Walking Through Walls.

John 20:19-31.

(Note: this sermon was preached on Holy Humor Sunday.  The dashes indicate listening to the person on the other end of the phone conversation.)

It is the evening of that first Easter day, and the disciples are still huddled behind locked doors in the upper room, fearful of the authorities.

[Phone rings.]

Sorry, I have to take this.  Hello?  Yeah, I’m working here, I gotta go.  I call you back. 

—  Yeah, I’m standing here preaching.  I gotta go, talk to you later.

—  I know you’re on vacation.  I saw it on Facebook.  I’m not. 

—  What?  Why? 

—  Okay, John 20. 

—  19 through the end. 

—  So look it up yourself!  Listen, I’ll talk to you later.  

—  What?  It’s where Jesus appears to the disciples after the resurrection.  

—  That’s what it says.

—  That question is a stupid distraction from the real issue.  It assumes a modernistic, imperialistic approach to the text, and gets us exactly nowhere no matter how we answer it.  The question is not whether it really happened then; it is how it happens now.  The past is dead; truth is always present and alive.

—  Then don’t ask dumb questions.  You knew what would happen if you got me started on that.

—  The disciples have locked themselves in a room, probably the same room where they had the foot-washing thing a few days before, because they’re afraid of the police.

—  I know, but when this gospel mentions “Jews” it almost always refers not to the whole people but the rulers and authorities.

—  Obviously.  Of course they were all technically Jews.  But the followers of Jesus tended to self-identify more as “Israelites” or “Hebrews.”

—  That’s because you haven’t read Margaret Barker.

—  Nevermind.

—  No.  The point is their fear.  They are cowering in grief, fear, and confusion.  Not only has their leader been executed, but the Sabbath is now over and the police will be back on the job, perhaps hunting them down.  At the same time, they have heard these weird reports that Jesus’ body is missing from the tomb.  Not only that, Mary is telling them that she has seen some angels in there and even that she has seen Jesus himself!  So she’s probably giddy with joy while everyone else is catatonic with terror.

So they are not just locked up in a room, the room is a symbol for the fear that is locking them up… and the fear that also locks us up, keeps us hiding, paralyzed, focused overly inward, unable to look out or do anything.

—  Yes.  Jesus comes to us in our fear and kind of breaks through the walls we build around ourselves.  

And when he comes he kind of materializes among them.

— I suppose if you want to imagine it like that, you could say it was like beaming down from the Enterprise on Star Trek, if that helps you visualize it, knock yourself out.  

But the point is that he does show up among them.  I mean he had already revealed himself to an individual, to Mary, and her testimony remains the spark that opens up their minds enough to see him now.  Here he reveals himself to the community, most of them, anyway.  

And he says, “Peace be with you,” indicating that he is not intending to be a fearsome presence.  Remember that this bunch of guys mostly just ran away to save themselves on Thursday night, when he was being arrested, tortured and finally on Friday executed.  They might have thought they had reason to be afraid of him.  When Mary came and told them, “Yo, guys, he’s back,” it might not have been taken as completely good news.

I mean there was fear and also some shame in their hiding.  They had abandoned their teacher and Lord, their friend.  Not that there was anything they could have done at that point to stop the whole thing.  And they probably reasoned that there was no point to all of them dying.

Anyway he says, “Peace be with you,” because he is bringing peace, shalom, forgiveness, acceptance.  And then he shows them his hands and his side.

—  Because he still had the holes in them from the nails and the spear, when he was on the cross.

—  Well, he was in some different form.  I mean in the other gospels the disciples don’t always recognize him.  Paul says our resurrected form is as different from our mortal form as a plant is from a seed.  

—  Because of the wounds.  His wounds are kind of a validating, credentialing device.  They establish the continuity between his resurrected form and his mortal form. 

—  No.  They weren’t just any wounds.  I mean, he wasn’t showing the scar from being bit by a dog when he was 8, or where he got his appendix taken out, or something.  

I’ve met people who kind of lead with their wounds and it’s more like a self-serving, attention-getting manipulation, sometimes.  I don’t think that’s what Jesus’ is doing here.

These are very specific wounds of having been crucified.  Not only was it an act of love, but it was the intentional absorption of a particular kind of institutionalized hatred and violence.  Crucifixion was only used by Rome, and only for political crimes.  Jesus shows the futility of the violence that was used to intimidate and control the enemies of the State and the ruling elite.  It was exactly what the disciples were fearing at that point.

In any case, it is when they see the wounds that the disciples realize what’s going on, and who it is who has materialized among them.  It says, “They rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”

—  Yes, probably it is an understatement.

—  No, I don’t know how to say that in Aramaic.

—  Well, then he says Peace be with you” again and tells them that as the Father has sent him, so now he is sending them.

—  Yes.  In other words get out of this room.  It doesn’t take though, because they’re still there a week later.  But he does send them out, that’s important.

—  Because he sends us out as well.  He gathers us together, and then he sends us out into the world.  We’re relatively good at gathering together, although we’re even shaky at that these days.  But we’re positively terrible at being sent out.  I think.  It is hard for us to realize that the mission we are given from God starts right here.  When I was a kid a missionary was someone sent far, far away.  We forgot that we’re all missionaries, and it begins with our own families and friends and neighbors.  We are all on a mission from God.

—  Somewhat different from The Blues Brothers, though we could learn from their, uh, intensity and enthusiasm, I suppose. 

—  Really.  I’ll have to watch it again.

—  What?  Your food came?  Where are you?

—  All this time you’re been sitting in a restaurant waiting for your brunch order?  You should be in church.  

—  I go to church on my vacation.  Mostly.

—  Oh.  Well, if those are your only choices I guess maybe going to brunch is a better idea.  What did you order?

—  I would have gone with the huevos rancheros.

—   Oh.  Well, then he breathes on them, and tells them to receive the Holy Spirit.

—  Well, it looks like the Spirit comes from God through him.

—  I don’t want to get into that.  The point here is that receiving the Spirit gives the disciples the power to forgive, that is, release, or, on the other hand, retain people’s sins.  In other words, to receive the Holy Spirit through Christ, is to become Christ in some sense.  We become partakers in the divine nature, as Peter says.  

We become the agents, the touchstones, by which people’s alienation, enmity, self-centeredness, and unconsciousness is released, freeing them to walk in newness of life in the Spirit; or… not.  We can also lock themselves into their own judgment.  Jesus makes his disciples somehow responsible for the sins of others, like the leaders that Ezekiel talks about.  They become in his name kind of like sin managers for the world.  Not in the sense of judgment, which Jesus says he did not come into the world to do, but as witnesses to the truth of God’s love and light and life, which people may unfortunately reject on our account.

—  Yeah.  I know.  Right?  Bummer.

—  It is quite possible that the church has retained more sins than it has released over the centuries.

—  No, I put it together with the Thomas passage. 

—  Yeah, well.  I think Thomas gets a bad rap on that “doubting” thing.  The other disciples weren’t exactly totally on board until Jesus actually showed up either.  And Thomas is the disciple who makes the most comprehensive and profound confession of Jesus’ identity in the whole gospel.  He calls him, “My Lord and my God.”  Nobody else goes that far.  He is also the only disciple who got that Jesus was going to die in Jerusalem.  So we should cut Thomas some slack.

The whole incident is here so we can get to the part where Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me?”  And he’s not just talking to Thomas here.  He’s with the rest of them too, still locked in their hiding place a week later.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”     

Seeing in order to believe is good.  We see that all over the gospel, starting with the first miracle, at Cana.  But it is too focused on the past and it is not reliable.  Our memories change and adjust; what we see is often determined by what we are expecting, fearing, wanting, and our individual perspective.  Every judge knows how “eyewitness” accounts are often inconsistent.  So that is not enough for us.  

What we need is the next step: to believe in order to see.  Seeing the truth often begins with trusting in this unlikely story of God-the-Creator becoming flesh and dwelling among us, full of grace and truth, teaching, healing, and finally being lifted up, dying, and being resurrected to breathe the Holy Spirit on us and give us his peace.

—  Yeah.  I know.  It’s what I do.  Preach.

—  No, there’s this little epilogue to the chapter.  It just says that these particular signs are included in this book to bring people to trust in Jesus, that he is the Messiah, the Son of God, and thereby have life in his name. 

So, here, this is the ending to the sermon I was going to preach but now can’t preach because I just spent all this time on the phone to you.

“The message is that in Jesus Christ, God enters into our fear, even our sinfulness, just like he materializes in this upper room full of scared, confused, guilty, ashamed people.   And for three short years he reveals to us our true humanity, which is with and in God.  He is the Son of Man, the Human One, the revelation of our true humanity; and he is the Son of God, the revelation of God’s true nature; and the fact that he is both suggests that at some level these are closely related, that the role and place of humans in the creation is to be the Creator’s agents and presence.

And by various signs he opens our eyes, our hearts, our minds, and our hands to a different kind of reality, one in which the Creator is deeply present and strongly active.  In the end, his witness to God’s truth runs so afoul of the authorities who are maintaining by fear, shame, and violence, the broken and distorted world we know, that they kill him.  Yet he emerges on the other side of death, to show us that not even death can stop the love of God.

Now it is our calling to follow him.  Not just in the kind of life he lived; but also to follow him through death to the other side, the real side.  And by our trust in him bring his light, life, and love, the light, life, and love of God, into our world, establishing his peace and his kingdom here and now.”

—  Yeah, that’s it.

—  Maybe you could do better.  For now, enjoy your eggs benedict.  I gotta go.