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Easter 2
16/4/2023

Acts 2:14a, 22-23
Psalm 16
John 20:19-31

In a sentence:
Whatever resurrection life looks like, it does not leave our history – us – behind

Identifying the dead
The fan of the TV murder mystery knows that an essential part of many of those stories is identifying the dead body. By this we confirm that the deceased is the person we think she is.

When we identify a living person, it is by recognising her face or voice. If we know her very well, we might even recognise her by smell or the feel of her skin. That is, we identify the living by sensory means, by what we naturally are, as perceived by sight, sound and touch.

When we identify a person who has just died, sight is the only sensory means left. The detective pulls back the pall, and the face is recognised. Often in the murder mystery, however, the story is more complicated than this. The trauma to the body or years in a shallow grave means that seeing doesn’t tell us much. Our senses fail us here or, perhaps better, the natural, sensory being of the person who died fails us because what remains can’t tell us who this is.

And so, where the person’s natural appearance is no use, the investigator turns to ‘history’ – to what the person did or was done to him. Now it’s about tattoos and scars, dental records and prostheses, or the remnant of a train ticket found nearby. These are historical ‘additions’ to the natural person, the unique marks our particular experience of life adds to our natural embodiment.

Thomas and the marks of crucifixion
Each year on this Sunday we hear John’s account of the appearance of Jesus to the disciples, in the absence of Thomas. Thomas, who begins in doubt, soon makes one of the strongest declarations about Jesus in the Bible: ‘My Lord and my God.’

We have all wondered with Thomas and then wondered at Thomas and his credulity. Our problem is that he apparently has Jesus standing in front of him, but we have the story of Jesus standing in front of him – natural Jesus, perceived by the senses of sight and hearing and touch. And the story doesn’t seem to be enough for us. Thomas and the other disciples seem to have it easier than we do.

But let’s look at the details of the account and, in particular, at how Thomas comes to his extraordinary confession. We all know that Thomas insists on seeing Jesus’ wounded hands, feet and side. This seems to be a gross materialism – ‘Let me hold him, and I’ll believe he’s here’.

Yet, we don’t usually note that this is also how the other disciples identified Jesus:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. (20.19f)

When Thomas says, ‘Show me the marks’, he asks for nothing more than what the other disciples have already had. Thomas doesn’t want to see ‘Jesus’ in some ‘There you are, old chap’ kind of way; he wants to see the marks of crucifixion. It could only be the risen Jesus if those marks were there.

This is very odd. Thomas and the others knew what Jesus looked like and sounded like and so could identify him by his natural features in the normal, sensory way. Yet it is by the marks of crucifixion that they identify him. This is to say that what Jesus ‘looks like’ – his natural person – doesn’t matter here. What matters is nothing natural – nothing sensory – but only the traces of Jesus’ story – his hi-story – summed up in the wounds in his hands, feet and side. Jesus is what he did and what was done to him. It is the (hi-)story which matters, the human and social dynamics which Jesus embodies and is.

Resurrection as the recovery of the cross
If this is true, something very strange happens to resurrection-talk. If Jesus is what was done to him, the rising of Jesus is the rising of just that – the rising of what Jesus did and of what was done to him. The rising of Jesus, then, is not merely the breathing-again of a dead man but the rising of the cross: the recovery of the cross as the heart of the matter. The resurrection is not ‘once-dead friend Jesus’ who comes back to life as some proof of life after death; the resurrection is the return of the crucified – the return of the cross. We are not, then, to believe in the resurrection but in the cross. It is the cross which is the scope and completion of Jesus’ work (‘it is finished’, John 19.30); the cross is the ‘load-bearer’ here, as we said last week.

This is not just neat theology; it makes a difference in real and specific human experiences and contemporary challenges. Some of you have read the op-ed piece I wrote last week, linking this interpretation of Thomas’ experience with the proposed indigenous Voice to Parliament. I won’t say anything more about that this morning.

But we can also connect Thomas with the fact that we (as a congregation) are here today in this particular place because we are about to move away from 170 years of one way of being, into something very different.

The raising of the wounded church
It might be (just a little) overdramatic to speak of our congregation’s present and immediate future as being a matter of death and resurrection. (It’s probably more like an amputation, which is bad enough!). But we do symbolise something of the wounds of the whole church in its current condition in broader society. It is not only the state of the property at Curzon Street which sees us having to move; if we were still the community which built those buildings, we would also be able to take care of them. But we’re not that community anymore, and maintenance and insurance and other overheads have pushed us into deficit budgets. The crisis of UMC aside, we were (are) in serious trouble. We should use it carefully, but dying is a useful metaphor for understanding many – perhaps even most – Christian communities in Australia today. The possible exception here might be recent, more successful migrant-based churches and a few Pentecostal megachurches. However, even many of these might yet be found just to be running late for their own funerals.

Whatever we think has caused this, the wounds in the Body of Christ are deep. And the question is, what would a resurrection look like? All we can say about this is that a resurrected Body of Christ – tomorrow’s church – will bear the marks of its suffering and rejection, and yet, those marks and wounds will not debilitate. The risen body of Jesus – marked as it is – is no longer on the cross and no longer wrapped in tight linen bindings. So also it will be for the Body of Christ which is the church, and this is the hope with which we contemplate our future.

We are everything which has brought us to this point. And our future can only be one that catches us up and carries us forward, history and all. The promise of this place, then, is not a sudden burst of new people coming in, filling this space in no time and out-shining all that has gone before. The church does not believe in flash-in-the-pan, won-the-lottery, dropped-out-of nowhere miracles. This is what we think Thomas and his friends got – a sight and sound spectacular. And yet, such a spectacle would prove nothing. So what if one dead person once rose from the dead? Quite seriously – so what? ‘Do you believe because you have seen?, asks Jesus, as if to imply, ‘What kind of belief is that?’

The church does not believe in miracles like this. It believes, rather, in the story of a history of a transformation of death: a scarred but living and strong body of Jesus, which then become the scarred but living and strong Body of Christ – even the church.

If we were to come here – and this has not yet been decided – it would be so that we might be both the congregation we have known and the congregation God might raise us into. Any future of the church is not simply a cutting itself free of its history of success and failure. The church’s future is a carrying-forth and transformation of all that. If we come here, and if this is in the hope of anything in any sense like resurrection, then we must both remember everything and also look to see it all transformed.

‘Do you believe because you see?’, Jesus asks us. No, we believe because we hear that history’s tragedies are just the nothingness out of which God creates a future with the world, a future with us.

The risen Jesus bears the marks of sin and death, and yet lives. His risen life, and ours, is one of memory and hope.

Our life is memory and hope.

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Easter Day
9/4/2023

Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10

In a sentence:
We do not know where we are or what we are until God turns our understanding upside down.

Resurrection and magic
The delight in watching a performing magician is seeing something which doesn’t ‘compute’: the white rabbit pulled out of the empty hat or the pretty assistant who, apparently having been sawn in two, can still wriggle her toes.

The conjurer knows the art of surprise by distraction. Crucial for her act is that we are tricked into focussing on something other than the crucial move. This is particularly the case with sleight of hand, by which the magician draws our attention to one hand while the other does the real work. If we have only our eyes to trust, we have to testify that the card ‘magically’ appeared where it could not have been, or the coin we have just seen has disappeared. Of course, we don’t think this is ‘real’ magic, so we immediately wonder, ‘How did she do that?’

Most of us experience the Resurrection stories of the Gospels like this. We ‘see’ the Resurrection by hearing the stories: this is the rabbit out of the hat. And as with the magician’s trick, so with a purported resurrection, we might wonder, ‘How did he do that?’ Is it possible that the dead can be raised?

Asking ‘How?’ at least allows that something special might have happened after Jesus died. But, as far as most of us are concerned, we don’t think too seriously about this: there is really no trick to see here. It’s perhaps a nice story, but it’s ‘only’ a story, somewhere between straight deception or a sincere account from deluded witnesses.

Miracles and distraction
The story of Jesus’ resurrection of Jesus, like the other miracle stories in the Bible, looks to us to be just a magic trick, which is to say that it seems to be nothing at all. We know there is no ‘real’ magic, no control of the world by will. Magic is only skilful manipulation, visible or hidden.

But the miracle stories are not intended to be accepted as magic. A few weeks ago, we considered an account in John’s Gospel of the bringing of sight to a man born blind. We saw that a problem with ‘nature miracles’ is how distracting they are. As that account unfolds, it becomes clear that the story is not about the good luck of one person who happened to have his eyes magically opened. It is about that man coming to see who Jesus was and, at the same time, the failure of others to see the same thing, despite the overwhelming evidence. The miracle story reveals not that there is a God who does magic but the possibilities of the human heart: from the seedling faith of the healed man to the barren ground of those who opposed Jesus despite the evidence.

To see only the miracle is not to see very much at all. This applies even to resurrections, which brings us back to our reflection on Good Friday. There we considered the significance of Easter for Good Friday. Good Friday needs Easter to tell us who Jesus is, making possible language like ‘messiah’, ‘son of God’, and ‘lord of glory’ for the one who dies on the cross. Good Friday matters because this one, revealed by Easter to be Lord and Messiah, dies. This is not any old crucifixion.

Not any old resurrection
But now we might turn things around to consider the importance of Good Friday for Easter. Easter needs the crucified man Jesus for us to see the sleight of hand under the distracting miracle.

In saying, ‘Jesus is risen,’ we naturally let the emphasis fall on the ‘risen’, for this is surely where the magic is: dead people don’t usually stop being dead.

But Easter is not any old resurrection; it is not the resurrection of ‘someone’ in general. In affirming ‘Jesus is risen,’ the emphasis falls most of all on the ‘Jesus’: not ‘Jesus is risen’ but ‘Jesus is risen’. This is because the real surprise is who is raised: as a despised, rejected and crucified man, Jesus is the last person we should expect God to raise.

To get the emphasis wrong is to mishear the gospel’s declaration. At the first hearing – and for many us, at second, fifth and twentieth hearings – the Easter story sounds like Jesus dies as a man but rises as a god. But taking Easter and Good Friday together reveals the gospel’s sleight of hand: the God dies, and the man rises. Easter Day reveals that it was God hanging on that cross, while Good Friday reminds us that it is a despised and rejected human being who is raised from the dead.

There are a lot of footnotes which scream to be inserted at this point, but there’s more devil than God in the details.

The central ‘takeaway’ is that Easter is not concerned with the question of life after death, and so not with the ‘idea’ of our continuation after our hearts stop beating. Easter is concerned with the switch: a god is crucified, and a broken person is raised. This movement is a radical shaking up of expectations, revealing that most thinking about the Cross and Resurrection is like watching the wrong hand and being deceived.

The magic hand in which we are held
God does not seek to deceive us here, of course. It is a self-deception because we hear the story according to our own sense of what matters and is possible, and not God’s.

On Friday we reflected on why, of all the endings of all the lives lived in all of history, we might concern ourselves primarily with the end of Jesus’ life. We might ask the same question now of the resurrection: of all the risings which might perhaps happen, why does this one matter? These are, in fact, the same question: what has the life and death and life of Jesus got to do with any of us?

The answer is given in our short text this morning from Colossians (3.1-4). There Paul speaks of us as having our being not in ourselves, but of our being in Christ: your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ is revealed, so too are you.

This is true magic: our lives filled out, made whole, justified in the life of another.

Up to this point it is as if, in living our lives, we have performed a magic trick on ourselves, misleading even ourselves to look at the wrong hand. And we open that hand and see all the things we have done and all the things which have been done to us, and we think that what we hold there is all we are.

Dying as gods to live as creatures
But there is another hand which holds the secret of the trick we are. Scarred but strong, this hand holds us as we hold all we have been and desire to be. We are hidden in this strong hand, completed and made whole there, enclosed within Christ.

For this to become our reality, the gods we desire to be have to die so that we might emerge again from our tombs as human beings, re-imaged – re-imag-ined – in the humanity of Jesus. God dies on Good Friday so that a true humanity might rise at Easter. This humanity is created not to be divine but to be creaturely, not for fear but for love, not for selfishness but for service, not for self-justification but for grace and gift.

By sleight of hand God catches us, like a falling coin, to reveal in the end that we were looking in the wrong place.

‘He is not here!’ laughs the smiling magician, ‘and you should not be either. You are looking in the wrong place. He is risen and gone head. Run, and catch up to him. And all that is his will be yours’