“Jesus came and stood in the midst”
“The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early,” we heard last Sunday. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week,” we hear today. Time is magically stopped and we are mystically present at that day, the day that never, never ends. The Day of Resurrection is just like that. In the spirituality of the ancient Eucharistic lectionary, which is at the heart of the Common Prayer tradition, we see through the eyes of John and especially, the doctrine of the Resurrection.
The Resurrection is not something which we celebrate in a moment, even for a day or for a season. It runs through the whole of the year and indeed through the whole of our lives in Faith. The Octave Day places us in that endless day of Easter to show us the Resurrection in motion. It shows us something of the meaning of the Resurrection for us and in us. The symbolism of being “on the same day,” the day of Easter, becomes the meaning of our Sunday worship. It is always a celebration of the Resurrection. We are always in the presence of the Risen Christ and never more so than in the Easter Season when the Resurrection is our principal consideration. The only question is whether we are alive or dead to his presence?
“Jesus came and stood in the midst.” He was “in the midst” on Good Friday, too, crucified between two thieves! How different and yet how similar. Christ is in our midst if only we would have the eyes to see him in Word and Sacrament, in liturgy and song, and in lives of service and sacrifice, in lives of love lived for God and one another. For Christ is in our midst. It is the Church’s proclamation.
But on this day, the day of Resurrection extended for all eternity, as it were, Christ is in our midst behind closed doors. The disciples were behind closed doors in the Upper Room. They were there in fear and great anxiety. The world of their hopes and expectations had been shattered. Then “Jesus came and stood in the midst” of them and suddenly all that was shattered begins to come together again into something new. His presence changes everything. The nature of that change is the Resurrection in us.
What is the significance of the closed doors? The closed doors are the closed doors of our minds. Our minds are like tombs. We are dead to the idea of the Resurrection, to its power and truth, until it presents itself to our understanding. We couldn’t invent it. It breaks through into our minds only so as to break out into our lives. The Risen Lord comes into our midst to usher us into a new and radical understanding of himself and what he is for us. Out of the chaos of fear and confusion comes peace and forgiveness. Powerful words that speak directly to depressed souls, depressed cultures, communities, and churches.
Jesus the Risen Lord says three times to the disciples “peace be with you”. This is “the peace which passeth understanding,” that is to say, it cannot be contained by our minds as in a tomb. It carries us into a new understanding. This peace overcomes all our enmity – our enmity against ourselves, against one another, and against God. This peace is purchased with the price of blood, the blood of the reconciling sacrifice, the atoning sacrifice, of Christ; the peace of our reconciliation with God. It is the peace of forgiveness. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” Christ prays on the Cross. Now his forgiveness is given to be our life. It is, we might say, a living peace.
Not peace later on. Peace now. The now is the living reality of the Risen Christ, the living reality of the reconciliation between man and God proclaimed in Christ’s Resurrection. The Risen Christ does not hide the past of our sins from us. He reveals them to us in the power and the grace of his forgiveness. He comes into our midst and shows us the wounds of his love for us. He breaks down the closed doors of our minds to usher us into a new understanding. The understanding of his Resurrection means peace. This ultimate peace is for us now because his forgiveness is total. We have only to live it. It is the constant yet joyous struggle of our lives. We live it where Christ is “in the midst.”
He is “in the midst” in his body. His body is the Church. And so the Church, too, must be “in the midst” of the world proclaiming the dynamic truth of Christ’s Resurrection and being the visible sign of the peace of reconciliation, and all through the Resurrection. Huddling behind closed doors in fear and anxiety is death. The Resurrection means a break-through of the understanding in us.
Peace is proclaimed “in the midst” of terror and persecution. Such is the radical nature of the Resurrection. Forgiveness is given to be lived in the face of enmity. It is proclaimed by the Church, the place of forgiveness. “Whosoever sins ye remit they are remitted unto them” and, conversely, “whosoever sins ye retain they are retained”. Such is the strong power – the dynamic – of the Resurrection. Jesus comes and stands in our midst. He sets us into motion. The motion of his life in us means peace and forgiveness. Resurrection. It is the very essence of the Resurrection that “it bursts the bounds, the grave wrappings, of our concepts; it explodes our ideas of time and space; it sovereignly walks right through the doors of our closed categories” (Hans Urs Von Balthasar). It does so to set us upon a new understanding.
We are set in motion, as the poet George Herbert puts it, to “runne, rise, rest with thee”. He captures exactly the pattern of the resurrection in John’s Gospel. First, the disciples run to the tomb on that “first day of the week,” then “the same day at evening,” behind closed doors, the disciples rise out of the tombs of their minds because of the Risen Lord in their midst. Only then can we have the rest that is the peace of forgiveness, the peace of the Risen Christ who is with us “even unto the end of the world”.
“Jesus came and stood in the midst”
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Easter, 2014