St Mildred’s Church,
Relationship Resumed
John 20: 19ff
Over this Easter quite a number of newspaper columnist seemed to have turned into professional theologians. They start by assuring that they are not believers a very encouraging beginning, you might think – and then proceed to make almost papal pronouncements on the such great issues as the existence of God and the meaning of the resurrection. The one that annoyed me most was by a woman journalist in the Times who at last revealed to us the true meaning of Easter. Nobody nowadays except a few fundamentalist cranks takes the Easter stories literally, we know nowadays that such things just don’t happen, but they were myths that reminded us that good is stronger than evil and that encourages a kind of cosmic optimism that everything will all come right in the end. That seems to me to be just about as far away from the gospel stories about the rising of Jesus as you can get. What they are concerned with are not great sweeping generalities about the ultimate destiny of the world, whether and how it will all come right in the end, what they are concerned with is focused entirely on what happened to one man in one place at one time, on these uniquely special days when his tomb was found to be empty and when again and again he came among his friends and resumed his relationships with them sometimes one by one as with Mary Magdalene, sometimes with couples as with the two on the road to Emmaus and sometimes with the gathered company of his friends as in the Easter evening story we read in today’s gospel. And that is what I want to say to you this morning: Easter is about resumed relationships with Jesus or it is about nothing at all. They thought they had lost him, that he was receding from them into the past where he could be remembered but not met, that their ongoing daily conversation and interaction with him had been for ever closed down on Calvary and they were left without him and on their own to face the future – the common predicament of all who are left to mourn someone who was once here but now is gone. And what made it all different at Easter was the discovery that he was not gone, but right there with them. There was a few years ago a TV detective series based in Scotland where the police team was languishing for want of a leader when the old leader was unexpectedly recalled and walked in on them and said “I’m back, I’m definitely back “ And if you wanted a sound bite to sum up the meaning of the resurrection, you could not do better than that. That is good news that changes everything, that is what Jesus was getting over to his people every time he appeared. “I’m back, I’m definitely back’ I am not imprisoned in the receding past, you are not condemned to a future all on your own, the present is mine and the future is and in all that happens and is going to happen you and I are going to be together and nothing can separate us any more, see I am with you always to the end of the world. As long as you live, in the good days and the bad days I’ll be there; when you die as the one who has faced and conquered death I’ll be there. When, as the hymn puts it, you soar through tracts unknown and see God on his judgement throne, I’ll be there. That resumed relationship is the source of their confidence, the source of their life, the motivation of their mission. In the forty days between Easter and Ascension that relationship is carried on in the series of visual appearances that the gospels record, but Jesus’ word to Thomas at the end of today’s passage insists that our relationship with him can be resumed not just by those who have seen him but by those who believe in him. “Blessed are those who have not seen but have come to believe.” And the wonder of it is that that promise of the blessing of a real relationship with Jesus has keep on being conferred on Christ’s believing people down the centuries and across the continents. The Church has not lived on memories, it has lived in the presence and the power of its Risen Lord. “Jesus came and stood among them and said “Peace be with you.’ Peace in Hebrew is shalom, it means far more than rest or absence of conflict, it means the fulfilment of everything that God has promised to his people in his kingdom, it means becoming what you were made to become, it means a taking of all that you have been and all you have done into the crucified hands of Jesus, including all the bad things and the destructive things in our lives and transforming them and reshaping them so that instead of frustrating God’s purposes they are made to fulfil them. Because that is what Jesus has done on the cross. He has got into the midst of sin and death that were destroying God’s people and has turned them into the means by which he comes to his Easter victory over them so that through his grappling with sin and death he has opened again the door to life and fulfilment. To denying Peter, to heart broken John, to confused and doubting Thomas He showed them his hands and his side and said Peace be with you so that the peace and the victory that he has won is communicated to them and out of their relationship to him they are equipped and emboldened to begin their mission to the world “He said to them again Peace be with you As the Father has sent me, so I send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ When he met them he involved them in his mission and conferred on them his power. The church that has no heart for mission shows that it has not yet fully discovered the reality of its relationship with the risen Lord. The way the relationship with the first disciples in the gospel story develops is the way he wants his relationship to us to develop today, the promise of peace, the assurance that God can steer us out of all the messes we are in back into his purposes for us so that our lives will be fulfilled in Christ rather than wasted by ourselves, the motivation that gives us to open up to others the promise of new life that Christ has given to us and the conferring on us the energy and wisdom of the Holy Spirit that will make that happen. The wonderful thing is that are surrounded by a mysterious presence not of a vague and unknown God but of a known and living Jesus and he comes searching us out and devising transforming breakthroughs into our lives so that he can convey to us his peace, confer on us his life and recruit us into his service. The only point of my speaking to you now is that through my voice his voice will speak and awaken you to faith and a resumed relationship with him. The only point of breaking bread and drinking wine at his table is that he has promised that that will be the place of his coming, that when we do it in his name and in the power of the Holy Spirit we shall not just remember him but recall him and receive him and enter into precisely that renewed relationship with him that is the meaning of Easter. But the risen one surprises us not just when we are together in church but every time we make room for him, give time to him. I start most days pretty flat and fearful, but when I go into my study and open my Bible and say my prayers, there is a quietening and stilling and the sense of a deep and mysterious presence that steals upon me and lifts my heart and makes me ready for the day ahead. It is into that resumed relationship with Jesus that the little one is to be baptised today, her baptism is his promise that in his time and in his way he will make himself known to her and direct her life to the fulfilment he wants for her. It is to that resumed relationship that he calls us today. He wants you to meet him, don’t be content with second hand, or second best. He invites you into a personal participation in his risen and conquering love. He says you and to me ‘I’m back, I’m definitely back. Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord.