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When Odysseus returns home after his travels, he is disguised as an old man. Nobody at home recognizes him, not even his own wife. But that evening his elderly nurse, Eurycleia, bathes him. At first she thinks she is merely bathing an old stranger who is visiting for the night. But while bathing him, Eurycleia sees a scar on the man's leg, a scar she remembers from Odysseus' infancy. And she recognizes the king when she sees his scar. In today's Gospel reading, in the evening of the Day of Resurrection, the disciples are locked in a room in fear. And Jesus, who has just come from his encounter with the Cross and the tomb, appears and stands among them. Then he speaks to them. "Peace be with you," he says. But it is only when he shows them his scars that they recognize him. He shows them his hands and his side, the scars of his crucifixion, and then, says John, "on seeing the Lord the disciples were overjoyed." Thomas, you'll remember, was not with the other disciples that night, and when the others tell Thomas that they have seen the risen Jesus, Thomas says, "Unless I see his scars, unless I see the mark of the nails on his hands, unless I put my finger into the place where the nails were and place my hand into his side, I will not believe it. " "I will never believe it," Thomas insists, "unless I see his wounds." And so a week later, when the disciples are again gathered together in the room, still locked up in fear, Thomas is with them this time, and Jesus appears a second time. Again he gives them a word of peace, and he turns to Thomas and says, "Here are my scars, Thomas. Put your finger here. Look at my hands and my side." And Thomas responds with his unmistakable confession, "My Lord and my God!" Now there were some in the early Church who insisted that Jesus bore no scars. They were the docetists. The word "docetist" comes from a Greek word which means "to seem" or "to appear." And the docetists argued that since Jesus was the divine Son of God, he could not have had scars, because those who are divine cannot suffer and die. Gods do not do such things. So Jesus must only have appeared to suffer and die. Jesus, they argued, only appeared to be a human being. But the Church insisted, as we will insist this morning in the Creed, that Jesus was fully God and fully human. The risen Christ bore real human scars, because Jesus was a real human being who was nailed to the Cross and stabbed in the side. And his being raised from the dead did not remove his scars. The risen Christ of Easter bears the real scars of a real Roman cross. Easter, God's stunning victory over death and defeat, does not erase the scars and wounds of life. It redeems them. This important, because a Messiah who has not actually experienced the pain and grief of the world, a Messiah who has not suffered with the world he came to save, can be no savior at all. He would be nothing but a make-believe savior, a fraud. Only one who has embraced the pain and scars of human life and has experienced the sorrow of the world, only one who comes to live where we live and die as we die, can redeem the world he comes to save. It's hard to be helped by someone who hasn't been here, who hasn't stood in our shoes or walked where we walk. A docetists god with no scars won't do; only a wounded God can save. John Claypool reminds us that the greatest miracle of Easter is not that God restored his Son to physical life after his death. That was a piece of cake for the God who can create the universe to begin with. Whoever can create life out of nothing can recreate life out of dry bones. The greater miracle of Easter was that on the Day of Resurrection, after what we did to his Son on Good Friday, God still wanted to save us. The greater miracle is that after what we did to his Son on Good Friday, God still wanted to send the Son he raised from the dead back to those who had killed him. The greater miracle is that after Friday, God still loved those who had denied and betrayed and abandoned his Son so much that he sent his Son back on Sunday to continue telling them the good news of God - that God is a God of such great love and mercy that he never abandons us, never gives up on us, no matter that we have given up on him, and that despite that Ugly Friday, and despite all our ugly Fridays, God continues to have hope for us. And that leads to the third miracle of Easter Day. It happened there in that room on the evening of the Day of Resurrection when the disciples were locked up in fear for their lives, when the disciples recognized the Lord by his scars, and they, too, were raised to new life. For you see, Jesus wasn't the only one who died on Good Friday. The disciples, in their own way, died there as well. Theirs was a different kind of death, of course, perhaps even a deeper death than the bodily death of Jesus. Theirs was the death of faith and hope, a death that refuses to be buried because it continues to move and have its being and to work its poison within us even as our physical bodies continue to breathe. And we can carry this death - this inward, spiritual death - wherever we go, because it can cling to us like a leech, and we are shadowed by it and haunted by it at every turn, which may be the worst death of all. As the disciples were locked up in fear that night, crushed not only by the utter failure and humiliating defeat of Jesus, but crushed also by the humiliation of their own cowardly spinelessness, they were struggling with this inward, spiritual, blood-sucking death. The Cross had wasted them all, just as it had wasted Jesus, and the hopelessness that accompanied them had shut them in their own tomb, in fear, behind locked doors. But death and despair and fear were not the end of the story. "By his stripes you have been healed," is how Peter would later tell the story. For the unfailing mercy and love of God in Christ crucified, which the disciples recognized in the scars of their risen Lord, has power to penetrate all "locked doors" - all prisons, all fears, all deaths, whether of the body or of the soul. Seeing that Jesus had not abandoned them, seeing that even at the height of his own suffering and pain Jesus had stayed the course and had suffered and even died for them, seeing that even at the gates of hell itself the mercy and love of God had not abandoned Jesus and seeing that this Jesus was now not abandoning them, but still loved them, seeing all this, the disciples, too, were raised from death to life. The awareness of the dogged and determined mercy and love of God that penetrated their locked doors on the evening of the Day of Resurrection literally gave the disciples new again, new life, life raised from the ashes of fear, turning the disciples' faithlessness into faithfulness, their cowardice into courage, their despair into hope, so that the same Peter who on Ugly Friday had denied Jesus now had the courage to proclaim him to the world: "By his stripes we are healed." It falls far short of the glory of resurrection life to think of resurrection merely as God's power to resuscitate a physical body. It falls short of the glory of resurrection life to think that God took the physical body of Jesus that had stopped breathing and simply gave it the ability to breathe again, as if God is merely a kind of celestial respirator or ventilator. We can do that, for a period of time, in hospitals. If Peter and all the other disciples had physically died on Friday or Saturday or Sunday, but had done so as beaten and broken men still locked up in fear, what would it mean if God were to have given their bodies the ability to breathe again, but only as beaten and broken men who were still locked up in fear? The miracle of the resurrection that occurred on Easter morning is matched by that of Easter evening and of the Second Sunday of Easter, when God's faithful mercy and love turned faithless men into men of integrity, when the scars of Jesus provided hope for those who despaired and turned cowards into captains of courage. There are Christians who think that Easter does away with the scars of life, that because Jesus was raised from the dead on Easter Day the pain and scars of life now only seem to be real and the Cross is to be forgotten. Not so. The risen Christ bore nail prints in his hands and wounds in his side. Christian faith does not deny the pain of life. It does not deny the reality of our wounds. Our scars, like the scars of Jesus, remain evidence of the reality of the painful woundedness of life. Christian faith is realistic about life; it is realistic about pain and sorrow and suffering. It is realistic about death. Christian faith does not deny death, either physical or spiritual. What it does, with and through the power of God, is redeem it. What faith does is provide the hope and courage to go on in life in the name of Christ with the assurance that the same God who did not abandon Jesus in his pain and suffering and death will not abandon us in ours. What faith does is provide the assurance that the same God who did not abandon Jesus in his real human life and death will not abandon us in ours. Jesus' scars are the sacrament of that assurance. I am reminded of the story of a French priest of the century just past. He said that during the First World War there were three young men walking through the countryside of France one day. They were older adolescents who were feeling their oats, full of themselves, proud of their quick wit and their intellectual acumen, and proud of the freedom and independence they felt with their fashionable, newly-found atheism. Later that afternoon they were joking with each other when they passed a small country church. One of the boys issued a dare to the others. He dared one of them to go in and find the priest and give him a little ribbing, to go and tell him that he was an atheist, to give him something to think about. One of the young men accepted the dare. He found the priest and told him that he was an atheist, that God was nonsense, and that the Church was doing great harm to people by spreading myths about a man who had been crucified, but who had lived to tell about it. The old priest listened patiently. Then, when the young man was finished, he said to him, "Well, young man, you've been brave enough to accept a dare from your friends. Are you brave enough to accept a dare from an old priest?" How could the bold young man refuse! So the priest said to him, "I dare you to go into the church and kneel in front of the crucifix where Jesus is hanging with nails in his hands and say, "Jesus died for me, and I don't give a damn." The young man did so, and then he came back and reported to the priest. The priest asked if he would do it a second time. And he did. He went and knelt before the crucifix and said, "Jesus died for me, and I don't give a damn." And again he came back and reported to the priest. The priest dared him to go back a third time. And the young man did. But when he returned the third time, he said to the priest, "Father, I want to make my confession." And then the priest who was telling the story said to his congregation, "I know this story is true, you see, because I was that young man." Jesus' scars are the sacrament of his love, the sacrament of the power of God to raise even the breathing from the dead. This third miracle of Easter Day is a miracle that continues to have power to penetrate all locked doors, all prisons, all fears, all deaths, whether of the body or the soul. Even the locked doors of fear and indifference, even the locked doors of intellectual certitude or arrogance. We all have our scars. Some of them are visible; some are invisible. We all have our locked doors, our fears, our deaths. And the One who has called you here today invites you, along with Thomas, to touch his scars, the scars he carries for you, that seeing them "you might believe that Jesus is Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this faith you might have life in his name." In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |