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 (John 14:27):
Peace I leave you, My
peace I give you; not as the world gives do I give you.
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 for us 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 when 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 was now dawning:
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 flesh by fidelity
to, and love for, God His Father; and then -- by rising from the dead -- He destroyed
death along with its ‘sting’, which is sin.
In Jesus and by His Spirit all men and women of good-will can now overcome
sin for love of God.
Peace
be with you!
Notice, however, that this Paschal
gift of peace belongs not to individuals as such, but to the whole Christian
Community, as a whole. It was first
given to the community of disciples gathered together for common prayer in the
face of a common threat; it was given, that is, to the Church both militant and
witnessing. Jesus does not make 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
individual peace -- if and when lost, broken, through our sin(s) -- we have
first to be received back into full communion with the Church and come to 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:
Consecrate them in the
truth. Your word is truth. As You sent Me into the world, so I sent them
into the world, and I consecrate Myself for them, so that they also may be
consecrated in truth. (John 17:17-19)
That is, before the disciples could definitively
go out on mission in the name of Jesus for His Church in the world, they had to
be themselves renewed and re-sourced through the truth (John 17:25s.):
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
by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, Who I
will give to sanctify My disciples, forming them in My likeness through obedience
and love, and holy as He -- My Spirit -- is holy, so that thus consecrated in Truth
I can say to them:
“As the Father sent Me,
so I send you.”
And when He had said this,
He breathed upon them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
In the book of Genesis we read (2:7):
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 the Spirit of supernatural holiness
and life, for themselves and for those they serve in the name of Jesus.
For those whose sins
you forgive, they are forgiven;
not just ‘forgotten’ by God, but
forgiven, by the restored gift of holiness and life by the Spirit, whereby the
sinner is also restored to peace of mind and heart.
For those whose sins
you retain however, they are retained;
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, a Man-among-men, for their
appreciation and love, and as Christ for their salvation; One Whom He
recognizes as Head of the Body which is His One Church, the gathering
together in conscious and willed community of all those who believe in
Him as the only-beloved One sent by His heavenly Father for their
salvation and their adoption as children of God.
Here we see the essence of the Holy
Spirit’s work amongst men on earth: to make manifest, give judgment against, and
abolish, sin; because He is the Spirit of holiness, the Spirit of the all-holy and
all-loving God and Father of us all.
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 under the new covenant, salvation
cannot be brought about through any occasional triumph in battle, but only 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, 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:
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 enter into the tomb and to believe; but here he tells us
about the Apostle Thomas in order to 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 supernatural life of eternal fulfilment in awareness 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 our sinfulness
by the Christian discipline of letting the one, true, faith determine and form
our way of life. 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
to bear joyful, personal, witness to Jesus by lives of loving, Catholic,
obedience.
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