Doubt & Hope

 

John 20.19 – end, Acts 5.27-32

Welcome to the week after Easter, Christ is risen, death has been defeated, we have celebrated, the chocolate eggs have been eaten, and the Priest deserves a rest. Now the disciple Thomas calls us to reflect and consider what this all really means to us.

In our Acts reading we get an insight into the lasting effect that Jesus’ appearance to the disciples has had. We heard that when he appeared ‘the doors were locked for fear of the Jews,’ yet in front of the Jewish Council and the High Priest the disciples seem to have found a new clarity of understanding about who Jesus is and this is reflected in their assertive and blunt replies.

It’s often an unwelcome surprise to those who believe themselves to be all powerful when the little people they feel they can control dare to quote a higher power, a greater and more enduring wisdom.

Is this the same Peter who denied knowing Jesus, confidently proclaiming what he now knows and understands to be true? He tells the Council that it is God who must be obeyed no matter how much power and suffering you can inflict upon us, you’re the ones who should be worried for killing his Son, I paraphrase on behalf of Peter.

After all, when Jesus appears to the frightened disciples who have locked themselves in a house it’s not to vent his anger at being denied and deserted by those closest to him, even leaving him to suffer and die, but to say ‘Peace be with you’, it’s the offer of a new relationship with the risen Christ which causes a spontaneous outbreak of joy.

Sadly, we still don’t need to look far to see the inhumanity of mankind in our world today, and fear of terrible suffering is all too real for so many, a situation the disciples could relate to. Understandably they were frightened. So scared, in fact, that, they hid behind locked doors. And who can blame them? They had just witnessed the one they confessed to be the Messiah betrayed by one of his own, tried and convicted by both religious and civil authorities, and then brutally executed. Little wonder they were afraid, assuming that the next step would be to round up Jesus’ followers. But when Jesus comes on the scene, their fear falls away and is replaced by joy.

What does it mean for us that Jesus showed the disciples ‘his hands and his side’? Perhaps there’s a message to all who obsess over physical appearance that even a resurrected Christ was prepared to share his scars and his wounds. Or maybe, it made the resurrection all the more believable that this is not some sanitised version of victory but one which has involved suffering, pain and sorrow.

But what about Thomas, who was out when all this was happening. Do you ever wonder where or why? Perhaps he was just getting bread or oil but it can’t have been easy to hear the others say something like…you’ll never guess who came to see us while you were out! Put in that way it’s not surprising that he wants to see and feel Jesus for himself, he’s missed out massively.  I’m sure that many of us can relate to him. He wants his own resurrection experience, his own living encounter with Christ, not a second-hand version.

Of course, Thomas already has history with Jesus, back in John 14 we find him asking more questions when Jesus said ‘And you know the way to the place where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.’

Perhaps Thomas drew on this and for him the ultimate realisation of ‘the way’ was to be in the physical presence of his Lord and God once more. After all an empty tomb means little without a body.

In being this way Thomas slows everything down, helps us to linger, reflect and remember that his grief was real , he wasn’t ready to let go, he was still in deep mourning. All of us who have lost someone we love can relate to this. We have have yearned for just one more interaction with the person who has died, to know them again as we knew them before, please God we may ask, just one more time.

We can use words and live lives that demonstrate what we believe but ultimately we cannot prove that God loves us too much to abandon us anymore than we can prove that love for another is real, at some point we have to accept it or reject it.

When we think of how Jesus responded to Thomas’ doubts it seems to be an open invitation for us to bring our own questions to him, question time with Jesus if you like.

There’s nothing off the agenda, one person I heard of is keen to find out why God made mosquitoes, but we may have bigger questions or doubts to bring to Jesus like why does evil and injustice seem to thrive in some parts of the world or is my loved one now safe in your keeping.

A week could have felt like an eternity for Thomas, maybe he was just becoming resigned to a future where he would have to live with doubt when Jesus arrived and said ‘peace be with you’ and ‘do not doubt but believe.’

We shouldn’t expect instant answers either but be open to hearing Christ’s voice in different ways, sometimes unexpected people or situations may enlighten us or reassure us of God’s love.

It may seem a counter intuitive thing to say but his doubts may help make our faith more real. It’s hard to relate to a version of the Christian story which is neat and simple, teaching all taken at face value. We should never feel guilty to say that we cannot find God where others tell us he is, to say this isn’t real for me, to explore and look for God in our own way. I’m with Rev Mark Oakley when he said he remains ‘unconvinced that reality is mirrored neatly in the recitation of any creed’. God is too big to be contained or packaged up in any phrase or physical space.

We need space and time for our faith to be felt, tested, lived with and ultimately become part of who we are to make it authentic, something that others may find believable.

Tom Wright, in his book ‘Surprised by Hope’ wrote “Frankly, what we have at the moment isn’t, as the old liturgies used to say, “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead” but the vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.”

I can really relate to that, there are so many aspects of God that we don’t know, yet I remain optimistic that our relationship with him will work out eventually, not because we deserve it or fully understand it but because he loves us. I’d happily have that proclaimed at my funeral ‘In the vague and fuzzy understanding that kept alive his optimism that it will all work out OK in the end’ , could it catch on as a new liturgy?

When we think of the disciples and their sending out by Jesus it has to be to a new more honest interaction with the people. They are aware of their weaknesses and failures, promises to stick with Jesus through anything turned out to be lies, lies for which Jesus doesn’t even demand an apology. He understands their human fallibility and wants to restore them to go out and serve the people once again. It’s time to rely less on their own strength and more on their response to God’s calling.

It’s a message we can draw upon as we continue our own journey through life, aware of our own weaknesses but also of the liberating hope and forgiveness available to us each and every day.

It’s for us to live out our lives to the full by being ourselves, carrying our mental and physical scars in the knowledge that they are shared with Christ.

Amen

Kevin Bright

23^rd April 2022

Easter Sunday: Witnesses

 

Acts 10.34-43, Luke 24.1-12

 

“We are witnesses to all that Jesus did both in Judea and in Jerusalem”. That’s what Peter says in our first reading. “We are witnesses”. That’s partly just a statement of fact, of course. Peter had seen Jesus at work. He’d travelled with him, lived with him, eaten with him, had his feet washed by him. He’d seen Jesus speaking to the crowds, healing the sick, and he’d seen him exhausted, asleep in Peter’s boat, frightened in the Garden of Gethsemane. Peter had been with Jesus almost till the end. He was the only disciple who’d followed Jesus when he was arrested, but his nerve had failed him at the last minute as he stood in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house. When people started asking him if he knew Jesus, he denied it all and hid as Jesus was led away to be crucified. But after the crucifixion, Peter was one of the first to see Jesus again – in a locked upper room, on the lakeside in Galilee welcoming his disciples to a breakfast of barbequed fish.

 

He wasn’t the only witness we hear about in today’s Bible stories though. The first to see the Risen Christ were a group of women, who had supported Jesus’ ministry. They had watched Jesus die and seen him buried in a borrowed tomb. That’s why they knew where to go with their spices and ointments. That’s why they were the ones who discovered that there was no body to anoint that the tomb was empty, that Jesus was risen.

 

At first the other disciples didn’t believe them. They were women. Women’s testimony didn’t count in a court of law in their culture. Nor, it would seem, did it count in the court of the disciples’ opinion – their words were dismissed as “idle tales”. But Peter decided that he ought at least to go and check it out for himself, rather than writing it off, and he found that it was just as they had said.

 

“We are witnesses” he said. He spoke of what he knew, and that was what gave him and the other disciples of Christ authority when they talked about the resurrection of Jesus. No one would have believed it otherwise. You couldn’t make it up, and you wouldn’t want to either. After all, many of these same disciples ended up being persecuted and killed themselves because of what they said they’d seen. There was nothing in it for them – no power, no glory, no status. If they knew it was a lie, if they knew they hadn’t seen it, there would be no conceivable reason to make it up. People may choose to die for a mistaken idea, but if we don’t die proclaiming a deliberate falsehood about an event which we know is untrue.

 

They could have followed the way of Jesus as a dead hero, a wise man whose teachings brought wisdom to the world – history is full of them, people whose stories inspire others. There would have been nothing wrong with that. But these people, who had been there, insisted, even at the cost of their own lives, that he wasn’t a dead hero, but a living friend. I can’t explain it, and I have long ago given up trying to. I don’t know what we would have seen if we had been there in first century Jerusalem with a video camera, but I know that these witnesses were sure that Jesus, who had died, was now alive. To them that was the proof that God hadn’t deserted him when he died on the cross, that he really was who he said he was, God’s chosen one, doing God’s work, and because of that, the message he had proclaimed, about God’s love being for everyone, really was true.

 

“We are witnesses” says Peter.

 

Of course, we can’t say the same thing, at least in the sense that Peter meant it. We haven’t seen the risen Jesus appearing in a locked room or on a lakeside, or trudging along the road with us on the long road to Emmaus.

 

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t bear witness to the resurrection. Those of us who call ourselves Christians today do so because in some way we have discovered the power of the resurrection in our own lives. It’s a different sort of witness, but just as important – perhaps more so. A former bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, once got into a lot of trouble in the press for saying that the resurrection was “more than a conjuring trick with bones”. But he was right, despite the furore. If the resurrection was only about something that happened  2000 years ago, thousands of miles away, seen by people who are now long dead, it would be an amazing story, but nothing more than that. Christian faith proclaims, though, that the resurrection of Jesus is a living event, happening in our lives day by day, for us to discover anew.

 

Peter is talking, in the first reading we heard, to a Roman centurion called Cornelius and his household. Cornelius has heard about Jesus and his message, and wants to know more. Think about that for a moment. He is a Roman centurion. It was the Romans who had crucified Jesus, Roman soldiers who had driven the nails into his hands, who had hoisted the cross up, with the weight of Jesus’ body on it, who had watched and sneered, gambling for his robe at the foot of the cross, until he died. Roman soldiers were the enemy. To be fair, Peter had really struggled when Cornelius had asked him to come to him, as I expect any of us would. It had taken some pretty heavyweight intervention from God to get him to go. But Peter knew that Jesus had proclaimed that God’s love was for everyone. He knew that even as those Roman soldiers were driving the nails in Jesus had prayed “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”, and he knew that by raising him from death, God had affirmed that message, had proclaimed that love was stronger than hatred, so in the end, he found the courage he needed, went to Cornelius, and, to cut a long story short, Cornelius his whole household were baptised and became followers of the way of Jesus in their own lives. Peter was a witness to the physical resurrection of Jesus, but Cornelius became a witness to the power of that resurrection to break down the barriers of suspicion and hatred which ought to have made Peter run a mile from him.

 

That’s what the resurrection is about – not an event that happened to Jesus and to those lucky enough to have been there and seen it two thousand years ago, but something which enables resurrection to happen daily in the hearts of those who follow him, people like Cornelius, who discovered a new way to live, love and forgiveness that should have been unimaginable

 

It's the same for us. We can’t witness that first resurrection in a graveyard in Jerusalem, but we can witness the resurrecting power of God’s love in the graveyard of our own hopes and dreams, in the situations where we feel that all is lost, as we discover that love is still stronger than hatred, and life stronger than death today.

 

It can be hard to discover and hold onto that on our own, which is why we need each other. We need to gather as a church, however we do that. Hearing the witness of others can be vital when our own faith falters.  But when we’ve found the good news for ourselves, it will spill out to those around us who need to hear it too, spreading through our words, our actions, our attitude to life.  It’s not about denying the reality of death or suffering – far from it; It is about declaring that they are not the whole of the story or the end of the story. All around us we see death at work – as the bombs rain down on Ukraine, as our planet faces the threat of climate change, as people are ground down by poverty and injustice, as well as in the personal threats and sorrows we face. Death is obvious, but we are called to bear witness to the possibility of life, where no life ought to be, which brings hope to places where despair seems to rule.

 

“We are witnesses”, says Peter, and that is what makes all the difference to him. He has discovered the power of God’s love for himself.  This Easter, God calls each of us to do the same, because if Christ has been raised from death, then we can be raised from death too.

Amen  

The Kindness of Strangers

 

Good Friday 2022

 

A couple of nights ago, on the BBC Ten o’clock news, Clive Myrie commented in a report from Ukraine that it was very wearing to begin almost every film he introduced with the warning that “viewers may find some scenes distressing”. The strain of reporting from a war zone was obviously taking its toll on him, because, distressing though it is for us to see these things on our television screens day after day, it must be far worse to be witnessing them in person, to see the bits that are blurred out for viewers, to hear the stories which the editorial team cuts out, knowing they are too grim to broadcast. And, of course, it is even worse for those for whom these things are not stories in a news broadcast, but lived experience, those who have buried their loved ones in their own back gardens with their own bare hands, because there is nowhere else to put them, those who have suffered rape or torture, and seen all they have and all they love destroyed.

 

We have the luxury of being able to turn off the TV, and I suspect that sometimes we may be wise to do so, but the suffering doesn’t stop because we can’t see it.

 

It really does seem at the moment as if there is nothing but bad news; as well as the war in Ukraine there is a pandemic still raging, a cost of living crisis, and a climate emergency which is ticking down to the point of no return.

 

And here we are on the solemnest day of Holy Week, piling on top of all that a story which is just as grim as anything we might hear on the news. An innocent man, arrested on trumped up charges, deserted by his friends, mocked and beaten and subjected to an horrific death. Telling this story year after year might seem like a perverse thing to do, deliberately depressing us even further than we are by the realities of our world – wouldn’t it be better for our mental health just to avoid it, think of something pleasant instead – bunnies and chocolate and fluffy chicks?

 

And yet, for two thousand years we have circled back to this story, telling it again, looking at it from every angle. Why would we do this to ourselves?

 

Perhaps it gives us a lens, a framework, to look also at the suffering around us now, and the suffering we go through with new eyes. People often ask why we call this day Good Friday – how can it be good? But we proclaim that it is, and that somehow it strengthens us.

 

As I looked at the story again this year, in preparation for Holy Week, one of the things that struck me was that, for all the cruelty and hatred in it, there are also acts  of love and kindness too, often from people who are either right on the fringes of Jesus’ world or even complete strangers to him. I’ve explored some of those stories in the display in front of the Lady Chapel, which I have called “the Kindness of Strangers”. There are the stories of people like the person who owned the donkey and gave it gladly to Jesus to ride into Jerusalem – I hope you like the Donkey we made at Messy Church this morning -  or the penitent thief on the cross, who defends Jesus when the other thief crucified with them rails at him. There’s Simon of Cyrene too, who is forced to help Jesus carry his cross, but is evidently changed by the experience and becomes a disciple. We wouldn’t know his name or where he comes from if he hadn’t. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea feature as well, stepping out of the shadows after Jesus’ death for the first time and helping with his burial, a gesture that must have seemed to them too little, too late, until the resurrection changed everything. And then there are the women who watch the crucifixion and the burial, when all Jesus’ male disciples have run away. They witness, and bear witness to his crucifixion, and later to his resurrection too. They may not be able to do anything to prevent it, but it makes a difference to us when others see and take notice of our suffering, and I’m sure it did to Jesus too.

 

What did it feel like to be one of those bit-part players in the story? They probably felt that what they were doing was pointless, but they knew they had to do it. Somehow, this man Jesus had drawn out of them love and courage they didn’t know they were capable of.  And as it turned out, their kindness wasn’t pointless after all. It has been remembered and celebrated in the words of Scripture ever since, to inspire us to love and courage too.

 

When you look at this terrible story, you find golden threads of kindness woven through it. They don’t negate the suffering and hatred, but they are every bit as important as them. They remind us that evil is not the whole of any story, that, if we have eyes to see, there is always hope and love, like those stubborn weeds that force their way up through the toughest concrete.

 

The kindness of strangers is as precious now as it was then.  It counts. It matters. It makes a difference. And we can see it all around us if we have eyes to look, in those who helped their neighbours through the lockdowns, stepping forward in their thousands to offer support, in those who have offered to host Ukrainian refugees or have given generously, in those who have protested about the treatment of refugees from other parts of the world – protest can be an act of kindness too. In every small gesture of love, even if it seems pointless, especially if it seems pointless, we proclaim the power of God, the God who doesn’t let hatred have the last word, ever.

 

Ultimately, all our kindnesses are rooted in the greatest kindness of all, the love of God, for us. God who didn’t  have to come and live and die with us in Christ, but he chose to do so, because we needed him, even if we didn’t know it. It is sometimes hard to see the good in Good Friday, just as it is hard to see the good in the world around us now, but that is what we are called to do, today and everyday, to see it and to be it, for friends and strangers, and even enemies, because that’s what God did for us.

Amen