Second Sunday of Easter2018(Year B)
Acts 4.32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1.1 – 2.2; John 20.19-31
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. (1 John 1: 5-7)
St John’s letter reveals a problem. He wants to say that the resurrection has changed everything. We live in the light now. God is light; in him there is no darkness. We live in God through Christ, so there can be no darkness in us, no sin. If there is, we are lying when we say we have fellowship with God through Christ. But we all know – and so does St John (as the rest of the letter makes clear) – that we don’t always walk in the light. Even though wedo (and want to) say we belong to God, we still sin. How is this possible if we are really Christ’s? Is it that we are pretending to be his? We are not really Christians? What is going on?
All the talk of light and dark can get confusing. There are probably more but I immediately see 2 kinds of darkness. First there is the obscurity that life throws at us. There’s the basic uncertainty about the future for starters. We do not know what is round the corner. But more specifically there is all the “Why, Lord?” stuff. The big questions that the church has always wrestled with – why suffering, why evil? Why war, famine, knife-crime, gun laws? Plus the more personal questions:“Why is this happening to me?”,“Why is my friend hurting so much?”,“What is the point of that, Lord?”,“Why now?” There is so much we don’t understand, don’t “get”, don’t “see” – much of the stuff of life is hidden in the darkness.
Then, second, there is the darkness we hold in us and sometimes spew into the world; the darkness of the sinfulness of the human heart that is capable of wounding and hurting others and that we sometimes seem to have no control over. There is that dark bit of us that wants to go any way but the way of God’s light.
The one sort of darkness can lead to the other. It is easy to trust God (or anyone else) when things are clear and obvious, especially if they are comfortable and nice. We can believe that God is light then. It much easier to doubt when things are unclear, ambiguous, confused. Doubt makes it much easier to lose a grip on the things of Godand then to lose a grip on Godand forget that God is light. Then we begin to see only more darkness, obscurity, and to let more of the dark and obscure parts of our sinful selves (as it were) see the light of day. Doubt and distance from God, can readily lead us into patterns of behaviour that draw on our human sinful darkness.
St Thomas finds himself in the middle of this kind of struggle. Part of him must have wanted to believe the other disciples when they told him that they had seen the Lord. Yet, it is not clear to him and he doubts. He does not see. Duringthat week before he finally did get to see Jesus, he must have asked himself more than once, why everyone else should have an experience he did not? Why this should happen to them, and not to him? He must have doubted God and doubted himself and wrestled with his conscience and wracked his mind for possible reasons. He may even have come close to walking right away for all we know. He would have been the odd one out and that is always a position where things get more distorted. It is not just that being isolated engenders increasing self doubtbut the other disciples may well also have wondered why Thomas was denied the vision of the risen Lord that they had had;what had he done wrong? They may have been none too subtle about their doubts. It is human nature. Doubt, begets doubt, mistrust, suspicion, rumour, exaggeration. And doubt of Jesus too; why didn’t Jesus wait until they were all there? Why put Thomas through a week of heart-searching agony?
Our problem is this. A Christian is a redeemed sinner. We know that Jesus has done everything necessary to carry our souls to the heart of God. We have been firmly parked in the light by Christ, transferred by his life, death resurrection and ascension from the realm of darkness and sinto the realm of truth, righteousness, peace and light.Yet, in spite of that reality the evidence suggests that our transfer is incomplete. We keep on doing things that are of the dark. We keep slipping back into living the lie that St John is talking about,
where we say one thing and do the other.
If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true
We say at the start of the service “Alleluia, Christ is risen!” and by the end of the Gloria we are being irritated with our brother or sister because they are singing flat, or they scratched their nose, or coughed in an annoying way.
Some have argued a solution to the problem that says that we simply cannot sin; that Jesus deals with our sin as instantly as we commit it so it is as if we never committed it. But that seems like a cop out.
Some would say we cannot know the whole picture and so bad stuff happens to good people for reasons (good godly reasons) that we don’t know about or understand. This is quite close to what St John does in the Thomas story: St John finds a reason for Thomas’s doubt and for Jesus’ delay in revealing himself. It is so that the rest of us might believe without seeing what Thomas eventually got to see. For St John the whole story of Thomas’s transformed doubt is to pile on more evidence that the resurrected Jesus really is resurrected so that future generations might believe too. But that kind of explanation seems very hard on the people caught up in the darkness. It seems arbitrary and unfair that some benefit while others are made to suffer.
But is there a hint of something else here too? Thomas is not given a private viewing. Jesus does not come to him separately and then he can rush back to the others, shouting “me too!”. Thomas’ eventual belief comes in the context of being with the other disciples. It is as if salvation has to be a shared awareness; as if knowing Christ as Lord and Saviour in all his fullness is only possible with others (and through and for others too).
If we have been transferred to the kingdom of light by all that Christ has done for us,then we are called to live in that light, which is to live in the light of transformed relationship. Everything that Christ does makes it possible for us to enter the realm of glory, to be in relationship with God,
What was utterly broken in darkness and sin, is utterly made new in forgiveness, restoration and light. God and humankind are friends again. Love stronger than death draws us to itself and in that dance of love with the One who loved all things into existenceI am called also to dance with you too. My relationship with you is also to be forgiven, restored, and to struggle its way into the light. Like any new life struggling its way into the light, it is a messy and painful business to give birth to the “new life” of new relationship, to give birth to “living rightly with others” in the light of Christ.
Neither Thomas, nor any of the other disciples could keep the risen Jesus to themselves. Faith in him is not a private matter. It can never be. Only utterly narcissistic love is ever for one alone. Love cannot be about “me”, “I”, “one”. Love can only ever be “you”, “we”, “us”. The Gospel needs community. And we need community, we need each other, to discover the truth of the Gospel. Only with one another do we find forgiveness. Only with one another is the brokenness of relationship restored.
In his book True Resurrection, Harry Williams CR wrote:
Resurrection as our final and ultimate future can be known only by those who perceive resurrection with us now, encompassing all we are and do. For only then will it be recognised as a country we have already entered and in whose light and warmth we have already lived…[the] experience of oneness within myself invariably brings with it the experience of oneness with the external world. I no longer feel separated from the people and things I live among. While remaining fully themselves and preserving their inalienable identity, they also become part of what I am. The separation between me and them is overcome so that I share an identity with them. My own resurrection is also the resurrection of the world.
What he writes can sound as if it were a fait accompli – I get “resurrection” and the whole world automatically looks good and light to me and I can easily live in love. I think it is harder than that. It is not about sorting myself out with God and everything falling into place (and so when everything does not fall into place it is either me or God who is not good enough.) It is a longer journey in the opposite direction – a journey of allowing others to shape and change me.
I meet God in my neighbour. The minute I try to be God to my neighbour, I fall flat in a hail of disintegrating humility. I only find forgiveness and learn how to forgive by first being forgiven by others. To say, “I forgive you” without knowing what it means to be forgiven is vacuous pomposity. I only discover how relationships are restored by being repeatedly and continuously accepted. I only change to become who Christ died to free me to be by rubbing along in community with my neighbour.
Rowan Williams writes in Where God happens: Discovering Christ in One Another
I have, by God’s grace, learned as a member of the Christian community what is the nature of God’s mercy, which does not leave me to overcome my sin by my own effort, so I have something to say to the fellow-sufferer who does not know where to look for hope. And what I have to say depends utterly on my willingness not to let go of that awareness of myself that reminds me where I start each day—not as a finished saint but as a needy person still struggling to grow.
Together we can help one another endeavour to reach up for the light in a way that none of us will alone, however pious.
Living in community (in a monastery, or anywhere else) takes time, effort, energy and bucket loads of grace.
but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.