Easter 2, Year C – April 15, 2007

Acts 5:12a, 17-22, 25-29; John 20:19-31

St. Giles Church, Northbrook IL – The Rev. Cynthia J. Hallas

Most of us aren’t aware of it, or maybe we just don’t think about it, but there are two “Pentecost” events in the New Testament (or put more accurately, two recorded times when the disciples of Jesus receive the HS in a formal way.)  Even calling it Pentecost confuses the issue somewhat, since the disciples of Jesus (as detailed in Acts), were gathered to celebrate a Jewish festival that Christians, largely without understanding the whole picture, have co-opted, name and all, into our own holy day.  This is the big, cosmopolitan event, with exciting tongues of flame and a rushing, violent wind, the one that attracted all those people, – one can only imagine what Cecil B. DeMille might have done with that in the movies!  We’ll focus on that event more fully in six weeks, and give it its proper due.  With the coming of the Spirit, those ‘inspired’ adherents went from being disciples (those who follow) to apostles (those who are sent). 

We meet some of these apostles this morning as they are tangling (and not for the first time) with the high priest and the temple police.  The ‘signs and wonders’ they have done among the people

have caused the religious authorities to arrest them and put them in prison, locking the door from the outside; still they manage to get out (with some help from an angel) and go right back to preaching in the temple.  When confronted by the high priest, they courageously – fearlessly – take a stand to ‘obey God rather than any human authority.’  These are apostles of whom the Church can be proud!  That’s the version of apostolic according to the author of Luke/Acts.  John tells the initial story very differently.

It was evening on that day (“that day”, of course, being the evening of the resurrection, the first day of all first days).  Stories from earlier in the day have spread to the disciples: stories of the empty tomb, the burial linens left behind, even a face-to-face encounter with the risen Lord (albeit initially mistaken for the gardener).  But whatever had transpired since daybreak, it does not seem to have had any kind of life-changing effect on the disciples.  Where are those valiant, fearless, faithful disciples of Acts, willing to risk imprisonment and perhaps far worse to preach and teach the Good News in the Temple?  Where are they, Peter and the others, who have chosen not to obey human authority, not even religious authority, when it conflicts with God’s authority? 

I’ll tell you where they are.  They’re all sitting together in an upper room, cowering in fear of those same religious authorities, with the doors locked on the inside.  These are clearly not “apostles” at all, in the sense of being “sent” (which is what the word apostle means).  These are, basically, the same broken band who fell asleep in Gethsemane and who fled when the going got tough for their Master.  They had not been imprisoned by others; they had imprisoned themselves.

And it is into the midst of their fear and disbelief and uncertainty and doubt that Jesus appears.  We’re not quite sure how it happened; nor, it seems, were they.  But appear he did, in the flesh as he had been, not as a ghostly spirit.  He appears in their midst, still bearing evidence of his physical wounds which he offers to let them touch – again, not spirit, but Jesus in the flesh.  And then Jesus gives them three gifts.  He gives them peace.  He gives them the Holy Spirit.  He gives them the ministry of reconciliation.  And he gives them a mission: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you….’  And with that, the Church was born.

But their first mission was something of a challenge – they had to deal first of all with one of their own.  ‘We have seen the Lord,’ they say to Thomas, who was inexplicably absent from the first post-resurrection gathering.  Why should he take their word for it?  Jesus gave them physical proof; Thomas wants the same.  And he gets it.  Jesus appears once again among his followers, allowing Thomas the same physical proof that the others had had; an invitation, along with a statement that some have interpreted as a scolding of sorts from Jesus.  But I think it’s much more like a gift: ‘do not doubt, but believe’.

The truth is, the disciples were all doubting and fearful as they began that journey into resurrection life with Jesus.  The women, the first ones at the tomb, had expressed fear and uncertainty initially.  The male disciples had doubted the women’s stories.  The empty tomb, and the angelic presences within and outside of it, terrified all of them.  They wanted and needed the same physical evidence that Thomas needed. They just got it sooner, and without asking for it.  To be fair, Thomas wasn’t asking for anything his fellow disciples hadn’t already gotten.  And yet it must be noted that already the idea of witness, the importance of passing on the story, has been written into the agenda of the fledgling Church.  With those first witnesses to the resurrection: ‘we have seen the Lord’, comes the message that the Church has been proclaiming for the last two thousand years: ‘Christ is risen!  Jesus lives!’  And they would all carry out that message, in the Jerusalem temple and well beyond it; including Thomas, who is believed to have carried the gospel to India, where the Mar Thoma Church, one of our Anglican Communion partners, still bears his name. 

There’s a reason we speak of the life of faith as a journey: ‘blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’  Jesus didn’t say, ‘Blessed are those who instantly arrive at a fully formed faith.’  Each of us has built our faith on the witness of others; both these apostolic figures, without whom the story would simply have died out; but also the witness of those who have been a part of our lives in our own time, as well as many, many in between who have kept on witnessing, kept on telling the story.  Each of us has had doubts, fears; times when we just want to lock the doors of our hearts or our minds or our spirits from the inside, and hope that no one will come looking for us.  But Christ does, and he finds us.  Not in the person of the physically resurrected Jesus of Nazareth, with wounded hands and feet that we can reach out and touch, but in the sorrows of the world and in the wounds, physical and otherwise, of those around us.  And Christ challenges us: to open our hearts to the suffering, to open our minds to new ways of understanding him, to open our spirits to a more comprehensive embrace of the gospel message.

It seems like a huge contrast this morning between the behavior of the apostles in Acts and in John’s gospel, from fearful seclusion to fearless proclamation.  But on second thought, maybe the contrast isn’t so huge after all.  The knowledge of the risen Christ, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the apostolic mission are what characterize both of these scenes and every act of spreading the Good News since.   “As the Father has sent me”, Jesus tells his disciples, “so I send you.”  As God has sent Jesus, so God sends us.  Into the world, to preach the gospel, spread God’s peace, and to discover just what ‘signs and wonders’ we might do in his name.