Scars

Propers: The Second Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It is the evening of the Resurrection and the Apostles are filled with fear.

Fresh in their minds is the violence of the arrest in Gethsemane, the humiliation of the thorns and the lash in the city, the horrors of the Cross atop Golgotha. They are hiding, as they have hid for days now, the doors barred for fear that they might be next. They might suffer the same fate—the arrest, the trial, the crucifixion—as the one they’d believed to be the Messiah.

And now there were these strange stories, strange happenings. Some of the women had gone out early this very morning to bury Jesus’ body properly. He’d been rushed into the tomb on Friday so as not to defile the sabbath. But now the sabbath was over, and those who had gone out bearing myrrh on Sunday morning had come back, breathless and panicked, claiming that the tomb had been broken open, that the body of the Lord was gone.

And they spoke of angels appearing as men arrayed in white, claiming that Jesus had risen just as He’d said He would. And Mary—poor Mary Magdalene, so traumatized but what she’d seen—Mary came back claiming that she’d encountered Him alive, actually spoken to Jesus risen from the dead! It was all too much. Peter and John had run to the tomb only to find it empty, the winding sheet and veil in which Jesus’ body had been wrapped lying discarded on the floor. Who would steal the body and unwind it in the tomb?

And the guards! There were rumors of the guards who had been at the tomb fleeing into the city, gibbering about earthquakes and light and tombs bursting asunder from the inside out. They had spent the day shaking and drinking their sorrows and being paid to shut up, but the rumors had already begun to fly.

And then suddenly He appears—Jesus, the Risen Christ, right there in the middle of the room. So much for locked doors. And there must be panic and wonder and horror because He has to keep on repeating, “Peace be with you. Peace be with you.” Peace? Who could possibly talk about peace? They all saw Him murdered, watched Him suffer and bleed and die with spikes in His wrists and a lance through His heart. They had been terrified of the authorities, but how much more terrifying is this?

A Man risen from the dead? Is He a ghost? Is He a demon? But He shows them His wounds, His hands and His side. And they see that He is a Man of flesh and blood, not a spirit, not a corpse, but a warm and living, breathing Man. And He breathes out upon them His Spirit, the very breath of God, and says not only that they are forgiven—forgiven for their cowardice, forgiven their betrayal—but that they are now freed and empowered to proclaim the forgiveness of others, indeed of all the world. And this is a power that has heretofore been reserved only to God.

Brothers and sisters, we too live in a word of anxiety and fear. Headlines lately haven’t just been bad news; they’ve been positively apocalyptic. Wars, famines, disease, economic collapse. Families are struggling, communities struggling, churches struggling. And then there are the smaller but sharper anxieties of everyday life: politics, health, stress, debt. We’re scared. We’re afraid. And perhaps we have good reason to be. In many ways we’re the safest, richest, freest generation in history. But we’ve sacrificed meaning. And in doing so we’ve sacrificed hope.

And then suddenly Jesus shows up. Not just as an idea, but as a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood Man, someone we can see and touch, someone who is alive amongst us. Alive in bread and wine. Alive in word and water. Alive in this community of sainted sinners gathered together to pray and to heal and to forgive. It is His wounds, mind you, in the story, that calm His terrified Apostles. They can see and touch the holes in His hands, the gash in His side. Only then do they rejoice, their fear turning to wondrous elation. Only then can they hear and take seriously His promise: “Peace be with you.”

What is it about those wounds, I wonder, that calms them so? Is it because those scars prove His identity, prove that they haven’t hallucinated the whole thing? Is it because they affirm the reality of the lash, the thorns, the Cross, the spear? Or is it because in these wounds we see that He really is with us, that He truly understands? He too has known pain and fear and disappointment. He too has known suffering and solitude, the agonies of death. And He has overcome them! He has overthrown them.

The wounds do not go away. He bears them still. Neither does the danger that the Apostles face beyond these locked doors go away. But their fear does. And it is replaced by a hope so joyful, so ecstatic, that they throw those doors wide open and go out boldly to face the very threats and terrors that until moments before had kept them holed up and paralyzed in that room.

That’s why we come here, don’t we? To encounter the Risen Christ. To see His wounds, to touch His scars. To die again to our sin and rise anew with Christ alive within us. We are not promised an easy life here, my brothers and sisters. Quite the contrary. We are promised a cross of our own to bear alongside our Lord. We too will be wounded. We too will fall. And we too will have scars when we rise to life in the Age to come. But those scars will then be trophies of our victory in Christ.

Jesus is Risen, and we shall arise! And because of this truth, we know that nothing and no one in this world can lay claim to us, can have power over us. Yes, there will be disappointments and defeats. Yes, we will fail and we will sin, over and over again. But that is not the end of our story! Christ will forgive us, over and again. Christ will raise us, over and again. Until at last we shall rise on the last day, never to fall again. And on that day we will know only the Light, in whom there is no darkness at all.

Disease will not prevent you from rising. Debt will not prevent you from rising. Our mistakes and our sins and our cruelties and our failures and all the things of which we are ashamed and lock away in the hidden recesses of our hearts will not stop us from rising. For “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world,” the entirety of the cosmos. You can whip us, you can shoot us, you can mock us, you can sue us, but you cannot stop us from rising. No one can.

Life will be hard. We will fail, and we will die. But then we Rise. And because of this promise, this sure and certain destiny which awaits in the Name of Christ Jesus, we are freed, here and now, to see the beauty in life as well. To see the grace. We are freed to reach out and heal and help and feed and forgive. To walk with those who suffer. To visit those imprisoned. To aid the needy and soften the haughty, to rebuke injustice and give of ourselves without fear that we will ever run out.

That is what the Resurrection means for us, here, today.

Do not fear your wounds, dear Christians. Do not fear to pour out your lives for the world. It just means we’ll have one more scar, one more trophy, to offer to Christ when we rise.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.