Peace and forgiveness and love
Peace and forgiveness flow out of the Resurrection. Such is the love which reconstitutes us out of the chaos of sin and betrayal, out of the malaise of suffering and sorrow. Like all of us, the disciples were huddled in fear behind closed doors. “Then Jesus came and stood in the midst.” It is a wonderful phrase which goes to the heart of the Passion and the Resurrection. God is in the midst of our suffering world, a world broken and in disarray, in fear and uncertainty.
Christ appears behind closed doors twice in John’s Gospel; once on the evening of Easter Day, and then eight days later when Thomas, whom we have come to call “doubting Thomas” was also there. He had heard about the first appearance of the Risen Christ but said that he wouldn’t believe until he could not only see but touch the wounds of the Crucified. Seeing and believing, reaching out and touching, and so believing. The point is that those are important though not the only forms of knowing.
And three times Jesus says “peace be unto you.” He bestows the power of absolution, of forgiveness upon the disciples whom he sends in his name even as the Father has sent him. And he tells Thomas to reach out and touch, to be not faithless but believing. As another Thomas remarks some thirteen centuries later, Thomas’s doubting provides for us the greater certainty of faith (Aquinas).
But the greater marvel, perhaps, is that these scenes belong to the same chapter as the encounter between Christ and Mary Magdalene where he tells her not to touch him while also sending her on a mission, a mission to the other brethren that is grounded in the eternal mission of his going to “my Father and your Father, my God and your God,” wonderful words which complement Thomas’ exclamation upon encountering the Risen Christ, “My Lord, and my God.” To the one, do not touch; to the other touch and see. Both are gathered into the love which restores and redeems, the love which is resurrection.
One of the great literary and philosophical works of our humanity was written behind closed doors, in a prison, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (6th century). He was awaiting execution on trumped-up charges of treason. He was in grief and sorrow, in fear and dismay. Lady Philosophy appears to him and, like Christ the Good Shepherd, undertakes to return him to his true self, banishing like so many false comforters, all the appeals to emotion and self-pity in which he has buried himself. She recalls him to learning, to the things which abide and are eternal. A remarkable treatise, the work has shaped the imaginary of the intellectual culture of Europe and beyond. It was mirabile dictu translated by Alfred the Great in the ninth century, by Chaucer in the fourteenth, and by Queen Elizabeth the First in the sixteenth, to give some sense of its range and importance.
How do we learn the Resurrection? This has been our question because the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection are all about how we learn. We don’t all learn the same way. As Lady Philosophy says to Boethius, knowledge is not according “to the power and nature of the objects to be known but according to the capacity of the knower to know.” The basis for this is much older, it seems, for “knowledge is intermediate between the knower and the known since it is an activity of the knower concerning the known”(Iamblichus, 3rd/4th century). That is exactly what we see in the twentieth chapter of John’s Gospel.
Jesus makes himself known in accord with the capacities of each. To Mary, he says, don’t touch; to Thomas, he says, touch. This is not contradictory. It recognises the different capacities of each. Each is engaged in coming to know in a way that belongs to their nature as knowers. In each case, there is a change. They are set in motion and sent upon a mission.
The mission is about peace and forgiveness, about the power of love that reconstitutes us in love out of the prisons of our closed minds and hearts. The very last chapter of John’s Gospel shows us this love in motion in terms of Jesus’ threefold question to Simon Peter, “do you love me?” and his triple command for him to “feed my lambs,” “tend my sheep,” and “feed my sheep.” Peter had betrayed Christ three times. Here Jesus reconstitutes him in love three times. Love never dies. It makes a way for us to itself; out of our unloveliness we are made lovely. Such is the joy and the peace of the Resurrection. It passes understanding for it is not of our doing but God’s work in us.
This capacity to change and to learn in the face of troubling and difficult times is what we need to reclaim for ourselves and for one another and for our institutions. Global issues become local problems. There is even a word for it, “glocalization.”. We will have to learn to live with less and perhaps discover that less is more and that our technological dependencies are not the answer. It will be about a kind of recalibration of our thinking and living. Like Peter it will be about being reconstituted in love. It is what these lessons show us even behind closed doors. It is about learning the things that really matter. Something that poets and philosophers (and even preachers) sing and show.
Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in me,
With faith, with hope, with charitie;
That I may runne, rise, rest with thee.
(George Herbert, 17th cent.)
(Rev’d) David Curry,
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy