April 15 2007                                       Easter II 2007 Sylvia Crouter

After Mary Magdalene recognized the Risen Christ on Easter morning,

recognized him when he called her by name, even though at first she took him for the gardener, afterwards, in the evening of the day of the resurrection, the other disciples were still in a state of fear for their lives.

Just as Peter had been terrified in the Palace courtyard when Jesus was being interrogated, just as all but a few women were so fearful that they hid

while Jesus hung on the cross, so now in the evening the disciples still cowered behind locked doors. John’s gospel says, “for fear of the Jews”, but we might amend that phrase to say, “for fear of the Jewish power elites in collaboration with Rome”.

But… something happened behind those locked doors!

Suddenly the room was filled with a Presence. The aura of that Presence was a sense of “peace”. “Peace be with you”, John records the words of the Risen Christ.

The vision of the vindicated Jesus still bore the signs of torture and crucifixion,

but a feeling of joy was loose in that barricaded room.

Now follows what some have called a “mini-Pentecost”. A mini-Pentecost because the event we associate with that word wasn’t to take place until many weeks in the future.

That Pentecost we remember as a wind and fiery crowns on the heads of Jesus’ followers

as they were filled with the Holy Spirit.

So the evening of Easter they experience a kind of foretaste of Pentecost, experience it directly from the Risen Christ. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” the Risen One says in John’s gospel. There follows a promise of forgiveness, and with that forgiveness all the failings of the Twelve are washed away. Forgiven are the many lapses in understanding of what Jesus was about. Forgiven are the childish attempts of one-upping each other in status. Forgiven their behavior in Gethsemane, in the Palace courtyard, and their absence at Golgotha as their Lord hung dying on the cross.

With this promise of forgiveness of things done and left undone, and failures sure to come in the future as they attempt to follow in the Way, the possibility of community, Christian community, is made a reality.

Michaela Bruzzese writes: “With the breath of the spirit Jesus gives the disciples the power to create community…

   his actions recall both God’s first life giving breath to Adam and Eve and God’s restoration of the dry bones in Ezekiel.” (Sojourners Magazine)

The Spirit creates the first Christian community and continues to sustain our churches to this day.

Indulge me for a moment in descending from the sublime to every day-ness. In a few weeks we on the Box Hanging Three will begin foaling. You will see less of me for several months because I will be stewarding new life on our ranch.

When a newborn foal slips out of its mother’s body, takes its first breath, snaps the umbilical cord as it struggles to stand, we try to be there to begin imprinting the foal.

The first action in imprinting is to breathe into its nostrils, not to give oxygen, but to give the foal the smell of humans, to say in effect, ”take note! this is the scent of the most important creatures in your future life. We are gentle, trustworthy and will take care of you.”

To stretch the metaphor a little we are saying, “Peace be with you.” With that first imprinting we are beginning to create community, a community of trust between humans and equines on our ranch.

Returning to the sublime:

Through breathing the Holy Spirit into Jesus’ followers the Spirit is imprinting those followers with the spirit of love and forgiveness, empowering them to become the church, Christ’s new Body in the world.

The gospel continues with the story of Thomas who didn’t receive that imprinting at first.

Why he was not present is not explained. Perhaps again it was fear of the authorities.

 But a week later he, too, experienced the powerful Presence; he, too, heard the words, “Peace be with you.”

Breaking with centuries of tradition that Thomas was a “doubter”, we should instead understand that Thomas wanted a first hand experience of the Risen Christ.

Jesus doesn’t condemn this in Thomas. Jesus invites him to touch the evidence of his suffering, to know that the torture was real, to know that crucifixion was real, death was and is real…but also that there is more.

And the Risen One affirms you and me and the millions on down through the centuries who can touch the resurrection only through the witness of others. He says to Thomas, but also to us, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

This account from John’s gospel is but one of several resurrection narratives,

appearance stories, from all four gospels. We post-enlightenment people , we people steeped in the scientific method read these stories as either factual, literal happenings

or else parables of the experiences of long ago people who communicated spiritual experiences in story form.

Let us remember that the gospel writers relied on oral tradition, on stories passed down over 30 years or more after Jesus’ death, because none of the four are believed by scholars to have been eye witnesses to the historical Jesus, his life, teachings and death.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, whose book we studied during Lent, have this to say, “These stories are the product of the experience and reflection of Jesus’ followers in the days, months, decades and years after his death. “(The Last Week page 198)

Experience and reflection. In reflecting on Jesus, on all he was and all he meant to them,

in reflecting on the manner in which he met his death those long-ago people experienced the Christ as (in Borg & Crossan’s words), “a living reality”.

It is my belief that we moderns do not have to choose literal factuality or parable.

We can have both. We hang our historical mindset on the written evidence we have:

the four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and such secular historians as Tacitus, Pliny and Josephus.

Writing in his history of the Jews in Rome in 93 A.D. Josephus gives us a tantalizing bit about Jesus in one brief paragraph. He describes Jesus as “ a man who performed surprising deeds…Pilate had condemned him to a cross, [but] those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life…

and the tribe of Christians so-called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.”

An early historian heard from sixty years after Jesus’ death.

But the record of the Risen Christ as a living reality is there for us even today, even 2000 years later. We meditate on these resurrection narratives, interiorize what they convey of long ago experience. We can put ourselves into a parabolic frame of mind and understand what it means to hear, “Peace be with you.”

We can experience what it means to feel such an abundance of blessings that we know what it means to have a net so full of fish that it is in danger of breaking from such abundance…or what it feels like to receive forgiveness three-fold such that we are inspired to feed three-fold God’s lambs in our world.

And each time we come to the rail next to neighbors, friends and forgiven adversaries,

 we kneel or stand in solidarity with those long ago men and women who did see and who did touch, we slip out of concrete thinking… into parabolic mode, and recognize the Risen Christ “in the breaking of the bread.” Amen