vision of faith. ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’: the messianic life of Jesus is to be replicated through Jesus’ people, as, with the breath of new creation in their nostrils, they go out with the message of forgiveness, and warning too. Thomas’ cameo appearance sums up the paradox of faith from the whole gospel: touching is possible, seeing is enough, but believing is best of all.
The Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 2.14a, 36–41
1 Peter 1.17–23
Luke 24.13–35
Today’s readings bubble over with the excitement of the new moment that has dawned in Israel’s story, in the world’s story, with the resurrection. It isn’t merely that God is offering a new kind of spiritual experience, or that there is now a new belief in life after death (which most Jews believed in anyway). It is the sense that something has happened, as a result of which everything is different.
But the thing which had happened was emphatically not what was expected. Theories about ‘cognitive dissonance’, that highfalutin pseudo-medical term used by some to say that the disciples were so overwhelmed with disappointment at Jesus’ crucifixion that they simply went on believing what they had believed anyway, simply won’t do. ‘We had hoped’, say the two on the road to Emmaus, ‘that he was the one who would redeem Israel.’ But (the implication runs) they crucified him, so obviously he wasn’t. Everybody knows that a crucified Messiah is a contradiction in terms. We are just another failed messianic movement.
They were like people on a hillside, watching eagerly for the sunrise. (This image works better in the tropics where there’s no twilight.) Disoriented, they are facing the wrong way. The expected moment comes and goes, and nothing happens. Then they become aware that, though the sky they are scanning remains dark, light seems to be shining anyway. With a strange excitement they turn around, to see the sun shining in full strength in the very place they least expected it.
It was the Scriptures, not least (we must assume) the Davidic promises, that warmed their hearts with the thought that they had been looking in the wrong direction, and nudged them to turn around and face the real dawn. The biblical story was all about God bringing redemption, new life, through death and out the other side. To expect the ransoming of Israel in the sense they had cherished was to look in the wrong direction. The ransoming (an Exodus word, of course) had indeed occurred, but it was the deep, ultimate act that freed human beings from ‘futility’ (1 Peter 1.18: a human life that, failing to reflect God, decays and self-destructs). The new creation brought to birth at Easter would now be born within human lives, creating love, trust and hope. The transforming power lay precisely in God’s word (1.23).
Peter’s challenge to the Pentecost crowd contains perhaps the earliest ‘theology of the cross’ in the New Testament. (You may need to include some extra verses to get the full thrust.) Jesus’ dying and rising has broken through into a new way of being Israel, a new way of being human; so, urges Peter, turn quickly from your headlong flight into ruin, share in the new-Exodus life of which baptism is the sign and seal, celebrate God’s one-off act of forgiveness, and pass it on to everyone else. Now there’s a message as urgently needed today as ever it was.
The Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 2.42–47
1 Peter 2.19–25
John 10.1–10
A student of mine spent a long vacation working with local churches in central Africa. Next term, the College Head asked him, in my presence, what he wanted to do with his degree. ‘Work in third world development,’ he replied. ‘Then why’, asked the Provost, an economist himself, ‘aren’t you reading Politics and Economics?’ The student didn’t even blink. ‘Because Theology is so much more relevant,’ he shot back.
Read Acts 2 and see why. Jesus had launched the new-covenant movement. His followers, like the Qumran community, believed that they, the renewed Israel, should live as a family. They belonged to each other, as brothers and sisters; and close families, in that culture at least, shared a purse. (This, by the way, is why it’s so misleading when non-sexist translations render ‘brothers’ as ‘friends’ and the like. Why not ‘family’?) If God had now acted to bring forgiveness at every level, how could they not forgive debts as they had been forgiven?
The so-called primitive communism of the early Church had little to do, then, with a belief that the world was coming to an end, and a great deal to do with the sense of fulfilment: the world of debt, the world of injustice, had come to an end on Calvary, and they were modelling the new world of forgiveness. They weren’t so concerned with the last days of the old world as with the first days of the new one. Politicians and economists can’t sort out third world debt, but the gospel, and its message of Jubilee, just might. If ‘teaching, fellowship, bread-breaking, prayers’, let alone ‘theology’ (remember Harold Wilson and ‘the theology of the Common Market’?) sounds boring to some, maybe it’s because we’ve forgotten that each of the four aspects of the early Church’s daily life stood the world’s values, not least its systemic injustices, on their head.
Abundant life, then: that’s what Jesus has on offer, not the thin, hang-on-like-grim-death approach that you find in some churches. The ‘shepherd’ parable in John 10, which really continues to v. 30, explores the intimate relation between shepherd and sheep, with the emphasis on the shepherd’s desire that the sheep be led in the right direction, fed and watered, and kept secure for ever. And the point throughout is that Jesus is contrasted with other would-be Messiahs: thieves and brigands, he calls them. There were plenty of those in Jesus’ world, leaders of marauding gangs on the one hand and ‘holy brigands’ (fundamentalist terrorists, we would call them) on the other. Jesus’ way of leadership, of founding the new movement, was totally different, and totally relevant to his day and ours. A different style, an upside-down ambition, a self-giving love that, as Peter saw, would then be imitated by his followers – the world waits to see what can happen when wandering sheep, brought home by the Shepherd’s love, then start to live by the same pattern.
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 7.55–60
1 Peter 2.2–10
John 14.1–14
I’m never quite sure what Jesus meant when he said ‘you will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father’. But I’m quite sure he did not mean ‘you will do lesser works than these’. An old cliché; but those who used to say ‘expect great things from God; attempt great things for God’ had John on their side far more than those who, by implication at least, simply want a place on the sidelines where a few little Christian activities can take place without causing a fuss. As the world continues to reveal its powerlessness in the face of evil, is it not time to take Jesus at his word?
The promise is flanked by others, equally remarkable. Many dwelling-places, furnished and ready. Knowing the Father – seeing the Father, even, something nobody expected to do and live – is found through looking at Jesus. And the simple and overwhelming promise about prayer: whatever you ask in my name, I will do it. Much standard
