Sermon for the Octave Day of Easter, 8:00am Holy Communion
“They shall look upon him whom they have pierced”
Not again! Surely we have had enough of this text from Zechariah! But yes, and perhaps most appropriately so on The Octave Day of Easter. Why? Because it belongs to the teaching, the doctrine of the Resurrection. Because it shows the inescapable and necessary connection between the Passion and the Resurrection. As we have noted, no Passion, no Resurrection; and, even more paradoxically, perhaps, no Resurrection, no Passion.
The Passion According to St. John read on Good Friday ends with Zechariah’s text, “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced.” Now that text carries us into the Resurrection in the ways in which the idea and concept of the Resurrection comes to birth in the disciples and in us. “The same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut, where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews,” John tells us, “came Jesus into the midst.”
“The same day at evening.” What is that day? It is Easter. Holy Week began with Palm Sunday which marks the beginning of one long liturgy that ends with the Resurrection at Easter, and yet imaginatively and liturgically, Easter extends into the Octave and into Eastertide. Sorrow and joy are intermingled, each shaping our understanding of the other. There is something quite compelling about such a way of thinking.
Where are we? Behind closed doors, John says, and in that same Upper Room where Jesus had gathered with the disciples “on the night in which he was betrayed” and where he gave himself in bread and wine as body and blood anticipating his Passion and Resurrection and providing for us to be joined with him in Holy Communion. What happens behind closed doors is quite powerful and wonderful. The disciples were huddled in fear. All their hopes, it seems, had been shattered by virtue of Christ’s crucifixion and now they are in fear of persecution because of their association with him. Our minds, too, are like tombs, behind closed doors. We are dead in ourselves.
