Easter 2
Sermon preached by the Reverend Andrew Hammond, Chaplain, St John’s College Chapel
When it was evening on the first day of the week.. the doors .. were locked for fear of the Jews | Jn 20.19
How do you feel on a Sunday evening? Are you buoyed up by the experience of church earlier in the day, maybe even by the wistful quiet of Evensong, and feeling warmly mellow? Or is there a shadow? – is there even a rising sense of melancholy? I know people who straightforwardly hate Sunday evenings. They find them depressing, or worse. They are visited by real or imaginary fears.
In my experience the people who most dislike Sunday evenings are those who have not had much of an uplifting Sunday daytime. Or they might have had a theoretically lovely lazy morning of reading the papers, followed by a huge lunch, but by the evening are feeling a bit bombed out and rather blue.
St John gives us a picture of the disciples in the aftermath of Jesus’ death. It is Sunday evening, and they are hidden away. They are more than melancholy; they’re huddled in fear. They’re crammed into the upper room, claustrophobic, irritable, very twitchy at the slightest hint of discovery by the authorities. Into this awkward, edgy atmosphere the risen Jesus simply insinuates himself. He just arrives, and announces himself with an everyday greeting – ‘peace be with you’.
John’s gospel narrative is tantalisingly impressionistic. We don’t learn what the disciples’ first reaction was. Maybe his silence on this suggests that they were silent too, struck dumb – first that someone should be in their midst, apparently without having used the door, which they would have had to unlock. And dumb too as he reveals who he is by showing them his wounds. He has to do this because they can’t immediately recognise him. But with recognition comes joy.
Then Jesus greets them again. In one sense this is just a re-start to the conversation, another ‘hello’. But the
words begin to ring a deeper note. Peace be with you. It’s all right. Do not be afraid.
How readily do we hear these words of Jesus in our own lives? We here are blessed by worshipping together, so Sunday evenings may not be the dark time that they are for others. Still, most of us hit bad patches – times when we feel marooned, cut off from the warmer climes of God’s love in Jesus. Ill health, misfortune, financial worries,
marriage problems, work problems, personal antagonism, bereavement … and sometimes just nagging sadness or doubts. Times when we perhaps understandably forget the good news of Easter, and slip into the kind of nervy agitation which the disciples were feeling on that first Sunday night. This is when, with God’s grace, in prayerful openness, we have to let Jesus’ words ring true; let them sound an echo in our hearts. It’s all right. Do not be afraid. I bring you real peace, a kind of peace which passes all understanding. I am with you, always, to the end of time.
Sometimes we are having such a hard time that just recollecting Jesus’ words does not seem enough. But I just
said ‘we have to let Jesus’ words ring true’: I was deliberately suggesting that we have to do something, we have to try to summon up even a wee bit of personal agency here. And there is reason to persist, to try. There is a helpful parallel, or analogy maybe, in another sphere. There are some activities – such as the Alexander technique, or yoga or possibly Tai Chi – where structured, careful physical actions have an internal, psychological benefit. It’s the opposite of mind over matter; more, matter over mind. This can begin, and very fruitfully, as an internal
conversation. In all sorts of spiritual or psychological situations this can be really helpful: I call it ‘mind over mind’. But we can go further. We can try a kind of insistent reminding ourselves of Jesus’ words of comfort, of peace, of reassurance - a reminding done as a deliberate, repeated act, a prayerful act, a prayerful action. This can be soothing, healing to the soul. Now it’s closer to ‘matter over mind’.
What we are doing, in fact, is adjusting into a kind of liturgical register. We are sinking into the sustaining world of rhythm, the liberating world of spiritual discipline in the best sense. When we repeat the words of Christ, we allow his words to act upon us in the here and now. This should not surprise us. Liturgy, the worship of the Church, our work as Christians together (whether literally or imaginatively) - that work is profoundly biblical in character and origin. The very words of scripture have a power to heal, to restore, to energise. Sometimes I begin morning prayer thinking, ‘gosh, so many psalm verses to get through’. But in fact, you do sink into them; the context adjusts itself; time passes differently. Or, more likely, the Holy Spirit adjusts the context, differs the passage of time. So it can also be, if we take the words of Christ in his resurrection appearances and sit with them, or sit under them.
When I was training for ordination I spent some time on placement at Belmarsh Prison. One day it was the turn of the imam to take me round on his tour of duty. In what was euphemistically called the Health Wing, in the next cell to Ronnie Biggs, as it happens, there was a deeply troubled Muslim man. We were only able to speak to him through the hatch in the door, and what the imam did was to sing a few verses from the Qu’uran and then as it were blow them into the cell. This calmed the man, powerfully. Now you may think that sounds perilously close to a kind of superstitiousness. But those of us who take seriously the sacramentality of our faith, of our journey, of our life should get it.
So, whenever we feel weighed down by our burdens, whenever we are keenly aware of our wounds – which might be deep – then we can call upon those words of Christ, invoke them. And we can recall that as he spoke them, he was revealing himself to his anguished friends by showing them his own wounds. Those gougings and tearings of the flesh of God-made-man were very real, and they lived on in his risen body. They live on, indeed, now, in heaven. And they are markers of the deeper sufferings of Christ, because they show how he quite willingly bent his head before the violence and loathing of humankind. He received those wounds by submitting to the worst that humankind could do. And the power of his perfect victimhood was such that the whole realm of violence and hate and pain and sorrow and death was entirely overturned. Then, and for evermore. Groping our way back into this truth, appropriating it for ourselves, is what we must do (and can do) in our dark nights of the soul, at those times when we are locked in for fear of what lies outside.