Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter
“Your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you”
Really? Do we really believe this? It lies at the heart of the Christian understanding. “You now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice.” Death and Resurrection are the fundamental pattern of Christian life. That pattern marks the rhythm of the liturgy and of our lives of service and sacrifice. It is really all about dying to live, dying to ourselves and living for one another. It is only possible through our being alive to God, to Christ in us.
The lessons of the Resurrection are quite profound and poignant. They are all about the dawning awareness on the part of the disciples and by extension in us of the truth and power of the Resurrection. It changes our understanding and outlook. The Gospels of Eastertide show us how we come to learn the things which matter most. And far from being a flight from the past, they reveal the redemption of the past and show us the power of memory.
Jesus makes himself known on the Road to Emmaus not just in the opening of our understanding about his Passion through the Scriptures but “in the breaking of the bread.” Jesus tells us Mary Magdalene not to touch him but “go and tell” the disciples about his mission and ours in his going to “my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Yet in the same chapter he tells Thomas to touch and see and so believe. Jesus proclaims peace and forgiveness behind closed doors to all of us huddled in our fears about Covid-19, our fears, I am afraid, of one another and our world, our modern fears of death and uncertainty. Jesus bids us “come and have breakfast” at a barbecue on a beach – Oh, don’t we wish!
All of these encounters have this point in common. They are all about what Christ teaches. They are all about the radical presence of God with us, not as collapsed into the world, but as raising us and our world into its real truth and meaning in God. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (Jn.1.4). The recurring theme is signalled here in today’s Gospel when Jesus says, “I will see you again.”
