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April 30, 2006
Faith After Easter
Micah 4: 1-5
John 20: 19-31
April 30th, 2006
Every year at Easter we celebrate an event that provides hope. Such a mix of matters come together on that glad day: not just the message of Jesus’ resurrection that will mean we and our loved-ones will come alive again never to die again, but also that lambs will snuggle close to lions rather than be digested inside them. Little children will play safely around cobras. Al Qaida will not kill. Suicide bombers will be a term without meaning. Darfur will be the name of a beautiful city in the Sudan.
So much hinges on the resurrection. Paul wrote, “If Christ be not raised, then we are of all people most miserable.” But why do we have to wait for so many good effects of the resurrection that seem promised now? Why does faith have to be, as the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, “The evidence of things not seen?” I wonder if we have kept hidden evidence that we could be showing so that faith would not seem so hard for so many. Jesus taught us we would do greater things than He did because He ascended to the Faither.
A problem we sublimate by faith is the need for delayed fulfillment of expectations of God’s promise of a Peaceable Kingdom. There are goals God is accomplishing that are not now evident. But why must we wait for so much that God promises?
By contrast, when Edward Jenner in 1798 made known he’d invented a cure for the dread disease of smallpox, immediately the disease was kept at bay for anyone who had the inoculation he devised. One hundred thousand people in England were given the antidote to smallpox within three years, and they were immune to smallpox. After Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine and people were inoculated, polio became essentially a disease of the past. Kids today don’t know what iron lungs are.
As Paul wrote in the great “hope” chapter in the New Testament, Romans 8, “All creation groans, waiting for the adoption of sons.” Two thousand years nearly have gone by. Creation is groaning more than necessary.
We are reading together the Gospel of John these Sundays. I wonder if you noticed how within that first week after Easter so much of the agenda of the story of Church history was anticipated. Fear and disbelief, then the reality of Jesus’ presence even to doubting Thomas, because he saw Jesus’ hands and side.
”Peace be with you,” Jesus said. It was a peace which He had promised was “not as the world gives.” Peace as the world allows depends on good circumstances. Jesus’ peace comes no matter what. We talk about it but do we have it? His peace comes under His conditions. Inward obedience to His commands = trust in Him, leads to Jesus’ peace.
Then there was the “Great Commission.” “As the Father has sent me so send I you.” The disciples must have wondered what He meant because they were still paralyzed, not knowing where to go, what to say. Until then only Abraham was told to go somewhere and he did not know his destination. Later Jesus would give the marching orders with destinations —first Jerusalem, then Judea, then Samaria, and finally everywhere with the Gospel. But the disciples did not understand all this on the evening of the first Easter.
They were not equipped by the Holy Spirit to do what Peter and Paul would later do in their spread of the Gospel throughout the Mediterranean world.
Then Jesus provided an anticipation of Pentecost. John tells us, “He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (actually the Greek text does not say “The..) We read this and wonder how to put it together with the great event that took place fifty days later. It was at the Jewish feast of Pentecost that the Holy Spirit was poured out on the 120 disciples who waited in the upper room in Jerusalem. It was then that Jesus’ disciples received the Holy Spirit fully to great effect. So what happened here?
Thoughtful New Testament scholars have noticed how similar John 20: 22 is to the Greek translation of Genesis 2: 7. “God breathed into Adam’s face the ‘spirit’ (pnoen) of life and the man became into soulish life—eis psuchen zosan.” This is an awkward, literal rendition of the Greek of Genesis 2: 7, suggesting how people were distinct from animals. Many early Christians knew the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible well. So they would have noticed as they read John’s remarkable words, the similarity between what God the Creator did after forming Adam from the dust and what Jesus did here.
Now the disciples were a huddled group of powerless fellows. They were like Adam who lay there on the Garden of Eden’s damp earth, a limp man-shaped form until God breathed into his face the life of the soul. Only we of all the creatures in creation have God’s breath in us. And something similar happened when Jesus breathed into the faces of His disciples His life-giving breath.
At the moment John describes, Jesus’ disciples were not reading about what happened but receiving the impulse of Jesus breath. What was it like? Did Jesus sigh deeply and then exhale so they could hear it, so that they felt something new happening in them.
Whatever happened on the spot, it wasn’t long before they realized that a new creation had begun. The Apostle Paul still felt the energy of that breath of Jesus when he wrote, “If anyone is in Christ that one is a new creation; the old has passed, the new has come.” The new creation should be much more in evidence than it now is.
Still more happened on that Easter evening. Jesus pronounced those awesome words that make it clear why forgiveness is so important. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
You remember Jesus had taught them to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” And He went on to say severely, “If you do not forgive others their trespasses neither will your father in heaven forgive you your trespasses.” Here Jesus described a fearful link between heaven and earth.
Here Jesus pronounced the final form of what has been called “The power of the keys.” In Matthew’s Gospel we read that early in Jesus’ days with His twelve disciples He said, “I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Here on Easter evening Jesus gave that promised key. This was a key that we still have.
I wonder to what extent the trials of the Church are due to all the sins that Christians retain rather than set free. I am sometimes overwhelmed at the impossibility of ridding the Church of the choking grip of mutual disregard. We retain sins and debts and trespasses that Jesus gave us the key to loose—if only we would. The consequences are evident in the powerlessness of the churches.
We hear much these days of the growth of mega-churches, but where is the evidence of the good effect of these vast gatherings? We preachers feel good if lots want to come listen. But to what end? Is there anything more to this than our fascination with bigness the illusion of being successful? Thousands of massed people who keep in their pockets the keys of the Kingdom, retaining sins they should loose, are of little use to the work of the Kingdom of God.
I was reminded recently that Islam is growing far faster than Christianity. Local Muslims may be about to build a mosque in our own town. The intensity of Muslim devotion is more impressive to many people than the limp devotion of Christians who claim to have the truth but have little muscle in their faith.
Is the reason for the lack of persuasiveness of our amazing Gospel of the love of God in Christ because we have disfigured the Gospel by our behavior? We have, as Paul put it, “the form of godliness but lack the power.” The power of godliness comes in acting God-like, mimicking Him “whose mercy is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him.” Where is the mercy in the Church?
Was the reason for the immediate vitality of the early Christians that sprung loose at Pentecost, fifty days later, because they not only had Jesus breathed Holy Spirit on them but also that they used the keys of the Kingdom? They actually loosed the sins of one another, forgiving right and left. They discovered that “love covers a multitude of sins,” as Peter put it. Of course, there were moments when sin got its comeuppance. Annias and Saphira discovered the consequences of lying to God. But those were days when the Church increased rapidly. Why? We look back and wonder.
I sometimes wonder if Christians have talked and talked about these things assuming that only correct conversation is now possible. Indeed, I ponder how important it has become to speak of the great matters correctly, to retain orthodox theology, because it seems this is what we have to nourish the next generation. Our right views of God’s work must be repeated in good form to remind ourselves of what God has done. And all the while God waits to see what we will do with the power of the keys of the Kingdom Jesus gave to us.
I sometimes become disconcerted how much I speak of what Christians ought to be doing in their life together, loving, serving, and forgiving each other. I fear I sound like the ancient heretic Pelagius who taught that it is possible to do what God has commanded us to do. John Wesley has been criticized for his view of “Christian perfection,” as though he forgot we’re just forgiven sinners, all of us. But what is the point of that blessing with which I close every service? There I remind you what the God of peace can accomplish in us through the power of the risen Christ.
I was reminded by an Eastern Orthodox friend recently of John Cassian, the fifth-century French monk who wrote about the training of the inner man and the perfection of the heart. He was called “semi-Peglagian,” that is, that he had a half-way view of the necessity of good-works. While it is true that we all need the grace of God, God has not left us powerless. But we need training in godliness. It doesn’t come by saying, “Lord, Lord.”
We have inherited a view of the Christian life that has so stressed the grace of God that we have put into a parenthesis all that the Bible tells us about what we should and must do in response to grace. So that the reason why you and I linger with that assortment of dispositions that make family life and community life less than happy is that we have been taught that all that is of any good must come from God.
We have hidden in the shadows the gifts of grace that we are to use that require the full cooperation of our desire to please God in order to be useful. It is truly sad how Christians allow to grow the roots of bitterness that could be killed with a good dose of holy Round-Up—if only we used the Keys of the Kingdom of God that Jesus gave us. The keys are still in our pockets, waiting to be taken out and used.
But now back to John’s story of the week after Easter. Thomas had not been there in the locked room when Jesus first came to His twelve disciples. John shows us a picture of Thomas the man from Missouri: “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Why did Thomas consider disbelief so needful? Thomas was an honest fellow. He would not tolerate living an illusion. Unless Jesus was alive, there was no hope. But then when he saw Jesus standing there before him, “My Lord and my God.”
And Jesus then pointed to you and me. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” It is helpful to know the honest, doubting Thomas believed because he saw Jesus alive. Jesus disciple Peter would later write, “Having not seen Him, you love Him and rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” But this rejoicing hinges on living out this new life that Jesus breathed into us. I wonder how we waste the breath of Jesus by making hypothetical His commands—by keeping in our pockets the Keys of the Kingdom.
What was faith in Jesus like after Easter? Very different than before. For one thing, now all those hints Jesus made about rising from death made sense. But more than this, the disciples no longer toddled along behind Jesus, just watching Him. Now they could do those greater things than He did because He went back to the Father. Jesus spread before them the means of this greatness on the evening of the first Easter. A new beginning, the breath of Jesus breathed into them, the keys of the Kingdom placed in their hands.
Let’s not waste what Jesus has given us—that we can use if only we will. Here is the secret of our joy, our growth, our usefulness. Let’s not waste what Jesus has given to us.
Let us pray: O Lord grant us to use that with which you have equipped us, to the glory of God and the joy and extension of the Body of Christ. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at April 30, 2006 09:30 AM