Frances Flatman reflects on the Readings for next Sunday :-
We are slowly moving on with the disciples understanding of the resurrection of Jesus first experienced on Easter morning immediately after Passover, and we need to pause and ponder the subtle ways in which our Readings spell this out. Our Vigil Gospel and other passages of the New Testament showed us Jesus happily greeting the women who had gone to the tomb, and last week’s Gospel showed us Thomas having a good feel of Jesus’ wounds. Now however we are asked how we should understand all those events.
Pentecost takes place 40 days after Passover and Easter, and quite a lot has happened as we find in Acts (2:14.22-33). Here today, we jump over the account of the sending out to the world of the Good News, with the pilgrims gathered for the feast all hearing the word in their own languages. Significantly Peter speaks of Jesus as ‘the Nazarene’ and not the ‘Son of David’ of Matthew 21 and the start of the passion. Luke remember was writing for pagan converts to the new faith, and was at pains to distinguish them from the Jewish leadership who had brought about Jesus’ death through the Romans. Yet Jesus was a Jew, and Luke works to draw out from the Jewish scriptures the long held tradition that salvation would come to the world through a Jewish man of David’s line. So he quotes from Psalm (16:8-11) with its promise of immortality, ‘You will not abandon my soul to Hades nor allow your holy one to experience corruption,’ with its conviction that faithfulness to Yahweh would somehow ‘save’ the Davidic line. As was well known by the first century CE, that dynasty had died out with the death of Zedekiah in the 6th century BCE as the king, captive of the Babylonians saw his sons slaughtered for his disloyalty and he would die blinded by his captors. Yet their legacy lived on in the hope of a Messiah who would ultimately reign over the nation. Our Reading therefore takes us from an understanding whereby death was the end and that was all there was, so that David's bones lie in his tomb, to an expectation through scripture and passed down through history for something more. Somehow, that Davidic promise would be fulfilled, and Luke proclaims that this had indeed been accomplished by the resurrection of Jesus and the presence amongst us of his continuing Holy Spirit.
We return to the writings of Luke for our Gospel (24:13-35) and we notice that new names appear as Cleophas and his companion, not of the eleven, are talking over the events of the passion they had witnessed; yet like so many Jews of the time their hopes of the coming messiah were rooted in traditional expectation of a great warrior leader, ‘He would be the one to set Israel free.’ It appears that like so many of their day, the experiences of the risen Christ given to various women were dismissed, since they in Luke’s version only met two men in dazzling clothes who told them he was risen. This is rather surprising, since we know from other incidents in the Gospels of how seriously ancient people took visions or other experiences of the divine, particularly in Matthew’s Gospel. No doubt Luke writes in this way to emphasise their total misreading of the situation. Like us, they expected the divine to fit in with our expectation of things, rather than see things from God’s way. Jesus, castigating them as ‘foolish’, quite an insult and against Jewish law, puts them right!
However, he gives them a second chance when ‘persuaded’ to stay overnight and, sharing a meal, he using the three eucharistic verbs, took, blessed and broke the bread, and ‘opened their eyes’ and no doubt their minds too, recalling the Last Supper and his command to the disciples. Then he disappears – the rest is up to them. Finally realisation dawned, and without hesitation they return to Jerusalem and find the eleven and others similarly liberated with Jesus’ appearance to Simon. Clearly these and other descriptions of appearances of the risen Lord Jesus are designed to get the nascent Christian group and ourselves thinking about the resurrection and what it means. Jesus is bodily alive yet significantly different – he can appear and disappear, pass through locked doors and so on. John will have him make breakfast and eat with the disciples, so there is the bodily reality of his being with his followers, but something signally different too, hinting that he is no longer simply ‘theirs’ but for the world and for all time. Like them we have to ponder, albeit not fully understand that greatest of all miracles, that of the Lord’s resurrection, of God with us, divinity who lives with human beings and enables us to live in some way ‘in’ eternity too.
When we turn to our Reading from 1 Peter (1:17-21), written to Christians around the early 2nd century in Bithynia in Turkey from an unknown writer pseudonymously using the name of Peter, we begin to appreciate just what a shift in understanding of time and distance from the actual resurrection has made to their understanding. Hellenistic and Roman gods made no claims on the moral or personal lives of devotees, their focus was largely on the survival of the Roman state and concern for its stability, along with offerings made for a good grain harvest and such like. Such divinities never promised any post mortem existence. But faith in Jesus does, and as a consequence asks for dramatic differences, in the way they and we lead our personal lives, to be made. Granted many were and still remain slow to alter their lifestyles despite continual admonition from the Church, but the important thing is why this is significant. Part of the Letter given here reminds Christians of their links to Jesus and as we saw last week, its insistence that we are already ‘in’ eternity and in consequence the invitation to live after the pattern of Christ is the fundamental thing. Children of a new age, the last times they were called, as we are urged to reconsider our present lives and make that dramatic shift which is the proof of our new lives in the Spirit, in Christ; and where persecution could not shake their faith, ours too are meant to mirror that of our Redeemer.
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