Sunday, April 15, 2018

Jesus perfects our love – Luke 24:35-48; 1 John 2:1-5a

3rd Sunday of Easter, Year B; Holy Infant parish.


Jesus, after his resurrection, appears in the midst of his disciples, and they’re terrified. So, Jesus wishes them peace. Not peace in the sense of having no conflict or struggle in their lives. In fact, he’ll soon send them out to witness to him knowing that that will mean martyrdom for most of them. No, Jesus wishes them the kind of peace in their hearts that will allow them to do that. The kind of peace in their hearts that will let them not be terrified to see him.


Now, Luke tells us that they thought they were seeing a ghost. Did they still dismiss the testimony of the women at the tomb and now the two disciple who had seen Jesus on the way to Emmaus? Or did they kind of believe in their heads, but not in a heartily deep-seated enough way that could actually be ready to see him again? We don’t know. But, note, that Luke doesn’t tell us they were terrified because they thought he was a ghost. Our translation makes those two things seem quite independent: they were startled and terrified and they thought they were seeing a ghost. The Greek actually also allows for the opposite direction: because they were terrified, they thought this was a ghost. Their terror at seeing Jesus raised from the dead didn’t let them imagine that he’d be anything but a ghost.

So, where might that terror have come from? I can quite imagine Peter, who denied Jesus three times, being terrified to see him again. I can imagine any of the disciples who fled, or even the women who stayed at a distance, not quite daring to get close to him during the crucifixion, being terrified to see him again.

A more prosaic example might help. When I was sixteen, in England, I had a big project to do for my electronics class. We had to design, build and test an electronic product, which would be assessed by national examiners and would count for 80% of our grade in that GCSE subject area. Our teacher had to go on medical leave shortly after we started work on our projects, and the replacement wasn’t an electronics specialist and couldn’t help us much beyond ensuring safety in the lab. My project didn’t end up being very good, and I kind of made my peace with that. I was doing eight other GCSE subjects, which were all assessed separately, and I was OK with one not going so well. When the exam board found out what had happened, the day before the deadline, they gave us a one month extension. And I was really frustrated when I found that out. I realized I hadn’t done a great job, had made my peace with that, and then found out I was getting another chance and would have to put a lot more work in now. I was kind of just ready to be done and write that off, and suddenly I had to try again.


Peter suddenly has to try again at loving Jesus, something he quite signally failed at on Good Friday. And maybe he’d started making his peace with that. And while it probably was OK for me to make my peace with a lousy electronics project, it’s not OK to make our peace with failure to love. Making our peace with that means becoming hardened, less human, less desirous of heaven, which is an eternity of loving creation, self, other and God. And Jesus isn’t OK with leaving us there. He’s so not OK with it that not even death will keep him from doing something about that.

So, he comes and prays peace for them. John’s gospel narrates the forgiveness scene between Peter and Jesus. Luke doesn’t. He just shows them having dinner together. The reading we heard from 1 John, spoke of Jesus working to perfect us in love. Luke shows us how. Coming, praying peace for us, and dining. Here in this place, Christ comes. And when he’s enthroned on the altar, we turn to one another, and pray “peace” to one another. It’s not really a greeting, it’s not a time for conversation, it’s a continuation of our prayer, to pray for our neighbor: “Peace be with you.” And then Christ invites us to dine.

E., today is welcomed into this community, that prays peace for one another, because Christ is already praying for us. And while it’s a few years before her first communion, already she can be fed by his presence and fed by his word. Christ’s action to perfect her in love in a real way starts tonight, as she is enthused with the theological virtue of love, claimed by the love from which and for which she was created and set on that generally slow stuttering journey to the perfect love of heaven.

No comments:

Post a Comment