The Rev. Charleston Wilson
In the Name of the Living God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
What exactly does St. John the Evangelist, the author of the Fourth Gospel, really want from you and from me?
One of the things that I admire most about St. John is that he is right up front with what he wants from his readers. There is no hidden agenda; he just comes right out and tells us.
In the 20th chapter, after describing two powerful accounts of the resurrected Jesus, St. John tells us, “These [things] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” We don’t have to guess; he simply tells us that he’s recorded these resurrected “acts of Jesus,” if you will, so that we “may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah,” and through that act of believing, we may experience “life in his name.”
And what St. John says is absolutely true. If we ever plan on having life in the name of our Risen Lord, somewhere, somehow, we must confront – that is, come face to face with – the Resurrected Jesus. Yes, beyond the sweet, precious “Infant Jesus of the Christmas crèche,” the “Atoning Jesus” of Good Friday and the “Teaching and Healing Jesus” of ordinary time, we have to confront this risen, living Jesus of Eastertide.
And from personal experience, this is easier said than done. Just this week I was struck with the fact that I spent more time preparing for Easter – with seemingly endless Lenten arrangements and all – than I have spent actually experiencing the Resurrected Christ of Easter. And I know I’m not alone.
This homily, then, is a brief little treatise, if you will, on St. John’s plea – about truly believing in the resurrection and how that experience of believing opens the door to a new life of grace, the resurrected, abundant life we all want to know and enjoy. After all, this is what Eastertide (and what some call “Easter Faith”) is all about.
But belief is a tricky – even loaded – word. It can be said that I believe the earth is round, that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and that I’m standing in Sarasota, Florida. I agree, that is, I can offer my intellectual assent to all these things without reservation. But St. John is absolutely not talking about intellectual assent or mere agreement. In Holy Scripture – and, by extension, in the life of faith – when the word “believe” comes up, the issue is never about intellectual assent or mere agreement.
In fact, the notion that belief is even related to intellectual assent or agreement is quite a recent phenomenon. Etymologically speaking, and in St. John’s context, the word “believe” has its roots in other Greek words that mean “trust, commitment, loyalty and engagement.” And in Latin, of course, the phrase “I believe” means “I give my heart.” The modern English word “belief,” moreover, came from the Middle English bileven, which meant “to prize, to value highly, or to hold dear.”
So, when St. John is pleading with us to believe in order to experience new life, he’s asking us to encounter, to accept, to receive and to abide.
Michael Greene, the Anglican evangelist, describes what happened once that small group of eleven men whom Jesus commissioned to carry on his work “encountered, accepted and received” the reality of the Resurrection. “They were not distinguished,” he says, and “they were not well educated; they had no influential backers. In their own nation they were nobodies and, in any case, their own nation was a mere second-class province on the eastern extremity of the Roman map. If they had stopped to weigh up the probabilities of succeeding in their mission, their hearts must surely have sunk. So heavy were the odds weighted against them, how could they possibly succeed? Yet they did.” And “yet they did” because they came to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and through believing they experienced new life in his name.
“Make no mistake,” claims Updike in his brilliant Seven Stanzas at Easter, “if he rose at all, it was as His body. If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence, making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.”
The resurrected life, then, is about walking through that door of belief, becoming children of God, having eternal life, not being condemned, knowing Jesus, never being spiritually hungry or thirsty, having peace, not being afraid, being forgiven, seeing the glory of God, becoming children of the Light, doing the works of Jesus. That’s what it means to have life in His name.
Do you believe in – that is, do you “prize, trust and receive” – the resurrection? Have you taken that plunge?
If you’ve never done it before, you can experience life in His name today. Yes, you can make a good start right here at mass today, the Second Sunday of Easter. Even if you have done it, perhaps you – perhaps I – need to renew our belief in the resurrection. Every mass, after all, is a renewal of the mystery of our faith – “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”
Today, when you hear the bell and the celebrant elevates the Host, the “bread that lives beyond the tomb,” a very practical way to experience life in His name is to look up, and believe – that is, receive – the resurrection, and, like St. Thomas before us, let us adore our Risen Saviour, crying in our hearts, “My Lord and my God.”
Then, with confidence – yes, confidence, not cowardice – let us approach the throne of grace to taste and see that the Lord is good, receive the forgiveness of our sins and experience a foretaste of that eternal, heavenly banquet to which ultimately each of us is called.
But none of this is possible without first believing – without receiving. Archbishop Michael Ramsey, one of the greatest Anglican archbishops of the twentieth century, scores again. He said, “The miracle of the resurrected life is only known [i.e., “available”] to those who respond to the new level of spiritual existence that has been disclosed.”
What exactly does St. John the Evangelist, the author of the Fourth Gospel, really want from you and from me? He wants us to respond. What will the response be?
Sermon preached by the Rev. Charleston D. Wilson
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, Florida
Second Sunday of Easter
12 April 2015