The Third Sunday of Easter
Sermon
The Third Sunday of Easter
14 April 2024
The Reverend Caroline Brownlie
“Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish and he took it and ate it in their presence.
Have you ever wondered what would have happened if ‘nothing had happened’ after Jesus’ cry of “My God my God why have you forsaken me?”; if Jesus’ experience of having been abandoned by the Father proved to be True; and there was no Resurrection. Would we be sitting here today? We are, so each of us over the years of our Christian commitment will have absorbed a great deal which contributed to believing that it wasn’t the end, which I thought we could reflect on together.
From Acts: ‘Gamaliel said: Theudas was killed, Judas the Galilean perished; leave these men alone. If this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them – you may even be found fighting against God’.
What do you believe about Jesus, when someone, like Malcolm on Maundy Thursday says He was God and man, or This was God, when talking about Jesus, what comes immediately to mind? As you aren’t going to tell me, it might be interesting, to go back to that thought, when you have a moment to yourself; when I think about the centuries before the Creed came to be crafted and written down, the arguments which raged and the tomes that were written analysing, defining theorising on what was called The Two Natures of Jesus Christ, I know that it’s ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ to raise it now, but that sentence from the Gospel jumped out and invited itself as the text for today. They gave him a piece of broiled fish and he took it and ate it in their presence. (Who is this, as John keeps asking … Not two natures but One.)
For us to ask together what was Jesus’ doing here? They were all huddled away together, behind locked doors, not knowing what to make of Mary or Peter’s witness to his being alive, they had been devastated and grief stricken by the undoubted death they had seen him die, yet here he was living and eating as before, his actions familiar and reassuring in the ‘old’ way’; look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Does a ghost have flesh and bones as you see I have. Then He asks for the fish, presenting them with what Malcolm Guite called the 2nd Cosmic Event, the new category of Reality which the Resurrection revealed; what John Polkinghorne described as ‘not a different, but a New creation’. They were confronted by two undeniable Truths borne of observation, evidence, the reason of experience both individually and as a community. As we are in the 21st century of what does our belief consist and how did it develop? (Is it a true and deeply held unquestioning faith without curiosity, or an inner imperative to explore what is beyond what has truly been presented to us?) Is this the supreme example of temptation to avoid difficulties in the Bible, the conundrum which doesn’t yield its meaning without our varied faculties? Are you asking yourselves why on earth has she brought this up?
I believe that the gift of the written Word deserves and allows all that our desire to learn, mark and inwardly digest could lead to, beyond our wildest imagining in this instance! We are still asking, Who is This? just as John wanted us to. What kind of understanding of Jesus as human and God does the Father want us to have and what does He give us in order to approach it? When we say each week ‘We believe in one Lord, Jesus
Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, True God from True God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father’ what do, what can we bring to that statement today?
Alastair McGrath a scientist first and theologian second, urges Ad-venturous Christians as validly as scientists do when researching new theories, to use the same skills of lived evidence, observation, reason, and yes, faith, elements of un-knowing as even Darwin, with incomplete understanding, continued with his conviction that evolution would be found to be accurate). To ask as they do, does this Theory that Jesus is God hold up, is it coherent and consistent with what I see around me in the world and the Universe? Is it the explanation of Reality that rings True to me?
We would be here till next Easter if we collectively recounted the Biblical support for the existence of a Jesus, let alone one who would survive death, but remember the redemption from the Flood, the Exodus in the face of Egyptian odds, the story of Joseph, perhaps above all Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, and phrases like You will not allow your faithful One to see destruction from Psalm 16 used so often at Christian funerals, you will show me the path of life, in your presence is the fullness of joy.
Centrally, we have the Gospels each with its different emphases and priorities but with the historic narratives of the Passion and Resurrection taking up more than 25% of each one; in Matthew Jesus says: Have you not heard what was said to you by God: I am the God of Abraham. He is God not of the dead, but of the living and this was before his death , and we have the incomparable words from the time of Jesus’ death, recorded by John He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he speaks the truth.
We have the existence of the Church, eternally enlivened by Jesus’ Spirit at Pentecost, yet in all its fallibility still enduring; we have the extensive witness of Paul and the other NT writers, including Paul’s words: If Jesus was not raised from the dead, we are of all people most to be pitied. We have the enigmatic complex work of John’s Revelation, containing the vision of the slain Lamb, the New (not different remember) Creation, and the 2nd Cosmic event revealed in God raising Jesus. We have the promise of Resurrection life given us in the sacrament of our Baptism into the death of Jesus; that our death as someone has said becomes nothing more than seeing the fall of a leaf out of the corner of our eye. Later too, we shall share the continuing promise of life in the gift of Jesus to us in the tangible bread and wine.
There is the world in which we live, the archetypal patterns which correspond to the OT witness; of the death and birth of new stars, the seasons, light and dark, seed and fruit, death and birth, the human body itself; the miracle of birth; wounds and the healing body. And God saw all that He had made and behold it was Very Good.
There is the whole history of culture, sculpture, art, music, writing and poetry, not least Malcolm Guite’s, which has produced the most sublime expressions of faith; think only of the B Minor Resurrexit, Handel’s I know that my Redeemer liveth, Elgar’s Gerontius, and all the paintings of Crucifixion we’ve ever looked at,
whether or not we warm to them. Motifs of death and resurrection are all around us; among modern Christian martyrs, from Bonhoeffer onwards, we have the figure of Alexei Navalny most recently willing to die, knowing that to return to Russia would end that way, in the cause of Truth borne of his relatively young, yet whole-heartedly embraced, Christian allegiance.
All or none of the above? None of this is proof of Jesus’ divinity – but each in our unique way can build faith in its sense of being reasoned, evidenced and experienced; part of, not separate from, our continuing ‘through a glass darkly’ (accurately translated ‘enigmatically’) the ‘going on in the dark’ which is the Holy Saturday aspect of faith, the remaining Mystery which is beyond us and reminds us of our creatureliness before the Creator Word.
Because this fool did rush in, I can only share with you Rowan Williams’ understanding of Jesus as human, revealed as God through the Resurrection; deep and dense, and denying paraphrase!
The proclamation of the divinity of the crucified is an affirmation of the coincidence of finite and infinite in the detail of this finite life; including and especially in its vulnerability, powerlessness and humiliation; an ultimate Reality which insists that the unprotected historical fleshliness of the incarnate Word is the appropriate embodiment of the selflessness of the Divine.
Perhaps we could see following Jesus as the gradual growth of consciousness of, gratitude for and trust in his Risen life within us, born of the vulnerability, powerlessness and humiliation we all encounter at times; so that ‘we may evermore live in Him and He in us’ until our death is but the falling of a leaf.
From Paul to the Colossians: “I want your hearts to be united and encouraged in love, so that you may have the riches of assured understanding, the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ Himself”.
“They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence”.
Amen.
