2nd. Sunday of Easter (A)
(Acts
of the Apostles 2:42-47; 1st. Peter 1:3-9;
St.
John’s Gospel 20:19-31)
Peace be with you!
That was the ordinary Hebrew
greeting, ‘Shalom’; a word to which we have become accustomed through our
modern hymns. But in today’s Gospel
passage it has no merely conventional meaning: it is repeated twice, and in
both cases is the first word in the clause; two details which tell us that the
word ‘peace’ is being strongly emphasized.
At the Last Supper Jesus had promised
His disciples:
Peace I leave you, My
peace I give you; not as the world gives do I give you. (John 14:27)
To be able to give peace was generally
considered a royal prerogative: that is what kings were for, to win, protect,
and confirm peace and prosperity for the people. But, in Jewish society chosen, taught, and
formed by God over thousands of years, it was above all the divine prerogative
to give peace. Jesus as the promised
Messiah --- the ‘Prince of Peace’ foretold by Isaiah --- gives His own special
gift of peace as the Messianic King.
Moreover, He does not give it as would worldly kings, for they give a peace
won through victory in war and maintained by coercion and struggle. Here in England, when the Romans invaded so
many centuries ago, they waged a bitter war against the native inhabitants, and
thereby provoked a British chief to remark, ‘Where they make a desert they call
it peace!’
Such was never Jesus’ way. Quite the contrary, He – the Messianic Prince
of Peace – won peace by sacrificing Himself.
And now, having risen from the dead, He gives His peace – the fruit of
His self-sacrifice – to His disciples, showing them, at the same time, the
wounds whereby He had won that peace.
The disciples were
filled with joy,
we read, just as Jesus foretold at
the Last Supper where He had said:
You are sad now, but I
shall see you again, and your hearts will rejoice with a joy that no one can
take from you. (John 16:21s.)
For Jewish aspirations in those days,
peace and joy were distinguishing features of the final glorious time when God
would rule as King, giving harmony to human life and to the whole world. That time had now arrived:
Jesus came and stood
among them and said, ‘Peace be with you’ and showed them His hands and His
side.
Mankind finds peace before God because
Jesus – Son of God and Son of Man –died sinless in His human fidelity to, and
love for, God His Father; and then by His rising from the dead He destroyed
death along with its ‘sting’, which is sin.
In Jesus and by His Spirit men and women of good will can now overcome
sin for love of God.
Peace be with you!
Notice that this Paschal gift of
peace belongs not to individuals as such, but to the Christian Community as a
whole. It was first given to the
Community deliberately gathered together as one for common prayer and in the
face of a common threat; it was, that is, given to the Church both militant and
witnessing. Jesus does not makes His
presence manifest as some prophetic prodigy for the amazement of the world, but to the assembled brethren, as divine
Head of His mystical Body, His Church, and only here, at this sacred encounter,
does He say, ‘Peace be with you.’ And that,
incidentally, is why, when we sin and lose our peace with God we have to
confess our sins to a priest; because peace is the gift of the Risen Christ to
His Church, and in order to regain our lost, broken, peace we have first to be
received back into full communion with the Church and share again in her prerogative:
Peace, with God and man in Jesus the Risen Christ.
Jesus then declared:
As
the Father sent Me, so am I sending you.
Once again these words of the Risen
Lord Jesus pick up a thread in His discourse at the Last Supper. There Jesus had prayed for His own who were
to remain behind in the world, saying:
Sanctify them in the
truth. Thy word is truth. As Thou didst send Me into the world, l so I
have sent them. And for their sake I
consecrate Myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth. (John 17:17-19)
That is, before the disciples could
be definitively sent out on mission they had to be themselves renewed and
re-sourced through the truth: through the word of Jesus and the Spirit of
truth.
Righteous Father, the
world does not know You, but I know You; and these know that You have sent
Me. I made Your name known to them and
will make it known. (John 17:25s.)
It is the Spirit, the Holy Spirit,
Who thus sanctifies the disciples, makes them holy as He, the Spirit, is holy,
so that having been consecrated as Jesus was consecrated they could be sent as
Jesus was sent:
As
the Father sent Me, so am I sending you.
Whereupon He ‘breathed’ upon and
said:
Receive
the Holy Spirit.
In the book of Genesis we read (2:7):
Then the Lord God
formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life, and man became a living being.
The word ‘breathed’ occurs again in
the book of Wisdom (15:11):
The
One Who fashioned him … breathed into him a living spirit.
From these texts we understand that
this moment when Jesus breathes His own Spirit into His disciples, is the
moment of a new creation, endowing them with eternal life.
For those whose sins
you forgive, they are forgiven;
not just ‘forgotten’ by God, but
forgiven, whereby the sinner is restored to peace and supernatural health as
well.
For those whose sins
you retain, they are retained;
for there is no peace, no gift of the
Holy Spirit, apart from the Body of Christ.
God does not deal with ‘loners’, He has only One beloved, His
only-begotten Son, Whom He sent as Jesus among men and Christ for men, and Whom
He recognizes as Head of the Body which is His Church, the gathering together
in conscious and willed community of all those who believe in Him as the
One sent by His heavenly Father.
Here we see the true essence of the
Holy Spirit’s work amongst men on earth: to make manifest and give judgment
against, to abolish, sin; because He is the Spirit of holiness, the Spirit of
the all-holy God.
Of course, it is undeniably true that
He is the Spirit Who worked wonders of all kinds in and through chosen
individuals throughout Old Testament history; but His greatest wonder is shown
here in the gradual obliteration of sin in the world and the ultimate re-making
of sinful men and women into a holy, consecrated, family of God.
Yes, in the Old Testament the Spirit
won salvation for Israel on many occasions; but here, ultimate salvation cannot
brought about through an occasional triumph in battle, but through the destruction
of sin and the forgiveness of sinners.
Yes, in the Old dispensation the
Spirit foretold future events, but here in the New Testament His greatest
pronouncement is the word of God which consecrates in truth.
Jesus Himself, here on earth, had
once sent out some of His disciples on a mission to go before Him to the towns
and villages where He Himself was to visit, and we are told that:
He gave them authority
over unclean spirits, to cast them out and to heal every disease and every
infirmity. (Matthew
10:1)
That sending had been only a trial
run, so to speak. Here, in today’s
Gospel we have the real sending, the real mission, of the disciples; and here
too we have the real ‘gift’, the real ‘power’ bestowed upon them by Jesus to
enable them to fulfil their mission: victory over sin in themselves and
authority over sin in others by virtue of themselves having been sanctified in
the truth.
And yet the Apostle Thomas himself
refused to accept and be sanctified by the truth proclaimed by the infant
Church! As you are aware, Our Lord, knowing
Thomas through and through, had pity of his weakness and his ignorance, and allowed
him the sight he wanted; but He gave him a very strong rebuke, the words of
which abide for an eternal lesson to mankind:
Have you come to
believe because you have seen Me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed!
The beloved disciple John who tells us
of this was well aware of the privilege he himself had been granted by God
which enabled him to look into the tomb and to believe, whereas Mary Magdalene
saw and feared, and Peter saw and was puzzled.
And here John tells us about the Apostle Thomas in order to humble
himself and show us where the greatest privilege of all is to be gained: by
believing without seeing, believing, that is, on the testimony of the Church.
People of God, if we wish to be part
of God’s new creation, if we long for such a purification that we might be able
to enter upon a life of eternal fulfilment in presence to and appreciation of
divine beauty and truth, goodness and love, we should pray that we might ourselves
be sanctified in truth by the Spirit of truth; that we might know and
appreciate through faith God’s message of salvation --still proclaimed by Jesus
in and through His Church -- ever more fully, and love it ever more
deeply. The only proof that we have
indeed received the Holy Spirit into our hearts and are allowing Him to
rule there, is the objective fact that we sincerely seek to overcome sin by the
Christian discipline of expressing our faith through love. As Saint John says:
This
is eternal life, the keeping of God’s commandments.
And those commandments are not
difficult because God’s Holy Spirit has been given to us. Therefore, let us open wide our hearts to
receive anew the Holy Spirit of Easter peace, and then go from this blessed assembly
of all-as-one to bear joyful, individual, witness to Jesus by lives of
loving, Catholic, obedience.
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