3rd Sunday of Easter, Year B. Breen-Philips Hall.
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 disciples 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. And
that’s a possible translation of the Greek text, but the Greek could also mean
that 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.
When I was praying with these readings, this was
the memory that came back to me. 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 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 these national exams in eight
other 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 with our teacher’s
medical problems, the day before the deadline, they gave us a one-month
extension. And I was really frustrated when I found that out. I knew I hadn’t
done a great job, I’d 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. And that
was frustrating.
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 a 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 offering himself in order to perfect us in love. Luke shows us what that looks like, after the Cross, how Jesus continues to act to extend to us the benefits of his Passion. He comes, prays peace for us, and dines. Friends, 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 a continuation of our prayer, to pray for our neighbor: “Peace be with you.” And then Christ invites us to dine, a true feast now, and a preparation for that eternal banquet of love that Christ is working to bring us to.
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