Easter 2

Opening Verse of Scripture Psalm 118:1

Give Thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever. 

Collect Prayer for the Day—Before we read we pray

Almighty Father, you have given your only Son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification: grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness that we may always serve you in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. CW

Risen Christ, for whom no door is locked, no entrance barred: open the doors of our hearts, that we may seek the good of others and walk the joyful road of sacrifice and peace, to the praise of God the Father. CW

First Bible Reading Psalm 150

Alleluia.  O praise God in his holiness; praise him in the firmament of his power.

Praise him for his mighty acts; praise him according to his excellent greatness.

Praise him with the blast of the trumpet; praise him upon the harp and lyre.

Praise him with timbrel and dances; praise him upon the strings and pipe.

Praise him with ringing cymbals;  praise him upon the clashing cymbals.

Let everything that has breath  praise the Lord.    Alleluia.

Second Bble Reading Acts 5:27-32

When the temple police had brought the apostles, they made them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, ‘We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.’ But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Saviour that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.’ NRSV

Gospel Reading John 20:19-31

When it was evening on 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. Jesus 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 to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘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.’

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. NRSV

Post Communion Prayer

Lord God our Father, through our Saviour Jesus Christ you have assured your children of eternal life and in baptism have made us one with him: deliver us from the death of sin and raise us to new life in your love, in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. CW

Commentary

Whatever way the Jewish and Roman leaders considered the resurrection, it was a threat to their authority and as such it’s obvious they would try to suppress or marginalise its communication and its reality.  To them it would appear as a dangerous challenge to their precarious position, and somewhat fragile pragmatic alliance, and some kind of misconceived and contrived human scheme designed to undermine their grip and rule on the region.  And to those who did not understand the cosmic and spiritual dimension of what had just happened, it would be seen as just another attempt by the rebellious people to destabilise Jerusalem and the surrounding areas to their own advantage.  But the resurrection was not some manufactured human idea or master plan, some scheme designed at usurping power.  It was a divine intervention of God in our world, His gift to a people who were still to understand the implications of the three days of the cross and resurrection, even those who would profess themselves as believers.  The disciples’ gathering together in a locked room is testimony to this confusion and apparent lack of understanding, seemingly even now after Jesus’ first appearance to them, in the absence of Thomas. 

It’s easy to give Thomas a bad press, but we need to remember that missing Jesus’ first appearance, having lived around Him for so long, and been so faithful to Him, it must have been a deeply sad and confusing time for Thomas.  Apart from anything else, on a personal level he must have profoundly regretted missing out on an experience which appeared to be so life changing for the other disciples.  ‘Why me’, ‘Why is it always me’, ‘Why do I always miss out’, he must have thought.  Yet Thomas had stuck with the disciples even thought that must have been so difficult for him, especially when the others started talking about the time that Jesus had explicitly shown them His hands and side, as they clearly would.  In fact, Thomas was looking for no more than the others had experienced when he utters the words that everybody remembers him for, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it."   Words that would forever define him. 

A week later, resurrection day again, Jesus appears again to the disciples, this time with Thomas present.  And it’s as if Jesus has heard every word that’s been spoken during the last week, He invites Thomas to take a look, to reach out and put his fingers in the holes in His hands and side, as Thomas has insisted he would need to do if he was to believe.  We can imagine the atmosphere; a deathly silence would have broken out and you could have heard a pin drop…. And into that silence Thomas speaks the words that are often overlooked in the ‘Doubting Thomas’ stories; ‘My Lord and my God’.  In doing so, he closes a loop which has been open since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden.  Thomas identifies and verbalises the true identity of Christ, His true deity.  He is God.  The word that was God, which John has introduced in the beginning of his gospel, is recognised for who He really is.  No longer is Jesus titled the Son of God, as He is elsewhere in the gospels, He is titled My Lord and My God.  Titles that have not been used together in this context since Adam and Ever were walking in the Garden of Eden and having a conversation with the Lord God.  Jehovah Elohim, the Self Existent One and the All Powerful One.  It’s been expressed (by Tom Wright) that Thomas makes one small verbal step and a giant leap for faith and theology.  His cry returns us to that intimacy with God humans have not had since Eden.  It's as if the whole of creation can now be restored to the state God intended.

In the upper room the disciples too come to realise the significance of what is happening, they are in the presence of God.  The distance between God and humans has literally disappeared.  Is this the reason for Thomas ‘missing out’ the previous week?  Has He been chosen for the specific task of helping the disciples (and the world) experience the reality of who Jesus is?  For in inviting Thomas to reach out and touch Him, Jesus is inviting Thomas to touch God.   It’s as deep, as simple, and as profound as that.  And it was to be life changing.

The initial bewilderment and lack of understanding finally falls away, and having discovered the true identity of Christ, the disciples took on new identities themselves.  They were transformed from a fearful and confused bunch of individuals hidden behind locked doors, to an empowered, bold outspoken force for God in spreading the news of the resurrection and what it meant to the world.  We read about the magnitude of this transformation in the words from Acts in our reading today.  “The high priest questioned them, saying, ‘We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.’ But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority…’”

As we recognise and acknowledge the true identity of Christ, as the God who broke though into our earth and our earthly lives, so too our true identity begins to shine through.  We are Sons and Daughters of God, transformed into a new creation by the Lord of all creation.  Like Thomas, will always continue to have doubts and uncertainties.  That’s the very nature of a life of faith.  We sometimes might feel we have missed out on the deep and profound spiritual experiences that others sometimes describe, or we desire in our own lives.  But that’s perhaps because, like Thomas, Jesus has something specific for us to do.  Something that will be used to reveal God in our world, to enable others to touch Him and experience Him with that same reality as the disciples as God breaks through.  But like Thomas too, we need to hold fast, not to our doubts, but to the profound truth that Thomas uttered.  Jesus, ‘My Lord and My God’ and trust to Him to work in our lives that same transforming and sustaining renewal as we live in that same reality of the resurrection.  As we reach out to God, so He reaches out to us and confirms in us our new and true identity, as His children, children of the living God.

Sam Cappleman

Meditation

Thomas appears three times in John’s gospel and each time he appears to be a realist with a pragmatic and practical outlook on life.  The first time he appears is when Jesus is setting out to Bethany and putting His life in danger and Thomas says, ‘Let us go and die with him’.  Next, at the Last Supper when Jesus invites the disciples to follow Him Thomas replies, ‘We don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way’.  So it’s perhaps not surprising that Thomas, grounded in reality and pragmatism says that unless he sees the hands and side of Jesus and the wounds that the nails had made that he will not (cannot) believe.  He wants to touch the risen Christ to be sure.  For Thomas, only the wounds have the power to reveal the love of God and change the apparent doubt into faith.  Jesus then appears in the locked room once more and invites Thomas to reach out.  At this stage it’s not clear whether Thomas did reach out and touch the wounds, and everything changed for him, or whether the wounds reached out and touched Thomas and everything changed.  We can never physically touch the wounds of Christ, but like Thomas, we can let the wounds touch us on our daily Easter journey of the resurrected Christ and allow ourselves to be continually changed to be more like Christ.

Sam Cappleman

Additional Material

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams said that the whole weight human failure cannot extinguish the creative love of God. In an Easter sermon he said that conflict and failure are part of the human condition, but that Jesus' death and Resurrection turns that on its head: 

"We share one human story in which we are all caught up in one sad tangle of selfishness and fear and so on. But God has entered that human story; he has lived a life of divine and unconditional life in a human life of flesh and blood." 

He recalled a visit to the Solomon Islands in 2004 when one of the leaders caught up in the islands' recent civil war took public responsibility for failure:

"He said 'I want you to bless us; I need to say in public that we were responsible as well as the people on the islands…' Here was a politician representing a community that had suffered greatly and inflicted great suffering as well saying 'We were all wrong. We needed healing and forgiveness…' And it was as if for the first time you could see the bare bones of what reconciliation means." 

The lesson, he says, can be learnt in other conflicts when people learn to listen to stories other than their own: 

"…going forward requires us all to learn a measure of openness to discovering things about ourselves we did not know, seeing ourselves through the eyes of another. What they see may be fair or unfair, but it is a reality that has been driving someone's reactions and decisions. We'd better listen, hateful and humiliating though it may be for some of us." 

In Northern Ireland, he said, progress towards reconciliation had made it possible for people to start to hear each other's histories; this meant that they needn't be bound by the past: 

"Everyone in this history made decisions, some shockingly evil, some tragic, some foolish [but] those decisions and the sufferings that came from them don't have the power to tell you what decisions you have to make today." 

The Easter story, he says, provides comfort and encouragement: 

"If we can accept the unwelcome picture of us and our world that Good Friday offers, we are in the strangest way, set free to hear what Easter says. Give up the struggle to be innocent and the hope that God will proclaim that you were right and everyone else wrong. Simply ask for whatever healing it is that you need, whatever grace and hope you need to be free, then step towards your neighbour; Easter reveals a God who is ready to give you that grace and to walk with you." 

"When in our world we are faced with the terrible deadlocks of mutual hatred and suspicion, with rival stories of suffering and atrocity, we have to pray for this resurrection message to be heard." 

Just as children in families are all too often pigeon-holed as “the clever one”, “the pretty one”, the “stubborn one,” so Christians have tended to categorise the historical characters of the Bible. And once those images are fixed, it is hard to dislodge them. Thomas the Twin has been dismissed as a doubter, one who calls into question the Resurrection and who refuses to accept it as a fact from hearing the accounts told by his fellow disciples. He insists that he will only believe such an incredible tale when he has proof. The little we know about Thomas suggests that he was deeply committed to Jesus’ cause. It is he who rallies the disciples when Jesus proposes to lead them to Lazarus’ tomb, straight into the hands of the Lord’s enemies. Thomas says “Let us all go, that we may die with Him!”. Clearly Thomas is a man of courage as well as commitment. Thomas shows himself to be honest in admitting to finding some of Jesus’ saying difficult to understand. There is no evidence that Jesus resented Thomas asking questions and wanting matters made clear. Jesus’ followers were a mixed bunch, with very different personalities. Jesus chose them, as He chooses us, for complementary gifts and talents, quirks and failings. Jesus did not want those that love Him to suspend their God-given intelligence. The Reverend Dr Joan Crossley 

Meditation

The experience of Resurrection results not simply in a good feeling but in the transformation or renewal of our life and action. Resurrection is not just about some future day after we die. It is also about the world today--the world of objects, people, creation, and beauty; the world that experiences both sin and evil as well as justice and peace; the world with all its struggles and its possibilities. If we believe in Resurrection then we should expect to see some signs of it. Community is formed. Fear is dispelled. Reconciliation becomes real. The work of justice and peace takes place. Society is transformed. There is a new heaven and a new earth. 

Today's scriptures give us some of these signs:

John receives a call to write down the message and share it. 

A growing community gathers in Solomon's portico. 

Signs and wonders occur in the early church. 

Thomas and later a great number of people come to faith. 

Many are healed. 

"Bad spirits" are driven out. 

The message is "Do not be afraid," and "Peace be with you."

Spirit is given for the forgiveness of sin.

What signs and wonders do we see today? 

What signs of faith? 

What signs of faith expressed in deeds? 

What signs of the forgiveness of sin? 

What signs of the forgiveness of social sin? 

What signs of reconciliation between peoples and nations? 

What signs of work for justice and peace? 

Hymns

1. Jesus lives, Tune St Albinus
2. Search me O God, Maori Tune
3. Now the green blade riseth, Tune Noel Nouvelet
4. Jesus stand among us,Tune Caswall
5. Alleluia, Alleluia, Tune Ode to Joy (See words below)

Prayers for Sunday and the week ahead

Through every minute of this day, be with me, Lord!

Through every day of all this week, be with me, Lord! 

Through every week of all this year, be with me, Lord! 

So shall the days and weeks and years 

be threaded on a golden cord. 

And all draw on with sweet accord into thy fullness, Lord, that so, when time is past, 

By grace I may, at last, Be with thee, Lord. 

John Oxenham 

Risen Christ, whose absence leaves us paralysed, but whose presence is overwhelming: breathe on us abundant life; that where we cannot see, we may have courage to believe that we may be raised with you. Amen (Janet Morley)

Dear Lord, you know that we are fearful – make us brave! You know that we are weak – give us your strength! You know that we are unfaithful – make us true. Amen

Faithful God, strength of all those who believe and the hope of those who doubt; may we, who have not seen, have faith and receive the fullness of Christ’s blessing; who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

Increase your grace, in us, O Lord, that we may fear your Name beyond which nothing is more holy; that we may love you, beyond whom nothing is more loveable; that we may glorify you beyond whom nothing is more worthy of praise, and that we may long for you beyond whom nothing is more desirable; and grant that thus fearing, loving, glorifying and longing we may see you, face to face; through Christ our Lord. Amen

Desiderius Erasmus, 1466-1536

God of the prophets, you fulfilled your promise that Christ would suffer and rise to glory. Open our minds to understand the scriptures that we may be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity, of the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen