Easter 2

Sermon preached by Revd Anna Matthews

Would you recognise someone by their hands? I’ve got to know some of yours quite well, from putting into them the bread of life. Hands big and small; those crooked with arthritis and others stained with felt tip pen; hands with painted nails and bitten nails, elegant or calloused. Some hands I know from having held them or anointed them: hands expressive of grief or sadness or shock or fear.

And if our hands can tell people something about us, what do your hands say about you? 

Mine would tell you I don’t do much manual work. The left is perhaps a bit stronger than the right – I’m left-handed, and the top bit of my left hand’s middle finger has a dent in it from all the years of holding a pen there. There are a couple of scars on my fingers that indicate a certain carelessness when chopping things, but I don’t think my hands are particularly distinguished. I’m not sure I’d recognise them in isolation from the rest of me, let alone think that anyone else would know me by my hands.

But Jesus, when he appears to his disciples, shows them his hands. As if to say ‘yes, this is really me’. It’s not an apparition, or a doppelganger, or a psychological trick their traumatised minds are playing on them. Here are my hands, he says, as evidence.

And they know those hands. They know how they’ve taken and blessed and broken bread. How they’ve been laid on people to heal and restore to life. How they’ve gestured as he taught, and unrolled scrolls and lifted up children and touched the untouchable. They know how those hands touched and washed their feet just nights ago, before they were clenched in prayer, and then bound as he was led away.

They know those hands. And now, as Jesus holds out his hands towards them, they recognise them, those same hands that had touched and blessed and healed and taught are the same hands that were nailed brutally to the cross. They know him by his scars.

Most of them hadn’t been there to witness the crucifixion. It was the women who stood in vigil as he was fixed to the cross, saw the nails hammered in, before he was raised into the air in shame and humiliation. Apart from the beloved disciple, the others seem to have fled. ‘I will lay down my life for you’, Peter had said, beloved patron of the over-confident, the impetuous, and the fallible. But when they came for Jesus, Peter denied him to save himself.

So they’re shut inside the house that first Easter morning, the doors firmly locked against the danger that’s still a present threat to them. Outside the house lies a busy city, with Roman and religious authorities still watchful for Jesus’ followers. Inside the house are disciples still afraid of what might happen to them; replaying in their minds the events that have happened, perhaps flinching still when it gets to the parts where they were not the bold, faithful friends they’d hoped and imagined they were, but found themselves to be panicked, fearful, fleet of foot.  

Into that thick atmosphere Jesus speaks peace. Not reproach, not condemnation, not anger. Peace. Spoken into their fear and self-reproach and self-justification. And then, because their muddled minds can’t process this, he shows them his hands and his side. Then he tells them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ and breathes on them the Holy Spirit.

He speaks peace, first, into their fears: into the fear that they’re next for arrest and punishment. Into the fear that everything they’d done and given up and hoped for is worthless. Into the fear that they’d got God wrong, and themselves wrong, and that the kingdom they’d thought was coming was just an idle tale. Into the fear that despite all Jesus had said, suffering and death do have the final word. The risen Christ speaks peace into all that. And then he shows them his hands and his side, signs that this peace doesn’t come from dodging pain or skirting round suffering, but by entering right into it. The fear is real, the pain is real, the death was real. And so is the peace. ‘Not as the world gives do I give to you’, Jesus had said, the night he was betrayed. He’d promised peace then, and now comes with this gift. And the peace isn’t just a breathing of new life and hope and forgiveness into the past: it’s also an opening up of a future beyond those locked doors.

This peace that Jesus gives is the deep peace, shalom, of right relationship with God, with one another, with creation, with ourselves. It’s the peace of the new creation, where all that is damaged and broken by sin is restored. And we get a deliberate echo of creation in the way John tells the story: in Genesis we read that ‘the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.’ Here, in John, we get the same word as Jesus breathes onto his disciples the Holy Spirit. In a new breath of life they are recreated, they become the living beings God made them to be.

And so a new future unfolds. ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ The disciples become apostles: the ones called become the ones sent, not in their own strength – which they know well enough to have been found wanting – but in the power of the risen Christ. They’re sent out with this peace, and with the authority to forgive sins – to declare Christ’s victory over sin for all who turn to him, so that the future of the new creation unfolds not just for them but for everyone. They no longer need to live behind locked doors – and nor do we.

And as they go, they discover something new. They’d recognised Jesus by his hands, those hands which had touched and taught and blessed and healed, and broken bread and raised to life and embraced suffering and bled for the world’s pain. And now they found that somehow their hands were Jesus’ hands: that as they touched and taught and blessed and healed and entered into the world’s pain, the risen Jesus was still present, ministering his peace, and inviting people into the life of the new creation.

Would people recognise Peter and James and Simon and the rest by their hands? We don’t know. We do know that they recognised Jesus by them. Look at your hands. How do you use them to touch, to minister healing, to bless, to enter into the world’s pain? They are yours, and they are Christ’s. What do they say about you? And what do they say about him?