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.
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