Easter 2C
April 27, 2025
John 20:19-31
INTRODUCTION:
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia!
Most people know that Christmas is not just one day, but 12 days, but did you know that Easter is not one day, but seven weeks? Yay, Christ is risen indeed!
During this 7-week Easter season, the lectionary gives us readings from Acts rather than an Old Testament reading. This is so that we can see and hear how the Early Church dealt with the news of the resurrection, how the news shaped their faith and their church, and so also how it shapes ours.
For the second reading we will be hearing this season from Revelation – a book that has a reputation of being sort of bizarre and troubling in its depiction of the end of the world. But really, it is a deeply symbolic book that paints a picture of hope in the midst of despair, famine, conflict, and war. The Book of Revelation shows us how God is present, not absent, how Christ is the self-giving Lamb, and how people are called repeatedly into a circle of praise and worship. All hopeful images, and all appropriate themes for the Easter season!
And finally, during these six remaining Sundays of Easter, we will hear from John’s Gospel. This 2nd Sunday of Easter, we always hear the story of Jesus appearing to his fearful disciples in the locked upper room on the evening of Easter. Since we read Luke’s resurrection story last week, not John’s let me refresh you on John’s version, which happened right before this. In John’s version of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene goes alone to the tomb, and finds Jesus is missing. She runs to tell the disciples, and Peter and the so-called “other disciple” run to check it out, and then leave the scene, puzzled. Mary stays, crying in the garden, and is approached by Jesus, whom she thinks is the gardener, until he calls her by name. Then she recognizes him, and runs to tell the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” And that’s where today’s reading picks up, in the evening of that same day. You can imagine some of the emotions in that room!
As you listen, listen as one who is still excited, mystified, and perhaps a little scared about this earth-shattering news of the resurrection. For this news is still all of these things, 2000 years later! Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
I mentioned several weeks ago that I had purchased a new coffee table. Well now we have added to the living room a new couch and matching chair. Woo! This was stressful, as it was both expensive, and required a complete rearrangement of our living room – and as soon as we have forked over the $3000-some dollars for couch and chair, I started having doubts and regrets. What if it doesn’t work in the space after all? What if it’s uncomfortable for cuddling with my kids? What if we hate the way it changes the
New couch and chair, new arrangement
(old coffee table!) - more pieces still in the works!
flow of how we move around our living space? We’ll have to change our patterns and habits. Agh! Everything will change!
I’ve always been this way. I am a visionary, a dreamer, a wannabe risk-taker… but as soon as it looks like something might actually become of my dreams, I come up with all the reasons it probably won’t really work. This is often human nature: we are resistant to change, even as we may long for it – because we don’t want to change our daily routine, we are afraid of the unknown, we prefer to understand how things will work, and we definitely do not want to regret anything.
I imagine the disciples felt some of these things at their Easter evening gathering in the upper room. It’s not that they didn’t believe Mary, about Jesus having risen from the dead (though that may have been part of it). But more, they didn’t know what this would mean for their lives going forward. They were without their beloved teacher, the one they had left everything to follow. He had upset the authorities so much that he had been killed. And now they likely feared that, because they were his disciples, their lives were also in danger. They didn’t know what to do. Furthermore, I’m sure they felt some regret, wishing they had been bold enough to do something to prevent Jesus’ death – I imagine their conversations between Friday and Sunday were full of “if onlys” and “what ifs.” Well now, according to Mary Magdalene, they have gotten what they wanted – Jesus was back, he was alive! – but instead of joy they are filled with fear, such fear, that they have locked themselves away in the upper room. Fear, worry, regret – all feelings we are all too familiar with.
When Jesus then appears to them in that place of fear and regret, everything changes! But even as they rejoiced that Jesus was, indeed, alive, I suspect there was still some fear there. After all, one week later, they are still in that locked upper room! But now, of course, the cause of their fear has changed. Before Jesus appeared to them, their primary fear was death: Jesus had been killed, and as his disciples, they feared that something similar might happen to them. But then Jesus comes to them, and tells them, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” And now? Now their fear is not only of death, but of this new life that they are being sent into by the Resurrected Christ.
We talk a lot about new life during this Eastertide: all the ways that God takes the old, dead things in our lives and turns them into new opportunities, new beginnings, new perspectives. It seems like pretty good news, right? New things often are. New clothes, new house, new couch, new vocation – all have positive connotations.
But not all new things are good. In fact, new things can often be frustrating or even scary, because they are unfamiliar and full of the unknown. I mean, we really needed a new couch, but even though the prospect of a new couch excited me, I was also filled with dread that we would regret it, that it was costly, that things to which we’d grown accustomed would have to change, that the new wouldn’t live up the comfortable (if also stained and saggy) ways of the old.
If I can be that cautious and resistant about living room furniture, just imagine how the disciples felt, hearing their once-dead-now-living teacher tell them, “Hey guys. Peace. I’m alive. And, I’m here to tell you, that I’m sending you out to carry on my mission in the world – you know, the mission that got me hung on a cross this weekend. Cool, right? Ok, peace out!” Uh, yeah, I imagine if I were among the disciples, I would have stayed locked safely in that upper room a little longer, too. I would be doubting my own abilities, not to mention my own courage, to carry out this mission Jesus was giving us, doubting whether Jesus really meant to put us in such danger, doubting whether I really wanted to keep doing this, or just get back to my safe, familiar life from before, which might not have been perfect, but was at least known.
But that’s the catch about Easter, you see – after the resurrection, there is no going back to your safe, familiar life. With the resurrection, everything changes – and not just the furniture! Life can no longer be the same. Death and fear are defeated, and life becomes new.
Okay, so what does that new life look like? Jesus says to the disciples gathered there, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” In other words, that new life looks like living the way Jesus commanded and demonstrated throughout his ministry: like, humbly washing the feet of one another – even those who would betray, deny, or abandon you. Like, reaching out to and standing up for those on the margins, like listening to women, and reaching out to the outsider, and feeding the hungry, and freeing the prisoner, and liberating the oppressed. New life looks like forgiveness, and like self-sacrifice. It looks like striving to be in relationship with one another even when it is difficult, and bringing light into the darkness, and proclaiming life into the places where stinky death tries to win.
It’s a tall order, even an impossible one. Or it would be, if it not for the other gifts Jesus offers to the disciples locked in the upper room. First of all, Jesus offers peace. Three times in this passage we hear this from Jesus: “peace be with you.” What comforting words for those of us who find the prospect of new life to be terrifying – especially a self-sacrificing, world-order-turning, risky, humble life of service. Perhaps as the disciples consider what this new life will mean, they are thinking, like I did about my new couch, “Wait, are we sure about this? What if it doesn’t work? What it is too big a task for us? What if it’s uncomfortable? What if we hate the way it changes the flow of how we live our lives? We’re going to have to change our patterns and habits. Do we really want to do this?” And to this fear of change and regret, Jesus offers, three times, “Peace be with you.”
And secondly, Jesus offers them the gift of the Holy Spirit. “He breathed on them,” John tells us, “and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” With this gift, Jesus offers to his disciples the very same gift that God offered humanity when he breathed into Adam’s nostrils and made life come about. God’s breath has this kind of power: the power to bring to life, to comfort, to support, to sustain, to encourage, to empower. Christ breathes on his disciples – and on us – and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And suddenly we have the power to fulfill his mission, to do his work in the world, despite what fears and hesitations we may have. We have what we need.
Peace be with you, siblings in Christ. As God the Father sent Christ into our world and our lives to show us what love and service look like, to show us that life will always overcome death, so Christ now sends us to continue bringing this message to the world, offering us peace in the midst of our fear, doubt and regret, sustaining us with his breath, and empowering us, always, with the Holy Spirit.
Let us pray… Risen Christ, breathe your empowering breath on us as we continue to walk into resurrected life. Come to us in our fears and our doubts and offer us your peace, and show us how to live out your gospel in all that we do. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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