“Jesus came and stood in the midst”
“April is the cruellest month,” the poet, T.S. Eliot, notes in The Wasteland. He must have had a Maritime spring in mind, a kind of April’s Fools Day joke that never ends! And yet there is a counter to the misery and the cruelty of the Maritime spring in April. It is the Resurrection.
The Resurrection is not a static event. It is the dynamic truth “that God hath given us eternal life; and this life is in his Son”. We behold the Risen Christ. We are set in motion by what we see. The Church does not simply stand upon the doctrine of the Resurrection; the Resurrection is the running life of the Church. It means that there are always breakthroughs in our understanding; resurrections of the understanding, we might say. They belong to the dynamic reality of the Resurrection.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this more dramatically illustrated than on The Octave Day of Easter. “On the same day at evening, being the first day of the week”, John tells us, the disciples were huddled together in fear behind closed doors. The Octave Day places us in that endless day, the 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 to his presence or dead in ourselves.
“Jesus came and stood in the midst”. They were behind closed doors. They were in fear and great anxiety, not unlike many of us today, perhaps. The world of their hopes and expectations had been utterly shattered. Then “Jesus came and stood in the midst” of them and suddenly all that was shattered begins to be knit together into something new and strange. His presence changes everything. The nature of that change is the Resurrection in us.
What is the significance of the closed doors? In a way, what matters is not how he got in but what happens within. The closed doors are like the closed doors of our minds. Our minds are like the tomb. We are dead to the idea of the Resurrection, to its power and truth, until it presents itself to our understanding. The point is that we couldn’t invent it. It breaks through 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 who he is for us. Out of the chaos of human fears and confusions comes peace and forgiveness.
Three times Jesus the Risen Lord says to the disciples “peace be unto you” – twice here in this gospel passage. 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 is the peace which has overcome all our enmity – our enmity against ourselves, against one another, and against God. This is the peace which is purchased with the price of blood – the blood of the reconciling sacrifice, the atoning sacrifice, of Christ. It is the peace of our reconciliation with God. It is the peace of forgiveness. It is given to be our life.
It is not “peace will be with you some day later on, maybe”. No. It is peace now. That now is the living reality of the Risen Christ, the living reality of the reconciliation between man and God which Christ’s Resurrection proclaims. The Risen Christ does not hide the past of our sins from us. He reveals them to us in the power and grace of his forgiveness. He comes into our midst and shows us the wounds of his love for us. He would break down the closed doors of our minds so as 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. We live it where Christ is in the midst.
He is in the midst in his body. His body, too, is the Church understood as the body of Christ, a most potent scriptural image. 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. The Church can only be the place of peace and forgiveness through the Resurrection. It does not mean huddling behind closed doors in fear and anxiety – that is death. No. It means a breakthrough in our understanding. Such is the Resurrection in us.
Note that this peace is proclaimed in the midst of terror and persecution, not unlike our own world. In John’s account of the Passion, Jesus is crucified between two others; he is said to be “in the midst”. Such is the radical nature of the Resurrection. This forgiveness is given to be lived in the face of enmity. It is given to be lived in 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 to set us into motion. The motion of his life in us means peace and forgiveness. It is 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” of our minds (Hans Urs Von Balthasar). It does so to set us upon a new understanding. We are set in motion to “runne, rise, rest with thee” (George Herbert).
Rise heart!
thy Lord
is risen.
Sing
his praise
always.
For such is the dynamic of the Resurrection in us. Christ is in our midst.
“Jesus came and stood in the midst”
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Easter 2016