Second Sunday of Easter (Fr. Guiliano)

Easter is a wonderful time of year. Many of us enjoy its traditions: Easter eggs, Easter chocolates, the expansive Easter lunch. Bishop N.T. Wright once recommended opening a new bottle of Champagne every day for the first week of Easter. 

The news media has Easter traditions, too. Pretty much every Lent or Holy Week, someone in a newsroom gets the bright idea to find a skeptical historian or scholar to weigh in on whether the resurrection of Jesus really happened. 

So right as our celebrations begin, we read or listen to vague statements from someone like Prof Bart Ehrman, telling us that the disciples of Jesus experienced him in a new way after his death. They “felt” he was alive in their hearts; they “had visions,” maybe they experienced a mass delusion, or it was a case of mistaken identity. They just couldn’t accept his death. 

I can never decide how to respond to these tiresome pieces. They rarely say anything new or interesting. Maybe they are just a minor annoyance, with minimal effect. After all recent surveys suggest that 2/3 of Americans accept the accounts of the biblical narratives, and believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, even if they don’t go to church. 

Still, there’s something about the skeptical journalism that aggravates me. It’s not just my hidebound traditionalism. It’s not even because some random or famous thinker fails to believe what the Church teaches. I don’t expect everyone to agree with us. I think, as a historian, it just bothers me that the “vision hypothesis” is made up. It has little grounding in the biblical narratives or anything Christians said in the first century. The apostles did not speak about “experiencing” Jesus. They talked about finding his empty tomb, touching his risen body, eating and drinking with him, speaking with him multiple times. In our Gospel reading today, for example, St Thomas “saw” Jesus with his hands. 

Jesus was tangible. The marks of the nails are portrayed in John’s Gospel as touchable scars. The spear wound in his side is still open. Very open. It is not like in Caravaggio’s famous painting, Incredulitá di San Tommasio, “The Doubt of St Thomas,” where Christ stands before three disciples, each earnestly looking as Jesus pulls away his outer garment, and guides Thomas’s index finger into a small but open wound. No, that’s too gentle for the Bible. The Greek verb in John’s Gospel is gross. Thomas says he won’t believe unless “I put my hand into his side” / Balō mou tēn cheira eis tēn plevran. The verb there, Balō, means “throw” or “cast”, rather than “put” – it is an energetic and violent word, presuming a large wound for its destination. Disgusting! Mysterious. 

Notably, Jesus does not shrink back from this: “Reach out your hand,” he says. “Throw it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

Or, as he says in Luke’s Gospel (24:39): “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Handle me, and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” 

The disciples did not claim to have a mysterious encounter with a spiritual presence; they did not claim to have a dream or a sensation in their hearts. They told stories about touching this man, this Master and Friend, once dead, still marked by his struggle, but now transformed and alive forever. Death may have had dominion over him – for an instant – but no longer. Now he leads an indestructible life. 

For us who live on the far side of the resurrection and on the far side of the Christianization of global culture, things are a little different, of course. Our faith rests on the sight of these apostles -- on their faithful testimony. 

Thomas had to “see” and “touch” to believe. We are blessed to believe without seeing. The apostles’ doubt and their struggle serve our faith; “these things were written so that you might believe,” as the end of our reading said. That presents a challenge, but let’s get the challenge right and cast from our minds any flim-flammery about visions and vague feelings. We believe confess the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and we await our own.

Let’s go further than that today, though. Let’s set aside the skeptics’ worries, and delve deeper into this story of a wounded but risen Savior. 

I’ll take you back in time first. On Good Friday, Fr Joe alluded to a long tradition of the Church, which sees its origin and sacramental life in the side wound of Jesus. After the crucifixion, when Christ was already dead, a soldier’s spear pierced his side, and we read that “blood and water flowed.” 

The Gospel of John itself takes time with this moment, saying: “He who saw these things testifies to them, and he knows his testimony is true.” Blood and water flowed: the blood of the Eucharist, the water of baptism. This is a traditional interpretation.

It sees in Jesus’ wounded and open body the fulfilment of the prophet Ezekiel’s words, with which our service began. Ezekiel saw visions of a new temple in Jerusalem and he “beheld water, which proceeded from the temple on the right side thereof.” That water is said to flow out from the Temple continually, first as a little stream, then as a deeper course of water, then as a mighty river, which coursed out of Jerusalem into the salt marshes of the Dead Sea, making them fresh and alive.

And, he writes: “On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.” (Ezek. 47:12)

There’s a reason we recited this text as we were sprinkled with blessed water. As Christians, we would say Jesus is the new Temple that Ezekiel foresaw. His wounded side is the font, the spring from which lifegiving waters flow. It infuses every baptism; it blesses the waters.

This would be totally vulgar if Jesus were only a dead man. At Calvary on Good Friday, no one bathed in the blood he shed, not literally. But myriads upon myriads have been washed sacramentally in th blood through their baptism into Christ. Myriads upon myriads have received his gifts. 

How wonderful and strange are these stories! It is too shallow to turn them into vague experiences of Christ’s spiritual presence; they are more than that; they say more than that. 

We learn through them how we may be washed clean and “born anew.” We learn of our inheritance in Christ, which is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven.” 

We learn how salt waters may become fresh, and the dead may live, how sinners may be made righteous. We see the mortally wounded Jesus risen again; we hear him saying, “Put your fingers here and see my hands. Take your hand and cast it into my side.” 

The Welsh poet R.S. Thomas captured the quality of our faith and of its mysteries in his poem The Kingdom. He writes:

It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

As we read the Gospels today, we may be uncertain, saying, “Well, that’s a long way off from here. I don’t know what to make of this living Savior, who comes in the flesh, who invites me to explore his wounds, to be bathed in his blood, to drink from his side.”

That is to give ourselves more distance than Jesus allows. We are not granted a critical vantage point where we may judiciously weigh the evidence. We are afforded peculiar sights, peculiar encounters, invitations to a relationship of such profundity that we may wish to shrink back in horror or shake our heads in mystification. “Put your finger here,” Christ says. “Cast your hand into my side.”

We are splashed with water from that font, that “right side,” whether we like it or not. The river flows outwards from the Temple and we are along the banks, witnessing its lifegiving power, whether or not we stoop to drink.