A Homily for the First Sunday after Easter

The doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews;

Jesus came and stood in the midst [of them].

—John 20:19

            Christ is risen!

            This is the message of Easter.  And the message came first to the myrrh-bearing women and to the eleven disciples.  The angel said to Mary Magdalene at the door of the empty tomb, “You seek Jesus, the crucified; he is not here, he is risen as he foretold.”  And Mary ran to tell the disciples, of whom at least two, Peter and John, ran back to the tomb to see for themselves.  And those two told the others.  And then what did they do? 

            Scripture tells us that they locked themselves in their house, because they were afraid.  But walls and locked doors were no barrier to the risen Lord.  He came and stood in their midst.

            Jesus, risen from the grave was present in his body, a body still bearing the imprint of the nails and the wound made by the soldier’s lance.  (When Thomas, who was not present at this first appearing, later doubted the resurrection, Jesus invited him to touch the wounds, and he did so and believed.)  It was a real body that walked and talked and ate bread and grilled fish.

            But Jesus did not simply reappear in the body of his earthly existence.  Rather, his body was transformed and glorified.  We know that Jesus’s resurrected body was transformed because it was no longer bound by the physical limitations of our human bodies.  Jesus appeared in the midst of the disciples although they were in a locked room. 

In his Easter homily this year, the Bishop of Rome put it this way:

During his earthly life, Jesus, like all of us, was tied to the external conditions of bodily existence:  to a determined place and a determined time.  Bodiliness places limits on our existence.  We cannot be simultaneously in two different places. Our time is destined to come to an end. And between the “I” and the “thou” there is a wall of otherness.  To be sure, through love we can somehow enter the other’s existence. Nevertheless, the insurmountable barrier of being different remains in place. Yet Jesus, who is now totally transformed through the act of love, is free from such barriers and limits. He is able not only to pass through closed doors in the outside world, as the Gospels recount. He can pass through the interior door separating the “I” from the “thou,” the closed door between yesterday and today, between the past and the future.

Jesus, risen from the grave, can overcome all barriers. On that first Easter day, when he appeared to his disciple, Jesus broke the barrier of fear. It was fear that had the disciples hiding behind their locked door; and, in a sense, the locked door was only an outward manifestation of the barrier of fear that they had erected around themselves.

Between the evening of Maundy Thursday and the morning of Good Friday, they had been with Jesus in the Garden. The temple guard had suddenly appeared, armed and menacing, to arrest Jesus; and the disciples had run away and hidden, all but Peter and John. Peter and John followed the guards to the home of the high priest, but there, at dawn, when Peter was recognized as one of Jesus’s disciples and confronted, fear took hold of him and he three times denied knowing Jesus.

And so on Easter morning, the disciples were hiding out behind their locked door. When the women came and reported the empty tomb, Peter and John ventured out to see for themselves, but they soon returned to the locked room, locked because of fear. That is where Jesus found them. When Jesus suddenly appeared in the mists of them, he penetrated not only the walls of their room and the locked door, but also their interior walls, the walls of fear that enclosed their very lives and being.

That is the power of the risen Lord, the power to penetrate barriers of every sort, to enter even when the doors are locked. And there are so many walls, so many locked doors.

We have walls of fear in our own lives. We are probably not afraid of the Jewish Temple police or of angry mobs hunting for the followers of a Messiah. Others are not so fortunate as we are in that regard: remember that the Chaldean Christian archbishop of Mosul, Metropolitan Paulos, was kidnapped and killed as he left church shortly before Easter. That is not something we fear here in Orange County. But there are other things of which to be afraid: debilitating disease, sudden death, economic hardship, the uncertain future.

We, too, build walls of fear around ourselves, and lock our inner doors to shut out the unknown. But it is the power of the risen Lord to enter through those walls and doors and to appear and to be present with us individually and in the midst of us collectively.

It is not fear alone that makes us build walls and lock doors. We build walls and lock doors on account of hatred, resentment, shame, covetousness, prejudice, self-interest, disappointment, despair, and many other things. These are what Benedict referred to when he spoke of barriers between the I and the thou, between the self and the other person. These walls and these locked doors keep us in, but they cannot keep out the risen Lord. Because he is risen, mere barriers no longer keep him in or out, he has transcended them all.

And so he comes to us, despite the walls, despite the locked doors. And he comes to us in love.

When the risen Jesus appeared in the midst of the disciples he had every right and reason to be angry with them. Nine of them hand run away, rather than endure what he had to endure. And Peter, his best friend, the leader of the disciples, had sat right there in the courtyard of the high priest’s house and had said, “I do not know the man.” And yet, the risen Jesus did not speak in anger. He greeted them, as always, “Sholem aleichem. Peace be with you.”

And more than that, he made them Apostles. He ordained them and commissioned them as his representatives in the world: “As my Father has sent me, even so send I you.”

The Apostles were not superheroes. They were ordinary folk like you and me. They were not fearless, quite the contrary; they were men who had been overcome by fear. But this Jesus is the same Lord who makes ordinary water into a flood that washes away sin and ordinary olive oil into medicine of healing. This is he who makes ordinary bread and ordinary wine into his own body and blood. And so he made these eleven ordinary men into Apostles, and gave them the gift of the Holy Spirit. He sent them out to proclaim the good news to all the people of the world, and so they went, these ordinary countryfolk, and did as he commanded.

And because of their ministry we here, and two billion other human beings alive today, twenty centuries later, have heard the good news and believed, and live a new life in him. And this is possible because, Christ having risen from death, can pass through all the walls and locked doors and come to us, and give us life.

Whoever has the Son of God has life. We who are baptized have died with Christ and risen with him to his new life in God, a life without walls and without locked doors. We do not just have a promise of a new life after we die, we have that new life now; and if only we can see that it is so, we can live that new life.

Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed for us: therefore, let us keep the feast. Not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. In this morning’s collect, we have prayed to the Father that we may put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, and serve him in purity of living and in truth. So long as that old leaven remains, we will be building walls and locking doors; but when we have put away the old leaven, then we will also tear down those barriers, and live in the peace of the risen Lord Jesus.

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Church of Saint Mary Magdalene

Orange, California

30 March 2008

See a list of the deacon’s homilies.