Standing Under the Scriptures
May 3, 2009

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday are:

1 John 3.16-24: Jesus’ laying down of his life contrains us to be similarly concerned for our fellows and to love God, as evidenced by keeping his commandments.

John 10.11-18: The Good Shepherd is marked by his utter commitment this sheep.

There was no class discussion last Sunday to report on. Still I am constrained to speak of the Gospel as appointed by the lectionary (Luke 24.36b-48), for fear that otherwise we will lose its transcendent dimension. This is the utterly new and stupendous development that it conveys in the whole history of divine-human relationship: God’s raising of Jesus from the dead. Jesus appears to all of his disciples in the evening of the day of his resurrection. This comes immediately after the encounter of them with him on the road to Emmaus, and even prior to that there have been intimations of his rising. Nevertheless the disciples are startled and frightened, as by seeing a ghost. Whereupon he shows them the tangible evidence of his reality and identity in his hands and his feet. While they are “still disbelieving for joy,” he asks for and eats a piece of broiled fish. And having done this, he opens the minds of the disciples to the Scriptures, how in his death and resurrection he has fulfilled what they foretold.

This “disbelieving for joy” is I believe the key phrase here. In view of the utter unprecedentedness of this event, it is no wonder that the disciples needed a while to take it in, to comprehend its reality. But even while they were in the process of doing so its implications were dawning on them, extending even to their being freed from sin and death and holding out for them an unbounded joy. Possibly recourse to a 1950s film (which has stuck in my mind ever since) is here justified in conveying this.

It is “Around the World in Eighty Days,” based on the Jules Verne novel. The hero and his devoted valet, after surmounting all manner of obstacles, arrive back in London but a day too late to claim their reward from the deliciously stodgy Reform Club. Then it dawns on the valet that they have failed to take account of crossing the International Date Line and are not late after all. He is so excited that he has difficulty in putting his realization into words, let alone in conveying it to his master. But eventually he succeeds, and the two of them stride into the Reform Club as the clock is striking noon. If an earthly happening can generate such excitement and joy, how much more so the heavenly one of the salvation of the world.

It is not just the disciples, however, who were slow to comprehend the stupendousness of the resurrection event and to experience the joy that it entails. We ourselves in the dullness of our humanity have been and still are; I confess that this is the case with me. But we are not left to do so by cranking up our imaginations, as it were by the force of our own wills. Instead, as the passage itself indicates, we are provided with the instruments that we need in our weakness. One of these is to be seen in Jesus’ otherwise curious eating of a piece of fish. This points to the sacramental character of eating in the whole biblical tradition, beginning with the Passover and culminating in the Eucharist. Participation in Christ’s body and blood, and thus in his death and resurrection, is thereby made possible for us in our corporate worship. The other instrument is God’s word, the Scriptures themselves as they are opened to us through principled reading and study, as in our class.

But the joy that comes to us in these ways is not just to be kept for ourselves or even for our immediate church circle. Instead the “repentance and forgiveness of sins’ which it makes possible is to be preached “to all nations.” By whom? By the disciples, yes, but not just by them, also by us. Our passage concludes: “For you [including us] are witnesses of these things.”

Faithfully, Fr. Ted