It's Still Easter

It’s still Easter! Of course, it’s still Easter tide in the church and will be until Pentecost on May 27th this year. It’s also still Easter in our Gospel for today – although Jesus and the disciples seem to be keeping very late hours. And what a tumultuous day it has been! It began at early dawn as a group of women went to Jesus’ tomb, found it empty, and met two men in dazzling white clothes who assured them that, just as he had promised, Jesus had risen. Although no one believed the women when they went to tell the other disciples, Peter ran to the tomb, looked in, and was amazed. Then Jesus caught up with two of disciples walking to the village of Emmaus, about six miles from Jerusalem. Although they didn’t at first recognize Jesus, he explained to them how God had delivered on all the promises God had made in Scripture. Since it was evening, they invited him to stay with them. When he took bread, blessed, broke, and gave it to them, they recognized him. When Jesus vanished, the two disciples leapt up and ran back to Jerusalem, to tell the eleven and their friends what had happened. Late as it was, Jesus came among them again. He still had more to tell them – even on this first day!

It’s not easy to make sense of all the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. The Gospels clearly don’t agree on what or how it happened that Jesus was alive again after his execution. Our reading last week from the Gospel according to John suggests a slightly different series of events from Luke’s portrayal of that first Easter. Certainly resurrection was and is hard to get our minds around. Yet, if we look at the resurrection accounts, especially those of John and Luke, we find that they are remarkably similar in what they tell us. Notice that in Luke’s account of the Easter evening meeting in Jerusalem, Jesus offers the disciples the same assurance of forgiveness and reconciliation that he had offered in John’s account. “Peace be with you,” he greets them, as he miraculously enters the room. He offers the disciples confirmation, even proof, that he is not a ghost but a truly, living body, by commanding them to look at him and even to touch him. Did they need further proof that he was not ghost? He told them he was hungry and ate a piece of fish. Then, just as he had done with the depressed disciples on the long walk to Emmaus, he explained how all that God had promised in the Scriptures had now been fulfilled in his resurrection. And, finally, and perhaps most importantly, he commissioned his friends to spread the good news to others reminding them that, “You are witnesses of these things.”

The disciples don’t speak in Luke’s account of this late night meeting with Jesus. Nevertheless, as Luke tells us, Jesus’ appearance among them unleashed a barrage of emotions in them. Hearing his greeting of peace, they were “startled and terrified.” When Jesus reassured them that he was not a ghost, invited them to touch him and ate with them, the disciples were joyful and yet also incredulous. After Jesus explained the Scripture to them, perhaps the disciples were enlightened. Perhaps they were now ready to take the risk of beginning to spread the good news about Jesus, to “proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins” to people of all nationalities and ethnicities.

Or maybe not. Perhaps that one encounter with Jesus wasn’t enough to dispel all their fears and to equip them as preachers and proclaimers of the good news. Surely they must have continued to have questions. Perhaps even some of the same questions we might have. What kind of a body did he really have, that the disciples could actually touch it? Why did the disciples at first have trouble recognizing Jesus, even though they had spent so much time with him? How could he just come and go as he pleased, turn up in different places at will, even walk through walls? How did he know what was troubling them, so that he could respond to their questions? And hardest of all: was that really Jesus whom they encountered? Surely, Jesus’ disciples and friends struggled with these questions long after the late-evening meeting described in our Gospel reading. After all, it took the original witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection years to come to grips with these questions: nearly thirty years for the writer of the Gospel of Mark, perhaps forty or fifty for the writers of Matthew and Luke, almost sixty for the writer of John’s Gospel.

We could ask our own questions ad infinitum. And scholars much more learned than I have written tomes, examining every point of the resurrection stories. While I have deep respect for Biblical scholarship, in the end we are not called to be merely intellectually convinced that Jesus was raised. Rather we are asked as followers and disciples of Jesus to put our faith in those original witnesses, to trust those who followed them, to look for evidence of Jesus’ new life in ourselves and our faith communities, and to share with others what we have experienced, the things to which we are witnesses. Yet we know that developing trust, recognizing the signs of Jesus’ work among us, and risking sharing our faith with others are all hard work. Conversion, new birth in Christ doesn’t happen overnight. Anglican priest David Runcorn tells of a woman who described the realities of spiritual birth. “Any woman knows,” she tells us, “that birth is long and slow, very painful and very messy. You expose the most embarrassing parts of yourself and are so vulnerable that you are past caring. If that is what real birth is like, then why should spiritual birth be any different?”1 If you still have doubts and questions about the resurrection, you’re in good company. Resurrection is a reality that takes us decades to realize fully in our own lives. Even so, we have God’s promise that Jesus continues to come to us, to reassure us, to teach us, to equip us to carry out his ministry in the world, and to transform us.

Our Gospel stories suggest that there is a way that that transformation happens most effectively in our lives. And that is when we remain in community with each other. Notice that in almost every resurrection story recorded in our Gospels, Jesus comes to a group of disciples: the women who heard the angel’s proclamation in Mark’s account, the group gathered behind locked doors in John’s account, the women whose outlandish tale of the empty tomb was considered nonsense, the pair on the road to Emmaus, and, finally, this gathering of the eleven and their companions. It is in community with each other that Jesus is most likely to come to us, to reassure, enlighten, and commission us, to transform us from spectators of the events of Easter into participants in them.

“You are witnesses of these things,” Jesus reminded the disciples, as he sent them out to proclaim the good news to all nations. To whom are we called to be witnesses? Now you might think that I am about to launch into another plea for evangelism at this point. Mission on the other side of the red doors is important, to be sure. Inviting friends and relatives to worship with us is also important, to be sure. However, I’ve been thinking about our parish as a Christian community, as a place where as a body we may witness to each other. It has become more and more clear to me that maturing as Jesus’ disciples and companions and growing in our ability to appreciate and share the good news of life in the risen Christ take place most often and most effectively in groups. It is in community that we share insights with each other, encourage each other in faith, and witness to each other of our day to day experiences with Christ. It is in community that we let others in on the struggles we have had with grasping the meaning of new life in Christ. It is in community that we pose our questions about Scripture to each other, and it is in community that Jesus helps us to see the relationship between the truths of Scripture and our own lives.

Which brings me to St. Peter’s. You have heard me preach a lot about mission and ministry to others. Our participation in the Common Ministry program is helping us understand better who we are, so that we can be better and more effective ministers to those among whom God has placed us. However, I also believe that God has called us to be more intentional about the kind of community we have internally, about what our in-reach is, if you will. Besides Sunday worship, what holds us together as a community? How are we nurturing and supporting each other? How are we witnessing to each other? I challenge you to reflect with me, to help us all find those ways in which we can share the doubts, sorrows, and joys of Christian life more intimately with each other. Are we willing to grow – as a body – in our ability to witness to each other?

If we are, then perhaps we can pray wholeheartedly, O God, we give you thanks for the gift of resurrection life. May we know in our lives, both as individuals and as a parish, that the crucified one is alive and comes to us: turn our doubts and disbelief into awe and wonder, until we all rejoice together in the glory and presence of the risen Lord.2
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1. Quoted in Donald Runcorn, Rumours of Resurrection (London: Darnton, Longman and Todd, 1996), 2).
2. Based on David Adam, Traces of Glory (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1999), 67.