Experiencing the Risen Christ

John 20:19-31

Sunday, April 15, 2007

The Rev. Dr. David A. Van Dyke

The Second Sunday of Easter

Prayer: Dear God, we gather on this day, like the followers of Jesus gathered long ago, bringing to this hour our doubts and fears, our worries about the world and all the things that preoccupy our minds.  We long to experience the risen Christ.  So as we open your word, open our ears to hear it, and open our hearts to receive it. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Amen.

If the truth were known, most ministers I know prefer Christmas to Easter.  I know I do.  I think it’s because the Incarnation—God’s coming into the world to be with us, as one of us—God’s presence and accessibility that we celebrate at Christmas, is somehow much easier to make sense of than is the notion that Jesus who was crucified didn’t stay dead. 

Most preachers take this day off, claiming exhaustion after Holy Week and Easter.  But even if I had the day off and was on vacation somewhere, I’d show up in church today anyway. Because I think this day, almost more so than any other day in the church year, has a way of addressing us where we are.  It addresses us as Christians living in a world that is supposedly an Easter world, and yet it’s a world that we know all too often resembles nothing like an Easter world. 

Do we really live in an Easter world?  Is that the way the world looks to you?  Dare we hold out hope that the resurrection claim, with all its ramifications, is true?  We find ourselves living in an Easter world—living with a whole new set of realities and assumptions about life and about death, but about death in particular, and yet struggling much of the time to see those new realities coming to fruition. 

So I understand it when Thomas expresses his reluctance to believe that the risen Christ appeared when he wasn’t with the others.  Because I too, long to see the risen Christ, and yet sometimes all I see is a world of escalating tensions and violence, and I don’t see the risen Christ in that. 

I look out a world where the poor are getting poorer and where the rich are sometimes making out like thieves—where the richest 10% of the world’s population controls 85% of the world’s assets, and that to be considered in the top 10% of the richest people in the world requires only that you have a net worth of $61,000—I look out a world that is arranged that way and it’s hard to see in that a world redeemed.    

I look out at a world where inner-city schools are not funded adequately and where we seem content to allow hope to die in the lives of poor children—allowing them to go uninsured, and I don’t see the risen Christ in that. 

“Unless I see the mark of the nails and touch those marks, and put my hand in his side, I will not believe.”  And who among us can’t relate to that?  

I have always loved this post-Easter passage that involves fear and confusion, real uncertainty and yet news so good they can hardly comprehend it.  Just what does that empty tomb mean for them and for the world?   

Something mysterious has happened. The tomb is empty and the disciples are scared to death.  The Gospel of John says they are scared of the Jews, and maybe the critics are right, the author of the Fourth Gospel is anti-Semitic, casting the Jews in a particularly harsh light?  It was certainly no more accurate then, to categorically lump all Jews together, as though they all thought alike, than it would be to assume you could do that today.  That’s true for Presbyterians as well.  Get two Presbyterians together and you’ll have three opinions. 

Also, consider the fact that the people locked in that room were essentially Jews themselves, meaning that if the text is close to accurate, then they were afraid of their own people.  And think about what that says.  Maybe they were afraid of what humanity was capable of doing—of what they might be capable of doing?  Scared of powerful political forces that were capable of getting rid of people who posed a threat to the political, social ordering of things—and if the body was missing, they knew that they’d be likely suspects in devising some kind of plot to steal it.  I think that for a whole host of reasons they were scare to death and that’s why they locked themselves in a room. 

John’s gospel goes to great lengths to tell us that the doors to the house were locked, and yet in the midst of their fear, Jesus came and stood among them.  We don’t know how it happened or what exactly that means, only that it happened.  Jesus came.  The one who had been crucified and sealed in a tomb was suddenly present among those who were sealed in tombs of their own.  And here’s what I find so convincing about what they experienced.  

When that frightened collection of Jesus’ friends and followers, huddled in that room behind locked doors—when those peasants, shepherds and fishermen, who had betrayed and denied their Lord and failed him miserably—when they could be transformed overnight into a bold and confident missionary society, convinced of life eternal and able to work with greater effectiveness after Easter than before, then no mere vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain that kind of revolutionary transformation (see Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective, p. 125).   

Jesus came to them and I’m convinced that we experience Jesus—we experience the risen Christ in our times of deepest need—when we are aware of our own vulnerability and weakness and need for a savior.    

I remember my parents telling me a story about friends of theirs whose beautiful, cheerful, 18 year old daughter was suddenly diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.  They did what they could but nothing seemed very effective. When the only prescription a doctor can give you is the phone number for Hospice, you know the situation is bad.  So they took their daughter home to die.  They had a hospital bed in the living room and the family waited for the inevitable. Toward the end of her all-too-short-life, her mother woke in the middle of the night and went into the living room, just to sit next to her daughter’s bed.  She sat there looking at her, no doubt recalling the times when she held her as a baby and brushed her hair as a little girl.  And as she would describe it sometime later to my parents, her pain as a mother, forced to keep vigil in that way, was excruciating to the point of being unbearable. How can this be happening?  Why can’t it be me? 

And then as she told it, sitting in the dimly lit living room in the middle of the night, she looked over, and there, standing in the corner looking in the direction of mother and daughter, was Jesus. Somehow he was just there in that room with them, and she knew it was him.  And then he spoke, saying, “Everything will be all right.”  She saw him, she heard him, she experienced him and was overwhelmingly comforted and strengthened by his presence.  “Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked my parents.  “No, you’re not crazy at all,” they assured her.

Very few of us will have an experience like that, but we all experience the risen Christ in different ways and at different times.  Remember the scene in John’s gospel when Mary went to the tomb, found it empty and began to weep.  The risen Christ said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”  She replied, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they’ve laid him.”  Jesus responded, “Mary.”  And she recognized him and said, “Rabbouni,” and immediately Jesus said to her, “Don’t hold on to me.” 

In other words, don’t hold on to your previous notions of Jesus.  Don’t cling to the past. From now on look to experience the risen Christ in the shadows and flickers of your faith as it gets lived out in the world.  Experience God through the risen Christ as you will surely encounter him in your searching, and sometimes when you least expect it.      

Paul Tillich once said something like this: “The old faith must die, eaten away by doubts, but only so that a new and deeper faith may be born.”

And what I love about today’s encounter—when Thomas finally is present and the risen Christ appears again, is that Jesus extends his nail-pierced hand in his direction, as Thomas had demanded, and yet Thomas doesn’t need to follow through on his earlier conviction.  Thomas demanded an experience of Jesus on his own terms until his own terms are rendered foolish in the experience of the risen Christ. 

And that’s how it happens.  Don’t forget that the risen Christ did not appear to the masses and was not experienced by everyone. He did not appear to Caiaphas or to the Roman cohort.  It’s a safe assumption that Pilate never experienced the risen Christ.  And so in the reading and rereading of this resurrection story, I have become absolutely convinced that the resurrection was never meant to serve as the ultimate trump card, forcing nonbelievers into believing.  It has always been about assuring hurting, lonely, weary, frightened-yet-faithful disciples that their hope is not in vain because we now live in an Easter world. 

That’s why “these things” were written—not so that we might have facts, but faith—that we might come to believe.

I try to keep that in mind when I consider that there are few guarantees in this life.  Success is not guaranteed even with hard work.  A long life and good health are not promised to us, even with a good diet and proper exercise.  Because bombs go off, the lab report contains news you didn’t want to hear, your boss calls you in and says, “We need to talk…” and the telephone rings in the middle of the night.  Bad things happen all the time to good people and the world, more often than not, resembles Good Friday and not Easter.

Even the feast, awaiting us at that table, reminds us of a broken body and spilled out blood. It reminds us of our world and what it is capable of doing.  But that feast is not just a feast of remembrance, it’s a feast of hope.  Hope that despite what the world is capable of doing, despite the way the world often looks, resurrection has occurred and hope has been born and is springing up in even the most desolate places.   

Have you experienced the risen Christ?  Are you able to believe that we are in fact living in an Easter world?  Sometimes it’s hard, I know.  I think it is the ultimate test of our faith.  But I also know this:

…blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

Amen.          

Property of the Broad Street Presbyterian Church

Contact the church to obtain reprint permission