170423-mr-ryan-austin-eames

Sermon preached by Ryan Austin-Eames Low Sunday, 23rd April 2017 Christ Church St Laurence Jesus said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I am going to proceed this morning on the assumption that there are none among us who have had the privilege of a physical encounter with Our Lord of the kind experienced by His disciples on the first Easter, or indeed of the kind experienced by Paul on the Damascene Road. Given my assumption, it would be reasonable for all of you to assume that the salient point to be made in such a sermon is that we must have faith, and that if we have faith we will be under Our Lord’s blessing; and that consequently, I can stop now, affect my egress from the pulpit, and we can proceed with the creed and the rest of Mass.

Would that it were so simple.

One of the challenges which we face as the church catholic in 2017 is that the resurrection has become too small. It seems that we are too well acquainted with the grand narrative of the incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension of Our Lord; and we therefore content ourselves with the statements of the creeds, that on “the third day he [Jesus] rose again from the dead”. In a manner of speaking we have even begun to see the resurrection of Christ as being comparable with other biblical accounts of the raising of the dead such as those attributed to the Prophets Elijah1 and Elisha2, or indeed those raised by Jesus himself.3 This, I am convinced, is a category error. The event to which the Gospels bear witness is of an entirely greater magnitude than the mere resuscitation of the flesh.

Over the past two millennia there has been a tendency on the part of the church to forget, discount, or otherwise ignore the fact that the concept of the resurrection of the dead did not begin with the events of the first Easter. First century Jews, the disciples included, knew that the resurrection of the dead was part and parcel of the coming of the Messianic Age, the greatly anticipated time of covenant renewal and when the Prophets had foretold that the dead would rise from their graves.4 God would deliver Israel from the hands of her Pagan oppressors and God would make good on His promises to Abraham, Moses, and David. The Gentiles would be gathered in and Abraham’s descendants would indeed be as numerous as the stars of heaven; the Torah would be fulfilled; and God would then finally reign through a Davidic king who would rule as the Lord’s anointed, a righteous judge, ushering in an age of harmony and peace. There is every indication that it was this role which the disciples had in mind for Jesus. But, the week that had begun so promisingly with the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, had ended so anticlimactically, not with a coronation banquet and a crown of gold, but with a humble Passover meal and a crown of thorns. Surely, the cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David!” had been in vain. Surely, this could not be the long awaited climax of the covenant.

This is how we must understand Saint Thomas’ instance that “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” How could he believe? The Romans were still at large, the meek had hardly inherited the earth, and there was no evidence whatever that the Romans had any intention of beating their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.5 I would suggest that until Jesus appeared to the disciples in the upper room and invited them to do exactly what Thomas had set as the burden of proof, that they shared his 1 Kings 17:17-22 2 Kings 4:32-35 3 Luke 7:11-15, 8:41-55; John 11:1-44 4 e.g. Ezekiel 37:1-15; Daniel 12:1 5 Isaiah 2:4 1 2

Page | 1

doubt entirely. After all, we heard in last week’s gospel that when Peter and John arrived at the empty tomb that “they did not understand the scripture, that he [Jesus] must rise from the dead”. And, while we are told that Mary Magdalene conveys to the disciples that she has both seen and spoken with the risen Christ, it seems that rather than either accepting Mary’s testimony or doing something to verify her claims; the disciples wiled away the hours in a state of masterly inactivity; still locked in the upper room, still fearful of both Caiaphas and Pilate.

In his formidable Commentary on the Gospel of John, Rudolf Bultmann writes that ‘the doubt of Thomas is representative of the attitude of men, who cannot believe without seeing miracles.’6 Though I think that this is partly correct, I think that there is more to it than simply this. Whether the evangelist intended it or not, the scepticism of Thomas bears witness to the truth that the disciples were not confidence tricksters eager to pass-off the disappearance of the body of their would-be Messiah as the general resurrection of the dead, nor were they naïve simpletons who were duped by a conjuring trick with bones. The fact is that Thomas doubted the resurrection because it is, by its very definition, an unprecedented event. It was entirely unanticipated that one man, Messiah or not, would be the subject of a one-off resurrection event during the continuing course of history.

This was not what Thomas or any of the disciples had expected, and yet, it was the reality with which they were confronted. Thomas’s confession “My Lord and my God!” is far more than the revocation of doubt. It is the reaction appropriate to the realisation that, Jesus had gone through death, emerged out the other side, and that death no longer has dominion over Him. It is the reaction appropriate to the revelation that, even though it did not look the way that it had been popularly conceived, the Messianic Age, the renewal of the covenant, the time when God would rule through his anointed one, had indeed arrived.

This as it may be, the decisive and tangible evidence of this fact is not to be found in our Gospel reading, or in esoteric abstraction, but in the fact that the disciples redesigned their entire world-view – ‘their characteristic praxis, their controlling stories, their symbolic universe and their basic theology’ – around the resurrection of Jesus.7 This was the impetus for Peter’s preaching, which we heard in the first lesson today. This was the impetus for the mission to the Gentiles. This was the impetus for Thomas himself to travel to the Indian subcontinent, at the very edge of the known world, to spread the gospel; the gospel for which he was martyred. That Jesus was truly resurrected continues to be the impetus for Christians throughout the Middle East – in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt – to continue to meet and worship in their churches, despite the very real physical danger of doing so. These things – these acts of witness – simply do not make sense if Christ is not risen.

It is inevitable that we will all experience moments of doubt. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury acknowledged in a 2014 interview8 that he experiences moments of doubt – perhaps more than an Archbishop of Canterbury should. But, as Sherlock Holmes says, ‘Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ We are called to be witnesses to the most improbable of truths: that Jesus, the crucified one, didn’t simply rise from the dead in first century Judea, but is alive and reigns. Now, today, this very moment. And we do this by being agents of his love, by loving the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our minds; by loving our neighbours as ourselves; and by loving one another, even as Jesus has loved us.

Jesus said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

R. Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. G.R. Beasley-Murray, (Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 1971), 696 N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus, (Downer’s Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1999), 136 8 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/sep/18/archbishop-canterbury-doubt-god-existence-welby * N.T. Wright, Climax of the Covenant, (London: AT&T Clark, 1993) * The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, F.L. Cross & E.A. Livingstone (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2005) http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780192802903.001.0001/acref-9780192802903.

Page | 2 6 7