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. In short, we are given an honest way to confront the limitations of the finite world and even more, the follies of human wickedness. In Christ and in his body the Church, we find the healing truth that changes our sorrows into joy.
Fr. David Curry, Easter III, 2009
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/05/03/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-after-easter/
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