The First Sunday After Easter '23
Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter
by the Rev’d John Crews
The Epistle, 1 St. John v. 4. The Gospel, St. John xx. 19.
+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost
With the disciplines of Lent behind us, we are now tasked with not only rejoicing in celebration of Christ’s resurrection but in manifesting the newness of life we have received in Him. In many ways the task before is more difficult than the one we have just endured. In Lent, our disciplines give shape to how we are to encounter God, our fasts structuring our relationship with God. Now, we are to celebrate and feast, but in a way very different from the meanings of those words to the culture around us. When the world celebrates, it is with a disregard for tomorrow. Don’t just eat, but gorge, drink until you do something memorable. Celebrations in the world are performative, one has to be seen having a good time, we have to post photos of our meals on Instagram, capture every moment on our phone to upload the proof of how well we celebrated.
But that is not the celebration we are now called to participate in. To be sure, we will enjoy food we have denied ourselves since February, we will partake of the wine that maketh glad the heart of man, but because for us the events of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection are both lived realities of our life in Christ. Both are truly present and united within us, in our remembrance of His Passion which our Lenten Disciplines prepare us for, and the Resurrection which is still working within us. Just as in our celebration of the Resurrection, Christ’s Passion and death upon the cross is the bright sadness that leavens the sweet cake of our celebration.
Through these remembrances that we observe which the reality of participation of them through our life in Christ, the thing that binds them together is our experience of peace through them and because of them.
“Peace be unto you,” Jesus says three times in today’s Gospel Lesson. But what is this peace that Jesus speaks of? Often times we have a very thin concept of peace. Typically, it means the mere absence of war and bloodshed. But the biblical understanding of peace is far more all-encompassing. In the Gospel’s original Greek, the word that we translate as peace is, εἰρήνη, from the root ‘to join’, meaning that peace means harmony between people, such that they may enjoy a state of tranquil prosperity. But even this does not get to the heart of the biblical concept of peace, for the Greek word is a pale shadow of the ‘peace that passeth all understanding’ found in the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom means harmony and tranquility, to be sure, but fundamentally those are outward results of the inner reality of wholeness or completeness found in relationship with God.
The peace that Jesus is talking about, therefore, is the fruit of the proper relationship with God. A relationship that mankind lost through its disobedience and that each of us individually squander in our sinfulness. But Jesus not only repaired man’s relationship with God, which would restore us to the state that Adam and Eve first enjoyed in the Garden of Eden, but goes even further, not just one of repair but one of adoption, making us heirs with Jesus, God the Son, in whom we live in and through.
In Christ we are made whole, our broken selves not just repaired but super naturalized. We believe in Christ in Faith, and we are reborn through baptism, our sins washed clean. But not only are we washed in water but water and blood, as our epistle tells us this morning. We are baptized into Jesus’s life, yes, but His resurrected life, and to be resurrected He first had to endure the Cross, spilling His most precious blood and dying for our sins so that we could die unto them.
God’s peace, then, is not merely the absence of strife and bloodshed, rather, it is the lived reality of resurrected life, one in which that peace is manifested in spite of strife and bloodshed, a peace that overcomes the world.
Jesus gives His peace to his Apostles and then sends them out into the world, “Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” He sends them into a world enslaved by death and sin. Or perhaps a better way of looking at is that the world is enslaved to death through sin. In the Garden, when God forbade Adam from eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, He told him that if he eats of it, “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Like our common understanding of ‘peace’ our understanding of ‘death’ is far too narrow. Death is not the mere cessation of our biological functions but of our disconnection with God, who is life itself. Without God, left to our own disordered wants and desires, mankind truly is the ‘Walking Dead,’ zombies who imitate the activities of living, when they’re not trying to feed off them.
Life in Christ and the Peace of God are both one and the same thing, just appreciated from different angles. After Jesus had said “Peace be unto you” a second time, He gives them Holy Ghost, and sets a specific task for them, to forgive sins. Just as life in Christ and the Peace of God are linked, so too are their opposites, sin and death. The remission of sin, grants us entry into new life in Christ, and it therefore follows that enslavement to sin and alienation from God is the true death, whether or not we are still breathing.
When we are alive in Christ we experience His peace and therefore it makes sense that whatever suffering this mortal existence has to offer cannot touch the peace of God which is ours now by right of adoption as fellow heirs with Christ. That we often lose sight of that reality, succumbing to sin is the thing which we must continually fight against between our baptisms and eventual ends in this world.
And so, we are left with what the world would see as a paradox, a constant battle to be at peace. But all paradoxes are unraveled in the person of Jesus, and such a state of affairs seems paradoxical only to those who’ve never engaged in the fight. To us, those seeking holiness, we know it is a battle waged both in fasting and feasting, in penance and celebrating, in forgiveness for our faults and the infinite love of God for us despite our flaws.
Like the Apostle’s waiting in the upper room, we find ourselves in between the events of the Resurrection and Pentecost.
Finally, a few remarks regarding Thomas. Poor dude gets a bad rap, forever known as ‘Doubting Thomas.’ But while he struggled with skepticism, we must keep in mind one essential element that separates him from many modern doubters. Although he struggled with doubt, he wanted to believe.
Although Thomas believed because he saw and Jesus says that blessed are those who believe who have not seen, Thomas is still the first person who calls Jesus ‘God’. “My Lord and my God,’ he says to Jesus, and that there is not only the essence of the Gospel, but the fulfilment of Scripture, the end and beginning of history, the foundation of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, and the source and summit of the peace of God, the peace that passes all understanding- Jesus is Lord and God, our God. And now, as we prepare to encounter Him afresh in the Eucharist, when we hear the celebrant declare, ‘Behold the lamb of God, behold Him who taketh away the sins of the word,’ let us respond in our hears, ‘My Lord and my God’ and know that we are truly at peace.
+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost
