A Reflection by Frances Flatman on the Readings for Sunday 16th April 2023
Two things really spoke to me recently of the faith of Christians. One was experiencing, in a large suburban church, the veneration of the cross on Good Friday. People just kept coming, the queue simply seemed to get longer and longer rather than decreasing, whilst we sang well known Taizé chants. The other was a report from Mexico, apparently the most dangerous place in the world to be ordained a priest. The report was of an ordination of a young man from a rural village in an area terrorised by drugs gangs who demanded the clergy support them or be killed. His seminary has the tomb of one martyred lecturer. What I experienced was the commitment of these Christians which is not really about the ‘organised Church’, so much as doing something physical, real and deeply personal for the Lord and for the community. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’ Our Readings all spell out this story of how we, so far distant in time and place, have come to belief in Jesus.
Yet our four Gospels all focus on the arrest and then the trial and crucifixion in which the disciples, who had been so close to Jesus and witnessed his miracles and his teaching, all fled! Our story of the growth of the tiny Christian community in Jerusalem in Acts (2:42-47), St Luke’s account, speaks of the effect of the resurrection on this dispirited and fearful bunch of followers. John of course has the visit of Peter and John to the empty tomb, and the sudden insight of the latter as he viewed the grave clothes. Something quite unlooked for, totally unbelievable in ordinary humanity, has occurred, Jesus has risen from death itself to form the Church by his power. In Matthew (17:16-17) we have an incident where the father of an epileptic asks for Jesus’ support as the disciples cannot cure his son. Jesus responds with ‘You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I put up with you? Yet after the resurrection, we find here in Acts that the disciples are able to work ‘Many miracles and signs’; the community has formed and grows as they live together, sharing their possessions and making sure no one is in want. It appears that the resurrection of the Lord, and their recognition of it and its meaning, has transformed the disciples, re-making them after the pattern of Jesus himself. They are able to be his community of resurrection, meeting to pray in the Temple, sharing the eucharist in their homes, and reaching out to others as Jesus had as their model and hence, their miracles too.
Our Reading from 1 Peter (1:3-9) helps to make this clearer. Written around the end of the first century CE for a Christian group in Bithynia in north western Turkey, on the shores of the Black Sea, (see 1 Peter 1:1) we meet a very different community from that of Jerusalem and Acts. We know about these communities because Pliny the Younger wrote to his Emperor Trajan, asking for help in dealing with this disruptive organization who were ruining the meat sales in the Province where he was the Roman Governor. Meat was released onto the markets after pagan festivals, where large numbers of animals would have been slaughtered in sacrifice to the pagan gods, and so Christians tried to persuade potential converts to abstain. The Letter gives the impression that the number of converts was sufficient to upset the meat market. Trajan issued his orders about how to distinguish active Christians, who were to be persecuted, but advised against anonymous denunciations by those suspect of attempting to seize the assets of enemies or others they disliked. Pliny gives details of the persecution of Christians in Bithynia. What is fascinating about our passage of scripture is its wording, it speaks of believers in Christ as ‘New born as sons of God’ through the resurrection of Jesus. It’s all the product of Christ’s resurrection! ‘We have a sure hope and the promise of an inheritance that can never be spoilt or soiled and never fade away, because it is being kept for you in the heavens.’ What it says is that the Christian believer is already in eternity. Our being here and now Christ’s heirs through his resurrection has made us people of faith. So the sufferings we/they endure are not rewarded by his resurrection; they are not causal in it, but are the proof of the Christian message of belief in Jesus crucified and risen, and this is seen in situations where the threat of torture and death presents no drawbacks to the faith. These men and women were already well aware of the precariousness of life, what with famines, wars or threats from pirates, or loss of goods through earthquakes, common as they lived on a major fault line in northern Turkey. The writer continues, stressing again that situation which is the case with all of us, ‘You did not see him, yet you love him; and still without seeing him you are already filled with a joy so glorious that it cannot be described, because you believe.’ Believing in Jesus and his promises transcends earthly life, and was and is a real option for those living in such fragile situations, and those beset with life’s problems.
What I find fascinating about John’s account of the resurrection appearances of Christ is their very down to earth approach and their practical advice. This is all the more significant as John’s Gospel teaching can often be of a rather elevated nature, as we see in the ‘Bread of Life discourse’, or the Lazarus story, both of which depart from the clear ‘historical’ record, as does the account of the crucifixion, as we find with Jesus’ long discussion with Pilate; and of course John alters the entire chronology of the crucifixion to have Jesus die precisely at the hour of the sacrifice of the Passover lambs, thereby making Jesus the last sacrifice, sufficient for all sin for all time. Here in our passage, (John 20:19-31) Jesus’ instructions are practical and pertinent, to the point. He instructs the doubting Thomas to have a good feel of his wounds to verify the reality of his resurrection; he breathes on the disciples (a return to Genesis with creation) giving them the power to release or retain sins. Now, when we think back over Jesus’ ministry in John, we can see how that works – think of the Samaritan woman so degraded by her lifestyle and so liberated by Jesus that she converts her city in John 4, or with the woman caught in adultery, John 8, or indeed in the story of the man born blind in John 9. The give-away here is ‘These are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life through his name.’ There is then a shear physicality about our worship of Jesus which frequently transcends all that well worked out ‘theology’ we and the modern Church focus on so much, which reminds me of our links back to the Easter story. In the church where I celebrated the Vigil, in which just about everything that could go wrong to mess up the ethereal wording of the Vigil, what I noticed at the end was the crowds lining up to venerate a statue of the risen Christ. It seems we are back with that great story of messy humanity and its imperfections in the face of the redemptive power of Christ!
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