Texts: Acts 4:32-35; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31
Those many people today who want to pooh-pooh our Christian faith make the Resurrection of Christ their particular target. Even people who are reasonably sympathetic towards the Christian tradition, such as Ian Harris, also take aim at the Resurrection story. They are right to do so. It all depends on the Resurrection. If Christ was raised from the dead, as the Church has always insisted from the very beginning, then our critics are wrong and they need to sort themselves out. If he was not raised from the dead, then we are wrong and it's time to stop fantasising and grow up. There is no Christian faith without the Resurrection of Christ. Followers and critics alike can agree on that.
But where the critics go wrong – and Ian Harris has repeated the mistake in his latest column in the ODT – is in their apparent belief that the Risen Christ appeared only to the believers, and that therefore their witness can be discredited. That simply isn't the case, and it isn't the case for a number of reasons.
The first reason we call St Paul. In no sense could he be described as a believer when he was en route to Damascus. With great respect to Mary Magdalene, and all the other witnesses whose testimony we have in our gospels, my prime witness to the resurrection is always St Paul. Ian Harris talks about the joy and surprise the disciples experienced when they realised that the vision and excitement generated in them by Jesus was still there after his death. That, he says, is what they meant by Jesus rising again; he rose again in their hearts and minds, and their renewed dedication to his way of life. Well, we'll come to the disciples in a moment; but how are we to explain all this in terms of St Paul? He didn't know Jesus, and he certainly did not share his vision and excitement. Yet his life was transformed from persecutor to apostle by something that happened to him on the road to Damascus.
Ian Harris "explains" Easter in terms of a powerful religious myth. But even he never goes so far to claim that on the road to Damascus St Paul was knocked flat on his back and temporarily blinded by a powerful religious myth! So, at the very least we can say that the argument that the Risen Christ only appeared to believers is refuted by his appearance to St Paul.
But we can say a lot more than that, as our gospel readings last Sunday and this Sunday make clear. When the Risen Christ appeared to Mary at the tomb, and when the Risen Christ appeared to the apostles on Easter night, they were no longer believers! They were non-believers. As we saw last week, confronted with the fact that the tomb was empty Mary assumed that somebody had removed Jesus' dead body. Confronted by the Risen Christ, she did not recognise him but thought he must be the gardener and that he had removed the body! Does that sound like a believer? And, of course, the second part of our gospel reading this morning emphasises that Thomas was completely unconvinced, even by the excited testimony of his fellow apostles.
So I would say that the Risen Christ appears to those who did not believe in the resurrection, and had to be convinced by him before they could believe. He appeared, in other words, to non-believers.
But that's only a small part of the importance of these stories. The more important part is that the Risen Christ appeared to the guilty. There is what Rowan Williams calls a resurrection pattern in the Scriptures, repeated over and over again. The Risen Christ comes to his guilty disciples, all of whom have failed the test. When the Risen Christ comes to St Paul he comes to the one guilty of persecuting the Church. When Peter preaches in Jerusalem he goes out of his way to remind his audience that they were guilty of putting Jesus to death. Whatever else the resurrection stories are about, they are about confronting the guilty.
And we saw a very vivid illustration of that in the media this week. A very interesting and valuable innovation in our criminal courts in recent years has been the use of victim impact reports, where, following conviction, the guilty person must hear what impact the offending had on the victim. It gives the victim the right to have his or her voice heard; and it ensures that whatever sentence is passed, the full weight of the offending is acknowledged. Only when that is done, can the court, the offender and the public address the future. The offender may deserve a second chance, but that does not lessen the enormity of the offence.
Jesus appears to the guilty as the innocent victim, and one of the first things he does is to show them his wounds – "his hands and his side", as St John puts it. Traditionally, that is taken as producing I.D., proving it really is him. But it occurred to me this week, after watching the news headlines from the Tony Veitch case, that what we have in this gospel account can also be understood as Jesus' victim impact report. "Look at me. Look how I have suffered. Look what you have done to me."
Now such a confrontation can lead to three responses. One may be to reject it. It wasn't me; I was provoked, I was under duress, I was saving my own skin, I was following orders. Tony Veitch said "That wasn't me. I'm not like that. I needed to understand how I was driven to it." And that approach, or something similar, may well have occurred to some of these apostles hiding behind closed doors.
Or we might be so overwhelmed with guilt that it destroys us. We can't live with it. Judas is the classic example of that. Suicide was for him the only option. Neither of those options is the one offered by the Risen Christ to those he now confronts. He offers them peace; not amnesia, not a false innocence, nor a crippling guilt. But peace. He says it twice. Peace that brings forgiveness and acceptance; he accepts them as they are, weak and guilty, and so they can accept themselves as they are. And as weak and guilty people they can go out into the world and confront other weak and guilty people with the extraordinary truth that they are acceptable to God despite their weakness and guilt. So the Risen Christ sends them out into the world with a special mission of forgiveness.
I want to end this morning with this little glimpse of the community of faith as we have it in our first lesson, from the Book of Acts. St Paul's transformation from persecutor to apostle was astonishing, to say the least. Almost as astonishing is the transformation of this bunch of people, whose leaders cut and ran when the crunch came. Remember what they were like immediately before the arrest and crucifixion: abusing the woman who anointed Jesus at Bethany; squabbling among themselves for pride of place in the coming kingdom; boasting about their undying loyalty to Jesus, and so on. Then one of them betrayed him, one denied even knowing him, and all of them ran for their lives and were in hiding behind locked doors on the night of the resurrection.
Yet here they are "one in heart and mind", sharing their possessions. And at the centre of this little community of faith we see the apostles, those weak and guilty but forgiven men, continuing to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. There in those transformed lives is all the evidence we need for the resurrection, whatever our critics might want to say.
That's why (if you look at the next two verses) a Cypriot Levite called Joseph, but known to Christian history as St Barnabas, sold a field and denoted the proceeds to the church. And that's why we're sitting in this lovely little church dedicated to his name. His name means, Son of Encouragement. Let us be encouraged! Amen.
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