Journeying Into Mystery

HOMILY FOR THE 2^ND SUNDAY IN EASTER

 There is a saying that goes, “He is as nervous as a cat in a thunderstorm.” Cats feel an enormous amount of anxiety in thunderstorms. It is an anxiety fueled by paralyzing fear, helplessness, and a lack of power to stop the storm raging outside. The same amount of anxiety, paralyzing fear, and helplessness fills the upper room in which the apostles cower, following the death of Jesus.

 They have all right to fear. The Romans had just brutally and publicly executed their leader. In the Gospel of John, they have been very well known associates of Jesus for over three years. They fear that at any moment, they will hear the heavy trod of soldiers’ feet outside the flimsy door behind which they are hiding, and they will be brutally arrested, whipped mercilessly, and crucified just like their leader, their bodies left hanging on crosses to be picked clean by the birds.

 We all know the anxiety the apostles are feeling. Anxiety and fear can fill our lives to the point of being paralyzed by it. Just like the apostles, we cower and we hide in our own upper rooms, behind barriers as flimsy as the door that separates the apostles from the world outside.

 The anxiety and fear that permeates the entire world today is so thick one can reach out and touch it. I remember the fear during the Cuban Missile crisis of the early sixties when paranoia drove people to create fallout shelters in their own backyards. I remember the same fear following 911 when some people were literally driven insane because they feared terrorists hiding behind every rock and every tree. Today, we turn our homes into armed fortresses in vain hope that we can fend off all threats to ourselves. Ironically, the more we arm ourselves, our fear and anxiety does not decrease, it only increases.

 We want peace as much do the apostles! But the peace we seek is fleeting. Everything we try to do on our own initiative to create peace fails. We cannot find peace outside of ourselves. Peace is something that comes only from within. Today’s gospel shows us that there is only way we will find peace in this very violent, anxiety-ridden world, and that is in Jesus Christ.

 The apostles learned this lesson in today’s gospel. Into the apostles’ fear-filled upper room, Jesus appears. What is the first thing he says to the apostles? He says, “Peace be with you.” In an instance, the paralyzing fear that has gripped the apostles falls away. It is as when Jesus uttered the word, peace, they breathed it into their whole being.  Amidst the violence and chaos that rages outside the door of that upper room, they suddenly not only feel peace, but they become the peace of which Jesus speaks.

 Then Jesus breathes upon them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” In receiving the Holy Spirit, they suddenly know in their minds and their hearts, the peace of which Jesus speaks. From that moment on, they become fearless. They will go forth from that upper room to fearlessly proclaim the risen Lord to all people. They no longer fear the violence that the world can throw at them, for they know that the peace of Christ has forever conquered all fear, all anxiety, and eventually will overthrow all violence and hate.

 Into our fear-filled upper rooms, Jesus appears and says to us, “Peace be with you.” To experience and to know the peace of Christ, we must first believe. Jesus says to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen but believed” We must believe that once we believe in the Risen Christ and the peace he offers us, nothing will separate us from that peace. St. Paul expresses this in his letter to the Romans. “What can separate us from the love of Christ?” St. Paul writes. “Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?” St. Paul concludes, “No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us.”

 When the peace of Christ fills our hearts and our minds, then, like the apostles, we will no longer be conquered by fear. We will become as fearless as the apostles, which leads us to one more task to accomplish. We must share that peace of Christ with all people. There is a beautiful prayer written by Jon Vandelier, a pastor from South Africa, a pastor who has known and experienced the horror and violence of apartheid. His prayer expresses wonderfully how we go about sharing Christ’s peace as we leave this church today.

 Around the well of your grace, O God,

Are those who thirst for friendship and love;

Help us to offer them the living water of community and connectedness.

 

Around the well of your life, O God,

Are those who thirst for joy and safety;

Help us to offer them the water of playfulness and protection.

 

Around the well of your mercy, O God,

Are those who thirst for wholeness and peace;

Help us to offer them the living water of comfort, healing and welcome.

 

Around the well of your presence, O God,

Are those who thirst for meaning and connection;

Help us to offer them the living water of service and worship.

 

May the life we have found in you,

Be the gift we share with all who hunger and thirst,

With all who are outcast and rejected,

With all who have too little or too much,

with all who are wounded or ashamed.

And, through us, may this corner of the world

Overflow with you, living water.”

 We pray this through Christ, our Risen Lord. “Amen.”

Blindsided is an interesting word. We usually use the word to describe a situation in which a person is caught unaware. For instance, “the quarterback was blindsided by the tackle.” Or, “the politician was   blindsided by the exposé on him in the newspaper.” In neither of the gospel passages below are the participants caught blindsided.

Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this
and said to him, “Surely we are not also blind, are we?”
Jesus said to them,
“If you were blind, you would have no sin;
but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains. (John’s account of the man born blind)

Then after this he (Jesus) said to his disciples,
“Let us go back to Judea.”
The disciples said to him,
“Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you,
and you want to go back there?”
Jesus answered,
“Are there not twelve hours in a day?
If one walks during the day, he does not stumble,
because he sees the light of this world.
But if one walks at night, he stumbles,
because the light is not in him.” (John’s account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead)

In the story of the man born blind, Jesus pointedly informs the Pharisees that they are well aware of their sin. They are not blindsided by it. Their defiance of Jesus is an acknowledgement of this fact. In the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, Jesus is not blind to the danger into which he is taking by reentering Judea. He knows full well that when he enters Judea, he is walking into a trap that will eventually end his life. As we enter Holy Week this liturgical year how well aware are we of the journey we are taking? Are we vulnerable to being blindsided?

Lent is a time of introspection, a time of self-examination. It is a time in which all excuses of being blindsided fall away. The 40 days of Lent compels us to dig through all that which muddles our lives. To use a graphic metaphor, it is roto rooter time, in which we stand waist deep in the crap that blocks and clogs our spiritual life, and examine the true status of our lives. If we choose to remain mired in sin, we will only sink deeper and deeper into sin, eventually losing ourselves, disappearing under its weight. This is precisely what the Pharisees choose to do in the story of the man born blind. Unlike the Pharisees,  if we choose to be free from the mire in which we find ourselves, we must make a commitment to clear away and wash ourselves clean of the sin that putrefies our lives. There are consequences to both choices.

It is easy to get really comfortable in sin. It is easy to give in to all the allurements, all the pleasures, all the false promises that sin offers.  It can be really nice. The paradox is that we know it is happening, we know we are losing who we really are, as sin continues to pile lies upon lies on ourselves. What is absolutely astounding is that we give it our full and open assent!

If we are to live up to the full potential God meant for us when we were created, we must face our sin and acknowledge it. As the comedian W.C. Fields once said, “There comes a time in a young man’s life when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation.”

We all have one sin that is an Achilles Heel for us. To discard and walk away from the sin that plagues us is to die to a former way of living that was once so attractive and comfortable. We walk away and hope we can continue to walk away into a new and healthier way of living. Do we have the strength not to get lured back?  It’s not easy. Again as W.C. Fields once observed, “Don’t tell me you can’t quit drinking! I have done it a thousand times!!” The sad fact about W.C. Fields, is that even though he was fully aware that he was addicted to alcohol and it was destroying his liver, he was unable to break free from his addiction. He remarked on his death bed that his one wish was that he could have gotten through life without alcohol.

Unlike the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, in John’s Gospel, the active ministry of Jesus lasts three years. Most of that time, Jesus is a fugitive from the religious and civil authorities in Judea. He  makes occasional excursions into Jerusalem, stirs things up for the religious and civil authorities, then “gets out of town” so to speak, into Galilee, where they are unable to touch him. One could say that Galilee was Jesus’ “Hole in the Wall,” to use a Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid reference.

In the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, Jesus enters Judea full knowing that this would be his last journey. He was well aware that one of his disciples had conspired with the Jewish religious authorities to plan his death. Nonetheless, Jesus fully commits himself to the completion of his earthly mission. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it produces great fruit”(John 12:24) Jesus teaches just prior to his death. Jesus knows he must die first in order to bring about a new order in a world stunted and twisted by sin.

When we make a commitment to free ourselves from sin, we commit ourselves to experiencing a death to our old selves. This does not happen by accident. Like Jesus, fully aware, we commit ourselves to die to an old way of life, an old way we ordered our world so that we will be able to live a new order by which our lives will be more fruitful. This is not the one time “born again” (as our Evangelical brothers and sisters like to say) commitment of conversion. It is a daily commitment to conversion. We have to make this commitment of conversion every day of our lives from that moment forward.  It is not enough to say, “I have accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior,” and then lapse back into the way we once lived. When we choose Jesus as “the way, the truth and the life”, our living must utterly change to match our words.

Beginning from the first Mass of Palm/Passion Sunday we enter into the world of Jesus walking fully aware into a world of darkness, chaos, treachery, cowardice, and brutal execution. Jesus was not blindsided by what he experienced. He knew what he was getting himself into. But he also knew that in entering this very dark place, he would emerge victorious three days later. As we walk through these days of darkness with Jesus, may we shed the darkness that clings to our own lives, die to ourselves, and emerge with Jesus victorious on Easter Sunday.