Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter

Duccio di Buoninsegna,
 Jesus Appears to his Disciples behind Locked Doors, c. 1308-1311

April 19, 2015

Acts 3:12-19
I John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48

An interesting thought experiment consists of grouping friends and acquaintances into different categories according to how one would handle invitations to dinner with them. Offhand, I can identify four such categories among the people I know.

The first category consists of those who really are no more than passing acquaintances, not very close, who I don’t imagine would ever have occasion to invite me to dinner, nor I them. Not that we necessarily have anything against one another, it just wouldn’t occur to us. That could always change, of course, if we got to know each other better or discovered some interest in common.

The second category consists of somewhat closer acquaintances who might invite me to dinner, or whom I might invite to dinner, but all rather formally, issuing an invitation and setting the date weeks in advance. The meal itself might be rather elaborate, with wine, candlelight, and a carefully chosen menu.

The third category consists of friends with whom I feel so comfortable that if we were doing something together during the day, I might say, “Hey, come on back to my place and we’ll send out for pizza.” Or, if I had stopped by their house for some reason, they might issue the invitation on the spur of the moment: “Won’t you stay and join us for supper? It’ll be ready in half an hour.”

The fourth and final category consists of those very close friends and relatives with whom I would think nothing of showing up at their house and announcing, “I’m hungry. What have you got here to eat?” Or indeed, who would think nothing of showing up at my house and saying the same thing. I don’t know about you, but I can count those people on the fingers of one hand, which is probably just as well.

Before we dismiss the fourth category as the epitome of bad manners and rude behavior, notice that it’s precisely what the risen Christ does in today’s Gospel: “And while they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.”

Have you ever tried to imagine what Jesus would say if he appeared to you? Many spiritual directors recommend such an exercise as a stimulus to prayer and meditation. When I imagine him appearing to me, I must admit that I don’t usually visualize him walking into my kitchen, opening my refrigerator, and saying, “What have you got here to eat?” But that’s only the deficiency of my own imagination, for Our Lord says almost these exact words when he appears to the apostles.

At one level, this detail of the resurrection narratives tells us how close Jesus was to the apostles, and indeed how close he wants to be to each of us. He wants to be that kind of familiar companion, our friend and brother, so much a part of the family that he can show up at our house, go into the kitchen, and make himself a sandwich.

At another level, this detail tells us something profound about the nature of the Resurrection itself. Our Lord’s risen body definitely has some mysterious properties. He’s able to come and go through closed doors, appearing and disappearing at will. When he first shows up, people sometimes don’t recognize him. Or else, as in today’s Gospel, they think that they’re seeing a ghost. But he’s neither a ghost nor a resuscitated corpse. Instead, he’s entered into a new and wonderful dimension of existence. He hasn’t merely “come back” from the dead; it’s more as though he’s gone through death and come out the other side, more truly and fully alive than he or anyone else has ever been before.

At the same time, his risen body is clearly the same body that was wounded and died on the cross. “And he said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.’” And then he eats the piece of broiled fish almost as if in order to demonstrate the sheer materiality, physicality, corporeality of his risen body.

It’s precisely this encounter that establishes the apostles as witnesses to the Resurrection and qualifies them to preach the Gospel to all nations. “Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.’”

In today’s first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, we see Peter dramatically beginning to fulfill that very commission as he stands before the people proclaiming the crucified and risen Christ as the Savior of the world.

We observe a certain logical sequence. Seeing, hearing, touching, and indeed eating with the risen Christ make the apostles witnesses to the Resurrection, commissioned to go forth and proclaim the good news to all nations and peoples. The result of that proclamation is, in turn, the gathering of people into fellowship with Christ, the apostles, and one another in Christ’s Body, the Church.

And so we come full circle. For the community into which the proclamation of the Gospel invites us is none other than the Eucharistic fellowship of those who eat and drink together. Again and again, the apostles encounter the risen Christ at moments when they’re gathered to break bread, just as we continue to encounter him Sunday by Sunday in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood.

In the end, then, the important question is not what we would give Jesus to eat if he showed up in our living room and said, “I’m hungry; what have you got here to eat?” – interesting as that question undoubtedly is – but rather, whether we will allow him to feed us and draw us ever closer into the fellowship of those who eat and drink together in his name.

Sermon for Easter Day

Resurrection Mosaic,
St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church, NY.
Photo: Mark J. Teleha; Lorain County Photographer's Blog
http://www.locophotogblog.com/?p=589

The Resurrection of Christ is the heart of the Christian faith. The good news that Christians are called to believe, teach, proclaim, and celebrate is none other than that “Christ is risen.”

This point needs to be made without compromise. Many people today find it difficult to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. For a number of years, when I was a teenager and young adult, I did not believe it myself. If you find yourself in a place of honest doubt and questioning, then I know where you’re coming from.

But still, regardless of what you or I believe personally, the Church must insist: without the Resurrection, Christian faith becomes something less than Christian faith; Christianity becomes something less than Christianity; Jesus becomes another ancient teacher of spiritual wisdom, whose sayings we can take or leave according to how helpful we find them. But no: Christian faith in the true and full sense of the word presupposes the truth of Christ’s Resurrection. Nothing less will do.

There are two essential elements of the New Testament witness to the Resurrection. First, on Easter morning, the tomb of Jesus was found empty. His body was gone. Second, shortly after this discovery, Jesus started appearing to his followers. He was neither a ghost nor a resuscitated corpse. His hands, feet, and side still bore the wounds of his crucifixion, but rather than having come back from the dead, it was more like he’d passed to a new and glorious state of existence on the other side of death – indeed, he was more fully alive than ever before.

Now, you’re either able to believe that or you aren’t. For my part, I think that faith is a gift that only God can give. If you’re unable to believe in Christ’s Resurrection, but would like to, then the only remedy is to ask God to give you that faith. And if you don’t believe in God but would like to, then your prayer might take something like the form it took for me for some years, “God, I don’t know if you exist, but if you do, then please reveal to me your Truth.”

In any case, I can do nothing standing up here in this pulpit to persuade you of the truth of Christ’s Resurrection by means of empirical proof or logical demonstration. The gift of faith is inherently mysterious; it comes to different people at different times and in different places according to God’s hidden purposes. What I can attempt to do, however, is help prepare the ground for this gift – like a gardener tilling the soil for the seed – by showing the reasonableness, credibility, and plausibility of what the Church believes and teaches.

The late Arthur Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974, addresses this question in a wonderful essay entitled “Preaching Jesus Today.” In presenting Jesus to our contemporaries, he writes, we should start with those facts about him that very few would deny.

First, he proposes, Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet and a teacher, did exist. Second, this same Jesus died by crucifixion. Third – and I quote – “as a result of the career of Jesus of Nazareth there came into history the phenomenon of Christianity, the new movement with its society, its teaching, its rites, its doctrine, its ethics, its impact on the world for better or for worse. This is again indisputable, whatever significance is ascribed to it and in whatever way the causal connection between Jesus and the Church is traced.”

Having established these three historical points, Ramsey proceeds to make some observations about the peculiar character of the Christian movement. “Within this new phenomenon of Christianity,” he writes, “there is a strikingly new valuation of suffering. … The ignominious death by crucifixion … meted out to Jesus is not shame and disgrace: it is ‘good news’, it is of God, it has a victorious character. And for the Christians to suffer is not defeat or tragedy; it has a like victorious character.”

This new valuation of suffering, Ramsey continues, is not a cult of martyrdom or a kind of masochism that values suffering for its own sake. Rather, “it goes with a belief in a divine use of suffering which links it creatively with sacrificial love and with a self-fulfillment within it and beyond it.”

Now, Ramsey asks, what happened to bring such a new valuation about? True, Jesus taught his disciples much about the meaning of his coming suffering and death, but before his death this teaching was lost on them. They didn’t get it. So, something must have happened to create for the disciples the doctrine of Jesus’ death as meaningful and victorious. And this something that happened, Ramsey proposes, was none other than the Resurrection.

The Resurrection, Ramsey argues, transformed the disciples’ valuation of death precisely because it was the Resurrection of the crucified one; the Jesus who came back to his disciples was the same Jesus who had died and who still bore the marks of his sufferings.

“Here then,” Ramsey writes, “is the central point of the history of Jesus. He was not a forgotten crucified teacher. His impact survived, and Christianity came into existence because the Resurrection happened and because it was the Resurrection of the crucified. And … the Death and Resurrection are the events which characterize the nature of Christianity. It is a gospel of life through death, of losing life so as to find it. Thus the Christian’s act of allegiance to the risen Lord Jesus was, and still is, an act of acceptance of the way of the cross.”

The basic thrust of Ramsey’s argument is that the Resurrection of Jesus as reported in the Gospels provides the simplest and most plausible way of accounting for the phenomenon of Christianity in general and for the remarkable and virtually complete transformation of the disciples in particular. The same argument can be made in other ways.

A week ago, on Palm Sunday, I pointed out that the disciples were so afraid at the time of Jesus’ arrest that they forsook him and fled. But then, in the months and years following, their attitudes and behavior underwent a complete reversal. Now, they were speaking out boldly, preaching in the public squares, and bravely facing persecution for doing so. Rather than simply returning to their farms, fishing boats, and trades, many of them undertook dangerous missionary journeys to distant lands where they ended up dying as martyrs for the Gospel they proclaimed. Again, the Resurrection of Jesus is the simplest and best explanation of this wholesale transformation of the disciples’ outlook and worldview.

It follows that the best way of bearing witness to the truth of the Resurrection today is by living lives that testify to the creative power of self-sacrificial love in community. When our life together in this or any other parish visibly embodies the values of death-to-self and service to others, then we begin to show the world not only that Christ is risen but also that he is alive in our midst. And on that basis we invite others to join us and share in this faith, this life, and this love.

Sermon for Good Friday

Henry Thomas Bodset (d. 1934), Jesus before his Crucifixion

During the Trial of Jesus in the Saint John Passion that we’ve just heard, Pontius Pilate declares not once but three times, “I find no fault in him.” (The Authorized Version (AV) says “fault,” but a better translation might be “guilt” or “crime” (RSV), or even “I find no case against him” (NRSV), or “I find no basis for a charge against him” (NIV).)

In John’s narrative, Pilate initially questions Jesus, asking whether he is King of the Jews. Jesus responds that his kingship is not of this world; otherwise his servants would fight, and that his mission is to bear witness to the truth.

Pilate then goes out to the crowd and declares the first time that he finds no crime in Jesus. He offers to release Jesus according to the custom of releasing a prisoner at the time of Passover. But the crowd insists, “No, not this man, but Barabbas.”

Pilate then has Jesus scourged, and the soldiers place on him the crown of thorns and the purple robe. He brings Jesus out before the crowd and declares, “See I am bringing him out to you, that you may know that I find no crime in him.” That’s the second time he says this. But on seeing Jesus, the crowd cries out, “Crucify him, crucify him!”

Pilate responds, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no crime in him.” That’s the third time. Pilate wants to find a way to release Jesus, and questions him once more. But when the chief priests implicitly threaten to report Pilate to Caesar, he finally relents and turns Jesus over to be crucified.

In the Jewish law of the time, to declare something three times was to make it irrevocable and binding – like swearing an oath. Some contemporary biblical scholars have argued that John and the other Gospel writers craft their accounts of the trial so as to exonerate the Romans for the death of Jesus and shift the blame to the Jews. But John’s account of Pilate’s actions is fairly damning. Pilate three times declares Jesus innocent, and then hands him over for crucifixion anyway. He thus perverts justice by openly condemning an innocent man to death.

This account of the trial highlights the point that Jesus suffers and dies on the cross as an innocent victim. As a corollary: those who conspire to gather evidence and bring charges against him, and who work to secure his condemnation first by the Sanhedrin and then by Pilate, are not administering justice but rather conspiring to commit a grave injustice. Whatever else the figure of Jesus on the cross represents, then, it depicts first and foremost the unjust suffering of an innocent victim.

The problem of unjust and undeserved suffering remains always with us. For example, when we witness the wholesale slaughter and maiming of civilian men, women, and children in war, our inmost selves cry out to heaven in protest: “Why, O Lord, why?” It’s bad enough that combatants should have to suffer and die in war, and no-one’s suggesting that they deserve it either, but nonetheless something about the unjust suffering of the innocent particularly scandalizes and outrages our consciences.

Down through the centuries, second-rate philosophers and religious teachers have proposed facile solutions to this problem. While we don’t like it at the time, they say, suffering is good for us. It strengthens our character and makes us better people.

But that’s a myth. During the Second World War, the British pacifist Vera Brittain wrote that far from strengthening character and ennobling people, most unjust suffering has precisely the opposite effect. It brutalizes and dehumanizes its victims, creating a legacy of bitterness, resentment, hatred, and thirst for revenge.

The one exception, she wrote – and much more the exception than the rule – is when such suffering is freely accepted by its victim and offered up sacrificially in the service of a higher cause or principle. In that case alone, unjust suffering has the potential to become redemptive and transformative. But very few people have any natural capability for such sacrificial self-offering.

The Gospel that we proclaim today, on Good Friday, is that Jesus Christ, as the Incarnate Son of God, fully human and fully divine, is the one and only innocent victim who ever accepts his unjust suffering and death with such perfect humility and resignation that his offering of himself on the cross constitutes, to quote the Prayer Book, the “one, full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.”

We don’t need to go into the various theologies describing the mechanisms by which the Atonement is thought to work. The Universal Church has never defined as dogma any of the many competing theories of precisely how and in what way Jesus’ death on the cross accomplishes the forgiveness of sins and the reconciliation of a fallen world to God. It just does, and that’s all we really need to know.

Two consequences follow for us, however, in our calling to live the Christian life. First, in this life at least, following Jesus means walking in the way of the cross. We must never seek suffering for its own sake. But if and when we find ourselves facing some injury, disease, or other calamity that entails pain and loss, we can accept it as a way of being close to Jesus. This acceptance comes to us not naturally but by divine grace, as a gift of the Holy Spirit. So long as we stay close to Jesus, we can bear anything for his sake – and in that case our pain and suffering do have the potential to become redemptive.

Secondly, however, while we may freely accept this path for ourselves, we never have any right to impose it on others. There is something particularly cruel and wicked about telling those in pain to accept their suffering because it will make them better people. And it’s downright blasphemous to inflict pain and suffering on the same pretext, that it’s somehow good for the victims.

No. Down through the centuries the Church’s best wisdom has derived precisely the opposite conclusion from the suffering of Christ on the cross. Our obligation as Christians is to do everything we can to prevent, stop, and relieve the unjust suffering of innocent victims whenever and wherever we encounter it in the world around us. Our mission is one of healing, reconciliation, restoration, and justice.

At this time in our history, in particular, we have an obligation to work to end the systemic injustice that disproportionately victimizes the poor and members of racial and ethnic minorities. The shooting of unarmed black teenagers is but one example. Yet we have the assurance that whenever innocent victims suffer unjustly, Jesus suffers with them. And when we minister to such innocent victims with compassion and love, we minister to Christ himself.

Sermon for Maundy Thursday

Marc Chagall, The Israelites Eating the Passover Lamb, 1931

The events we commemorate on Maundy Thursday, and indeed throughout the coming three days, all take place within the context of the Jewish celebration of Passover in Jerusalem. This evening’s Old Testament reading from Exodus recounts the institution of the Passover meal, known in contemporary Judaism as the Seder. 

According to three of the four canonical Gospels, the Last Supper was a Passover Meal. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus sends his disciples to the upper room to prepare the Passover on the First Day of Unleavened Bread, the day when the Passover lambs are being slaughtered, and that evening after sundown they gather for the meal itself.

The Gospel of John, by contrast, describes the Last Supper as taking place a day earlier, “before the Passover,” with the crucifixion of Jesus happening on the First Day of Passover. John, it seems, wants to emphasize that Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross occur on the same day that the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple nearby.

Down through the centuries, scholars have debated which of the two accounts is accurate. Either way, the Last Supper takes place when Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem to keep the feast. Passover, with all its connotations and associations, is “in the air.” And for all four Gospel writers, the feast of Passover supplies the wider context of meaning illuminating not only the Last Supper but also the unfolding drama of the Lord’s subsequent betrayal, arrest, trial, suffering, and death.

Our reading from Exodus rehearses God’s instructions to the Israelites for keeping the first Passover. Despite a series of nine terrible plagues, Pharaoh has persisted in refusing Moses’ repeated demands to let the people go. About to send the tenth and most terrible plague of all, the death of the firstborn sons throughout the land, God instructs the Israelites that the head of each household must slaughter a lamb and smear some of its blood on the doorposts of the house. The lamb is to be roasted and eaten that night, with nothing left over. Then, when the angel of death goes through the land and sees the blood on the doorposts, he will pass over that house and spare its firstborn.

This last plague finally persuades Pharaoh to relent and let the people go. For the Israelites, then, the Passover lamb becomes a sign of deliverance and salvation. However, the Passover meal is not left as a one-off event. The books of the Old Testament record that the Israelites continued to keep Passover, year by year, as the annual commemoration of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt.

A number of biblical scholars have suggested that this annual celebration of Passover was not merely an occasion of piously recalling events that remained confined to the distant past, but rather a means of dynamically re-appropriating and re-experiencing those events in the present. Subsequent generations of Jews did not live through the Exodus from Egypt, but, in a way that is difficult for the modern western mind to understand, by re-enacting those events liturgically they became one with their ancestors who did, and so were reconstituted as God’s people Israel. This mysterious quality of the Passover commemoration is conveyed in the opening words of the Seder, spoken by the youngest child present: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The child represents, of course, the future generations who are to be incorporated into the people of Israel by liturgical participation in the long-ago events of the Exodus.

The Greek word for this sort of transformation of time is anamnesis, the making-present of past events, which translates rather lamely into English as “remembrance.” And Saint Paul uses precisely this same word in rendering the words of Jesus at the Last Supper over the bread and the wine: “Do this in remembrance of me.” In Greek: do this for my anamnesis. A better translation might be: Do this to make me present among you; Do this to recall me into your midst.

Earlier in the same letter, Paul explicitly likens Jesus to the Passover lamb in words that we repeat at the Breaking of the Bread at almost every Eucharist: “Christ, our Paschal lamb has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (Paul’s reference there to “unleavened bread” similarly refers to the matzo bread used in the Passover meal.)

At the Last Supper, Jesus transforms powerful religious symbols inherited from the past. Up until now, the Passover lamb has functioned as a sign of God’s deliverance of his people from slavery. But now Jesus himself becomes the new Passover Lamb, the sacrificial victim whose death delivers his people from the power of sin and death for all time and beyond. More than that, Jesus fulfills the symbolism by showing himself to be the true Passover Lamb, the ultimate sacrificial offering towards which the Passover Meal was always pointing.

During the course of the meal, Jesus invests the familiar elements of bread and wine with new meaning: This is my body; this is my blood. In the context of the Last Supper, these mysterious words have a double significance. First, they predict what’s going to happen the next day. Jesus will die on the cross and his blood will be poured out. Obscure as these words are when he speaks them, his disciples will afterwards be able to remember and understand: Yes, what was it that he said at the supper about his body and his blood? His words not only predict but also interpret his coming death. It is not an ignominious and ultimately meaningless defeat, but rather the inauguration of a new covenant in his blood.

Second, his words set the pattern that his disciples are to follow henceforth until the end of time: “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup,” writes Paul, “you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” From now on, the life of the Church will be defined by this pattern: meeting together weekly and even daily to break the bread and share the cup, and so partake of the Body and Blood of Christ.

On Maundy Thursday, then, we give thanks for our Lord’s gift of himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. We remember with gratitude the Eucharist’s origins in the Passover meal, which Jesus celebrated faithfully throughout his life. We pray for the Jewish people, our “elder brothers and sisters in faith” as Pope John Paul II called them, who will be celebrating the Passover Seder at this time tomorrow evening. And we rejoice that Jesus is our Passover lamb, who feeds us with his own Body and Blood every time we gather to break the bread and share the cup.