Second Sunday of Easter

Today’s Gospel takes us to an upper room, a room of stale air and the stink of anxious bodies – the smell of fear.  A man comes into this room and offers inner peace and joy.  “Peace be with you,” he says.  The first gift of the risen Lord is peace.  “The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord” – that’s the second gift: the joy of the risen Lord.  This is God’s dream for our world: peace and joy.  Then the risen Lord gives the gift that makes both of these possible: “Receive the Holy Spirit.  Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”  A man comes into a room and offers a world of forgiveness and reconciliation with God.  Jesus comes with the Easter agenda for transforming the world.  This is the gift of resurrection that Jesus offers: a new creation.

Note that it is on the first day of the week – the first day is always the day of creation.  Every year we hear this story on the Sunday after Easter.  It is a great story of one of the appearances that took place following Jesus’ brutal death.  And it might sound like an appealing tale but totally irrelevant for our world today.  Peace?  Joy?  Reconciliation?  In our world?  The past decades have brought us Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Timor, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – to name but a few of the more horror-filled spots on our earth.  The agenda for the future is more likely what it has always been: the Ukraine, Sudan, nationalistic bloodbaths.  And that’s why we need to hear the story of Thomas each year.

Tradition has reduced Thomas to “doubting Thomas” – as if the rest of them did not also doubt who Jesus was when he first appeared.  But take another look at Thomas.  He lays down his conditions for accepting that Jesus has been raised: “Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”  He wanted a touchable Master.  He got more: when Jesus did appear and offered him his body to touch, Thomas was given the gift of speaking the great proclamation of faith: “My Lord and my God.”

Thomas stands for all of us who now and then wonder if anything good is still possible, in light of the blows life can deal, in light of the horrors we can inflict on each other, in light of the questionable values we find accepted and accept ourselves.  The government in Belgium holds the opinion that under certain conditions, like being a hemophiliac or severely disabled, an infant can be killed at birth.  The primary criterion is quality of life rather than sanctity of life.  In this brave new world, the Easter agenda of peace, joy, and forgiveness can seem like a beautiful illusion.

But that evening long ago those people in the upper room did not cast out the risen Jesus.  They took him at his word and they went forth.  And a dream took root, one that needs to be reaffirmed and recommitted to.  And so last week we were asked: Do you believe in God, in Jesus, God’s only Son, and in the Holy Spirit?  Do you accept God’s dream as a reality to be achieved through our working under the power of the Holy Spirit?  Here today we are in a room – only here it is bread and wine that direct our future, transformed bread and wine that are truly a gift of the Spirit.  In eating the Body of Christ, we grow into the Body of Christ.  We are the Easter people, sent to bring about God’s dream for our world: peace, joy, reconciliation.

The First Letter of Peter tells us that in God’s great mercy we have been given “a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”  Our future is not one of impossible, unreachable dreams but “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.”  And so we cry out, “Alleluia!  Alleluia!  Alleluia!”

Paul A. Magnano

Pastor