Bad News
Propers: The Second Sunday of Easter, AD 2023 A
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.
Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
I don’t know about you, but there are times when I feel absolutely sick to death at all the bad news in this world. I find it all so overwhelming, and so utterly exhausting.
See, I was very fortunate. I came of age during the Unipolar Moment, that window of time between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001. And I’m telling you, it was a decade of boundless optimism. The entire globe breathed a collective sigh of relief that the Cold War had ended not in some long-prophesied nuclear holocaust—I grew up with a-bomb drills under my elementary school desk—but in the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Our 1980s fears of toxic waste, acid rain, and holes in the ozone layer had all been addressed by good science, serious legislation, and international coöperation. Free trade was the name of the game! From 1991 to 2002 the United States underwent our longest sustained economic expansion in history. Russia was our friend. And China, well, we were going to make sure that China grew as rich as Croesus, because as soon as they had money, they would also want democracy, right?
Even the Gulf War appeared to have been a good thing insofar as it provided evidence that conflicts from now on would be short, surgical, and sanctioned by the U.N. Gone were the meat grinders of massive world wars from our grandfathers’ time, gone the bloody shame of Vietnam, which had so haunted our fathers. At this ebullient moment, in 1992, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote a book entitled The End of History and the Last Man, in which he triumphally proclaimed that the Western world order had brought about a perpetual utopia upon this earth.
30 years later, all of that now sounds unbearably naïve. Yet for a decade there we really did believe it. Our leaders believed it, our youth believed it, I believed it, as though the sun would never set upon the American Century. And now—oh, Lord. When’s the last time that we as a people felt honest optimism? Global pandemic. Climate change. Mass shootings. War in Europe. Opioid epidemic. Nuclear proliferation. Rising Red China. Falling U.S. life expectancy. Years of price-gouging inflation.
Not to mention loneliness, anxiety, ignorance, political radicalization, massive inequality, predatory healthcare, the inaffordability of higher education, and the collapse of civil society, including book groups, bowling leagues, boy scouts, and the church. We’ve lost our past, our future, our religion, and our hope. There is for us now only the present moment, only the next thing to buy, the next show to binge, the next fleeting hit of dopamine in an increasingly medicated and mentally ill society.
So, yeah, there are times when I feel that I cannot take even one more piece of bad news.
Thomas I understand. Thomas I get. He’s not a bad guy; he’s actually very brave. It’s Thomas who proclaims, when Christ insists on traveling to Jerusalem in spite of the clear and present danger to His person, that we ought to go and die with Him. Not for nothing is Thomas the only surviving Apostle who isn’t hiding in the upper room on the day of resurrection, that first Easter Sunday, when Christ appears to the all rest. Thomas is out and about, risking his life, getting things done.
And Thomas lives in a society used to disappointment, used to fear. First-century Judea was not a particularly fun place. For a dozen generations the people of Israel had been chewed up and spit out by the great empires of the day. Assyrians and Babylonians scattered them to the winds. The Persians brought them home but under foreign domination. The Greeks tried to wipe them out as a people. And the Romans—well, they had invited the Romans in to get rid of the Greeks, which it ends up is a bit like releasing wolves in order to deal with rats.
Romans were not what you might call enlightened rulers. They brought aqueducts and trade, surely enough, but they also brought crucifixion, oppression, annihilation. The Legions were a bit like the Death Star: all or nothing, no stun setting. Imagine seeing your people subjugated, humiliated, casually tortured and killed, radicalized by their sufferings, riven and divided into feuding factions. Imagine having no homeland of your own and little if any hope.
Yet there were the prophecies, ancient prophecies of a Messiah, a Christ. But they had waited for so long, and who knew whether Daniel had even intended for the timeline which others had distilled from his works. But any port in a storm, right? You gotta believe in something; that’s the only way that any of us ever survive. Thomas believed in Jesus, believed enough to risk his life, believed enough to die. But those hopes were dashed one night upon a mountain, one morning on a cross.
Thomas watched his hope die, in the worst way we knew how. And two days later, three by Hebrew reckoning, his friends, his brothers, are telling him Christ is alive? Bull, he says. “I don’t believe it. How could I believe it? We all watched Him die, Peter. So unless the proof of His life is as visceral as His death, I will not and cannot believe.” And in this he’s not unreasonable. Mary didn’t believe when the angel told her of the resurrection, not until she’d seen Jesus for herself. Likewise Peter didn’t believe when Mary told him, and so on.
No-one in the Gospels believes in the risen Christ until they have each experienced Him for themselves, whether by Him calling them by name, or breaking with them bread, or breathing upon them the Spirit, or placing their hands in His wounds. It’s not until they hear Him, touch Him, see Him, experience Him for themselves, that they fall upon the floor and cry, “My Lord and so my God!”
After that there is no fear, no hesitation, no holding them back. They go out proclaiming Christ like lions breathing fire, until the whole world is enflamed.
We are far from the first Christians to live in a difficult time. We have known decades of peace, centuries without persecution, at least for us here in the West. Our challenges today are subtler yet deeper, moral and spiritual failings. We treat people like things, and things like people. We are anesthetized by manufactured outrages and infotainment. We declare religion a thing of the past even as we kowtow to the elder gods of blood and wealth and soil. Our age is insidious.
Yet we are not alone. We have never been alone. The Bible and history both are full of people who despaired in far worse situations than our own, only to find God present in their wounds, in their doubts, in the everyday life of simple faithful people, working out an impossible salvation for all of humankind. Do not think it incidental that Thomas enters Jesus’ wounds. The power of God is perfected in weakness. There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.
Our word Gospel, from the Middle English godspell, literally means “good news.” The Romans would typically declare it for the birth of some new Caesar. Yet for Christians the Gospel is the Good News of Jesus Christ, Jesus risen from the dead. He is our true Emperor, our true King of Kings, for we do not belong to this fallen world; not anymore, not since our Baptism. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus promised us. “But take heart! I have overcome the world.” No matter how bad things seem, in Christ we have always and already won.
The other day, when I asked both friends and colleagues for good news in hope of offsetting the relentless onslaught of bad, all they could offer me was: “Christ is risen. God is with you. You are engraved in the palms of His hands.” This indeed is all we have to offer: not riches, not fame, not personal gratification, but only Christ and Him crucified. He is all we offer; He is all that we could need.
For truly if Jesus is risen, then nothing can take that Good News from us, nothing can take us from Him; not death, not hell, not doubts nor despair. Thomas doubted justly; Jesus loved him all the more. Behold His hands and wounded side. Behold His healed scars. Christ knows exactly what we’re going through, and is with us all the way. All the way to the grave. All the way to hell and back.
Cold wars end. Empires convert. The Word of God endures forever. I was naïve to hope in the empire, when I was still barely more than a child. But faith, my friends, is not naïve. It turns the whole world aright.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment