“This is the witness, that God hath given to us eternal life; and this life is in his Son”
“The same day,” John tells us. What same day? The same day as Easter. It is as if time has slowed, as if we are simply in the moment and meaning of Easter Day. The same day but “at evening”; “there was evening and there was morning, one day,” Genesis tells us about the wonder of creation. Here is the greater wonder of redemption, the new creation through the Resurrection. Where are we?
We are caught up in the mystery of this same day, the eternal day symbolic of the sabbath of God in the radical meaning of God’s eternal life given and made known to us in Christ, as John says in the Epistle. That is what we are struggling to understand. We are very much, I think, especially in the confusions of our culture of fear and death, with the disciples on the evening of that one and same day. We are behind closed doors. It is a powerful symbol of our human uncertainties and fears. We are behind the closed doors of our minds; buried in ourselves, dead to life. Our minds are like tombs. It is an appropriate image for our culture of fear and death; closed in on ourselves.
Yet, what we are given to see is God opening our minds. How? By appearing in our midst. There is, first, as saw last week the witness of Mary Magdalene finding the empty tomb and running to Peter and John who confirm her finding but revealing their perplexity “for as yet they knew not the Scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.” The second Gospel reading from Mark at Easter (BCP, p. 185) makes this same point: the women coming to the tomb, finding the stone rolled away and “a young man sitting on the right side” of the sepulchre, “clothed in a long white garment.” As Mark puts it, “they were affrighted” or amazed but are told “be not affrighted: ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified; he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.” It is evidence from absence, the witness of the empty tomb, which is not the same thing as absence of evidence. For there is also the witness of the young man or angel. “He” who was crucified, whose body you seek, “is risen,” they are told. Something has changed. It marks the beginning of the process of learning the radical meaning of the Resurrection. It changes everything but not by negating the realities of the Passion. The Crucifixion and the Resurrection have to be thought together.
Such is the unfolding of the drama of the Passion and Resurrection. We are being shown its truth and meaning. For beyond the witness of the empty tomb, something which has already been mentioned in the Gospels in terms of a conspiracy theory about the spiriting away of his body by the disciples, there is the witness of Christ himself. Jesus teaches us about the radical meaning of his Death and Resurrection. This is shown in the Gospels of Easter Week from Luke in the story of the Road to Emmaus, the most compelling story about how we learn about the radical life of God. Christ runs out after us and opens our understanding by opening to us the Scriptures, as Luke emphasises. But it is also shown here in the interplay of the Epistle and Gospel.
Christ appears behind closed doors to the disciples, huddled in their fears and anxieties. He who was crucified in the midst of the two thieves now stands in the midst of the disciples. He says, “Peace be unto you.” He will say this three times in the 20th chapter of John’s Gospel. This morning we hear it twice; the third time will be at Evensong. But, most importantly, “he showed them his hands and his side.” What is that except testimony to the Crucifixion and to the reality of the Incarnation through the Passion. It is real. The marks of the Crucified Christ are essential to the teaching of the Resurrection and its meaning for us.
“As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you,” Jesus says. Something changes for us. We are gathered into the radical meaning of the Son’s going forth, his exodus or exitus from the father to our fallen world, and his gathering all things back to the Father in his reditus, his return. Therein lies the meaning of forgiveness. It is testimony to sin and to the overcoming of sin and the world, as John says in the Epistle. The Resurrection is new birth: “Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.” The Resurrection is the victory of life over death, the overcoming of the world in its opposition to God. This is our faith. It means that the world does not define us in terms of all of the circumstances and confusions of human experience. All of that belongs to something greater, namely, the making known of the eternal life of God in the Son. The Gospel makes clear what that new life means: the forgiveness of sins.
Christ’s sacrifice is his dying for our sins and thus overcoming all sin. The eternal life of God is greater than human sin and death. The Resurrection changes how we think about death and human experience. We are opened out to the radical new life of God alive in us through the forgiveness of sins. Christ has been given, as the Collect puts it, “to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification.” A profound and important theological point. What is our justification? Our being made right with God and with one another within the truth of God’s created order. Sin is our injustice; the overcoming of sin is God’s justice imputed to us. The challenge is to live this new reality; to live as God’s forgiven and blessed children. The Easter message this morning makes it clear that forgiveness is an essential property of our life in the body of Christ, the Church, to which the power of forgiveness has been entrusted via the disciples who are here sent forth in the power of the Holy Ghost, and are made Apostles, those who are sent. Again, in an echo of Genesis, Christ “breathed on them.” His breath is the Holy Spirit who moved over the waters of creation bringing all things into order. The new order is forgiveness, the overcoming of sin and evil, and the testament to our restoration and renewal.
We are more though not less than our bodies and our material and physical circumstances, more though not less than the sufferings and agonies of human experience, past, present, and to come, more though not less than our sins and follies. The Resurrection opens us out to our freedom and dignity as found in Christ and Christ in us. Contrition, confession and satisfaction are the constantly recurring moments in our liturgy.
The Cross is not eclipsed by the Resurrection; if anything its meaning is made clearer to us because of the forgiveness of sins. What is hidden is now made manifest. It is accomplished in Christ’s death and Resurrection yet it has always to be more fully realised in us. The wounds of the Crucifixion have become the marks of love. Only God can make something new out of the nothingness of sin and evil, the negation of life and goodness itself. The negation of the negation, the death of death, changes everything. We live in these moments in the realisation of God’s eternal truth and life which gives meaning to our lives.
The Easter week readings and today’s all signal the change in us and for us that the Resurrection shows. On the Road to Emmaus, the disciples who had been running away in fear and confusion from Jerusalem are changed by Jesus opening their minds in opening to them the understanding of the Scriptures and making himself known to them in the breaking of the bread, recalling the Last Supper on the night of his betrayal. The Resurrection does not eclipse the Passion but intensifies its radical meaning for us. God engages our humanity in all of its disarray to restore us to our truth and dignity as found in him. The Resurrection makes visible what is present in the Passion, and that makes all the difference. The disciples who were running away in fear return to Jerusalem as the witnesses of the good news of the Resurrection. Christ is made known to them and to us.
The Second Lesson at Evensong tonight continues from this morning’s Gospel but a week later in the same upper room. Again, we are behind closed doors. Learning is a process; it takes time and perseverance and prayer to get it. Thomas, who was not there on that evening of the same day, has heard the report of Christ’s appearing to the disciples but famously will not believe, he says, until “I see in his hands the print of the nails, and thrust my hand in his side.” Christ appears to him and bids him “behold my hands, and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless but believing.” Thomas’ response is his famous words of faith: “My Lord, and my God”, just as the Centurion at the Crucifixion said, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”
All of this belongs to what John says: “this is the witness, that God hath given to us eternal life; and this life is in his Son.” God uses the things of this world, even our sins and evils, to make a way for us to him and to our life in the life of God himself. This is the wonder, the wonder of God. It is the counter to all our fears, anxieties and confusions, the counter to our being closed in upon ourselves; the counter to the solipsistic illusions of our disembodied selves in flight from the world. Eternal life is opened out to us through the peace and forgiveness which Christ bestows.
“This is the witness, that God hath given to us eternal life; and this life is in his Son”
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Easter, 2024