2nd Sunday of Easter B

See Commentary on John 20:19-23

Homily 1 - 2006

The doors were closed in the room where the disciples were. They had closed them themselves.

But with John’s gospel, words often mean more than they immediately suggest.

What were closed were the doors of their hearts and of their minds. They had locked themselves in. They had locked each other in. Each one’s collapse in faith confirmed the others in their disbelief: Sadly: whose sins you retain they are retained.

That is what our cultures do. We chatter endlessly about freedom, and don’t ask what freedom is for. We champion quality of life, and don’t accept the consequences of genuinely respecting life.

It is so easy to lock up the minds and hearts of each other – to confirm our common blindness, our common hardness of heart. That is what the disciples were doing to each other.

But then. Jesus came and stood among them. The Jesus who had died alone, betrayed, denied, deserted by them.

He greeted them: Shalom! Peace be with you. It was the familiar Jewish greeting, but with John, again, words can mean more than they immediately suggest.

What did Jesus’ greeting mean to these disciples who had lost faith? It meant acceptance, forgiveness, continuing friendship.

They hadn’t first converted, repented or been sorry. Jesus took the initiative. Jesus offered them acceptance, forgiveness and friendship while they were still drowning in their faithlessness, in their sin... While they were imprisoning themselves, and each other, in their emptiness and despair, Jesus offered them love, mercy – (they mean the same thing).

We have come to learn that this is not surprising: if love is not unconditional, it is not yet real love; if mercy does not reach out first to sin - unrepented sin -it is not real mercy. Indeed, only if mercy reaches out to unrepented sin can genuine repentance be possible. Remorse, regret, fear of punishment, fear of hell, can be there, but not genuine repentance.

We have come to believe that God really loves. Jesus has shown us in himself what true mercy is.

Our song can be that of the psalmist today:

Let the sons of Israel say: His love has no end. Let the sons of Aaron say: His love has no end. Let those who fear the Lord say: His love has no end.

As the disciples allowed the Spirit of Jesus to wash over them, to sink into them ... as they let themselves be loved, let themselves receive mercy, they unlocked, as it were, the doors of the room where they were.

John went on: Jesus, the merciful, accepting, forgiving Jesus, breathed on them and said: Receive the Holy Spirit (receive my Spirit...become merciful like me). For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven. Set each other free through your mutual love and through your constant readiness to show mercy first.

Indeed, Jesus also said: As the Father sent me, I now send you. I send you into the world to set it free to love.

But, as he had warned earlier, before the world ridiculed and crucified him, the world doesn’t value mercy, the world doesn’t trust mercy. It may not mind if we love one another,- but don’t let us try to suggest love as a governing value for the world at large! Even our own nation refuses to welcome our nearest neighbours seeking asylum from persecution and injustice.

So much for mercy!

Can we listen to Jesus, allow ourselves to absorb his Spirit (that he wishes so much to breathe on us),and accept our mission of mercy to our world?

Homily 2 - 2009

I love this Gospel passage. Each time I talk about it, I get excited myself.

The risen Jesus appeared to the disciples - to the ten of them (Judas had left the group, and Thomas was apparently absent).

These were the ones who had been so deeply loved by Jesus, the ones he had, not long before, called his friends, the ones who meant so much to him. Yet, in the face of danger, they had deserted him. One of them, Peter, had repeatedly denied having anything to do with him, having even known him.

The first words of the murdered and risen Jesus to them were: Peace be with you. And his second words to them were: Peace be with you. Not a word of recrimination - as though their desertion was now irrelevant – not forgotten, just irrelevant.

He simply wished them peace. He simply yearned that they be at peace – these deserters.

What incredible bigness of heart. What incredible freedom. What incredible love.

Yet, is it incredible? Isn't genuine love always unconditional and unmerited? We might struggle to get anywhere near that - but we know in our heart of hearts that that's the way true love is.

If God doesn't forgive, God doesn't love. If God does not love, God is not God.

Then Jesus went on to tell them - these deserters - that he trusted them, that he relied on them. He sent them out to carry on the same mission that had been the sole focus of his whole life: As the Father sent me, so am I sending you. “Show the world what God is like! Show the world what I am like!”

He breathed on them - as the creating God had breathed on the clay in the garden of Eden, and made of it the first, the essential Adam, the man, the truly human being.

There's a new creative energy abroad in the world!

Then he said: Forgive! Reveal the heart of God!

Forgiveness is the shape that, sadly, love has to take in our world. Is there any human relationship - even beautiful human relationship - without its mixture of self-interest?

And since forgiveness is the real crunch test of love - that's the message.

And the only ones who can preach that with any credibility, and who can witness to that with any passion, must themselves, firstly, be sinners.

We qualify for that, sadly - or is it wonderfully?

Can you hear the risen Christ saying to you: Peace be with you? Can you let yourself hear the risen Christ say to you: Peace be with you? Before you get yourself into any sort of shape?

Unless you can hear him, you're useless.

But, and this is my final point: it's OK to find it difficult, to doubt.

Thomas did. And the first thing that the risen Jesus said to Thomas, who struggled to believe forgiveness, was: Peace be with you!

Homily 3 - 2012

I was quite shocked during the week when I heard that upwards of forty young men who had been sexually abused by a small number of priests and Christian brothers had since committed suicide. I knew that there had been some suicides. I knew that the experience of being abused usually destroyed the quality of life in different ways of nearly all those abused; but to learn that upwards of forty had killed themselves over the years has been quite shocking.

I don’t know how you feel. I would like to say from the start that it is quite appropriate to feel not only hurt, but decidedly angry.

We have some chance of dealing constructively with those feelings which we are aware of and in touch with. The energies associated with anger are important energies, and can move us to seek and to work for change. Unrecognised and unowned, however, they can be dangerous and destructive to us and to others. Of itself, the word anger is too generic a term.

There are many shades and many degrees of anger, and often a collection of other feelings along with it.

It is helpful to sit with whatever you feel and allow yourself to notice it, and give it the opportunity to take shape and to be identified. It is also important to work out whom you are angry with: the perpetrators, their superiors, the parents who did not believe their abused children, the press, the victims themselves who have chosen to speak out, their lawyers, your workmates who make fun of you and of the Church.

Notice your feelings. Then decide what you might do with all the energy associated with them. You might judge yourselves powerless to do anything. You might think carefully and responsibly seeking to understand better the complexities. You might support initiatives of various kinds set in motion by others.

The past cannot be undone, but it can be learnt from. Victims can be respected, understood, supported and compensated somehow, where possible. We cannot relive the past, but we can plan for the future – to ensure as safe an environment as possible for young people today and tomorrow. We can try to discover the causes for the offences in the first place, and for the inadequate way they have been dealt with.

Obviously, abuse did not happen only in the Church – but it did happen there, despite all that the Church stands for.

Personally, I have done a fair bit of reading, and thinking and self-examination around the issue of the clerical culture of which I am a part – and, in order to understand that culture in context, I have looked at the broader issue of how all institutions tend to operate.

Over recent weeks we have reflected on the Passion of Jesus. How come that decent people, good people, thoroughly religious people – just like us – could be so deaf to the message of Jesus, so unresponsive, and ultimately so hostile and violent as to deliberately bring about his death?

Blindness, and the inability to respond appropriately to whatever challenges the status quo. I am inclined to think that we shall always be blind and deaf to what we unconsciously do not want to see and hear.

There is only one thing that will set us free from that blindness, I believe, and that is the deeper knowledge, surprisingly, that we are all loved and forgiven, unconditionally, by God. To the uninvolved observer, the possibility of unconditional forgiveness can seem recklessly dangerous.

But to the one who truly believes it, and who has experienced it, it is the key to self-knowledge, to self-acceptance, to true self respect and to genuine growth.

Over time, it cures blindness; and it empowers true and purposeful repentance and change of direction.

We heard in today's Gospel Jesus' unconditional offer Peace be with you to those disciples guilty of betrayal, denial and abject abandonment in his moment of need. It was his way, the only way, of saving the world.

And each week, as we present ourselves for the celebration of Eucharist, just as we are, sometimes confused, sometimes angry, sometimes guilty, always in need, he says again to each of us: Peace be with you. And we know we are slowly changed.

Homily 4 - 2015

Thomas was not as silly as we have made him look. In fact, I think we would all be much better disciples if we would let ourselves experience something like what I imagine he went through.

When Jesus was arrested in the garden, Thomas was shocked. It was not just fear for his skin that was behind his abandoning Jesus. In fact, all the disciples were shocked. They were all totally confused. Despite all that Jesus had said, they did not expect that he would be arrested, because psychologically they could not. For them, he was the Messiah, the Christ. They believed that; they wanted that. And it got worse. Jesus was humiliated, helplessly brutalised and murdered. No miracles; no triumphant escape.

The possibility of resurrection did not occur to them; it was not on their radar. On the Sunday morning, the women disciples went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ dead body. The male disciples did not have the decency, the energy, the residual love, whatever, to do even that.

Later that same Sunday Jesus appeared to them. Thomas was not there. When he joined them later, they told him they had seen, not just Jesus, but “the Lord”. Thomas would not, could not, believe. What could he not believe? The other disciples? Their story? It must have been just a ghost, or a figment of their heated imaginations… Why did he demand to see Jesus’ wounds before ever he would believe? What went on in his mind over the next few days?

How could Jesus have been killed if he really were God’s Messiah? How could any sort of decent God ever allow that? That was not Thomas’s idea of Messiah – not his idea of the one Israel had waited for for over a millennium, the one who, according to so many prophecies, would reverse Israel’s humiliation, the one who would forever establish his authority over all the nations. Effectively, Thomas anticipated a Superman Messiah. And behind the Superman Messiah, a God who would pull the necessary strings – a Superman God. Crucifixion could in no way fit that scenario. If the disciples’ report were right, his whole idea of Messiah, and of God, was wrong. But how could that be? How could God’s Messiah possibly suffer and be crucified? What sort of authority, what sort of divine power, was that?

The following Sunday Thomas was back with the other disciples, and Jesus appeared once more among them. Gently, encouragingly, he invited Thomas to touch the wounds still there in his body. What could Thomas do? The crucified Jesus was risen indeed; and the worst efforts of his murderers had stopped neither his loving nor his forgiving. Thomas’s already wavering expectations about the Messiah and about God gave way, confronted with another undeniable reality. Without precisely understanding what he was saying, he came out with the magnificent expression of faith, My Lord and my God!

Why I think Thomas’s journey to faith is so important is because I believe we have to follow a similar journey. We all, pretty inevitably, seem to start with a Superman sense of Jesus and of God. Life challenges that sense, particularly suffering, particularly the experience we so often read as the silence of God, the absence of God, the heartlessness of God, in the midst of that suffering. I believe that we have to lose faith in that God – in order to discover the God of Jesus. What about God’s power? Thomas had to wrestle with that question, as did the other disciples, as do all disciples. Would God’s pulling strings, making exceptions, really lead to life? Or is God’s creative, truly life-giving power the energy of love – revealed in the raw wounds of the risen Jesus?

I do not think that anyone can answer those questions for us. We must learn for ourselves. It helps when there is a supportive community at hand, or an understanding friend, to carry us as hesitantly we explore, re-write and surrender to the mystery of love without limit.

 Homily 5 - 2018

“The doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews”. Their fear was real, perhaps even close to panic, but that was not all. They were totally confused by the news of the empty tomb. John believed, but the rest could not make sense of it. They felt disillusioned, and guilty – perhaps even angry at themselves, or even at the absent Jesus.

“Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, ‘Peace be with you’.” What did that say about Jesus? To me it says that he was obviously quite at peace himself, at peace, too, with these men who were truly guilty – still. How could he be at peace after they had totally let him down? How could he be so much at peace himself that he wanted them to share his peace? Ultimately it reflects his usual stance towards others. He loved people, because that was the way he was. He loved everyone, anyone, just as they were – innocent, guilty; cowardly, brave – consistently, unconditionally. And in this context of their guilt, loving meant forgiving. In place of fear, guilt and confusion, peace filled their hearts, and with that peace, love, forgiveness and joy. What an evening!

Despite their breakdown and obvious inadequacies, Jesus continued to trust them, indeed, to entrust them, with what was most precious to him, his mission. “As the Father sent me, so am I sending you!” And to make that mission quite clear, he handed on to them the Spirit that enlivened him, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love, and drew them into what he saw as his mission –his work of forgiveness above all and his persistent and insistent welcoming of sinners. [And here I use a translation different from the one most of us are used to], “The people whom you forgive the sins of are forgiven; the people whom you keep hold of in community are held in community”. The incident with Thomas that followed illustrated that last point. Though he refused to believe when the other disciples told him that Jesus was indeed raised, Thomas was not excluded from the community. There is place within the Christian community for sinners and doubters. It was there within the community of disciples that Thomas encountered Jesus, and there within the community that Jesus led him gently to faith.

We are familiar with the image of Jesus as the Lamb of God, the innocent victim killed as the means to the nation’s liberation. Meaningful as the image is, and it is a great reminder of the centrality of non-violence in response to violence in the pursuit of the Church’s mission, it is nevertheless inadequate. The more significant thing about Jesus’ death and resurrection is that he returns among us as the always-forgiving innocent victim. Forgiveness sums up the very essence of the Church’s mission, and non-violence is its necessary means.

When we allow ourselves truly to mature, we realise that to live fully is to love and forgive, and to love and forgive are the only way to live fully. As we leave childhood and adolescence behind, we also realise that adult love and forgiveness are necessarily unconditional. At the same time, we realise there can be no place for, and we let go of, our ideas of an “angry God”.

When we truly allow the peace and joy of the risen Christ to saturate our every fibre, we necessarily operate non-violently. The Church has been on the road for two thousand years, yet we have still not learnt the ways of peace. Peace has not become our default option. It distresses me that our own nation does not prioritise the skills of peace-making in a section of the world that is crying out for truly competent peace-makers, and instead chooses to support the further development of the local arms industry.

“Peace be with us” indeed!

 Homily 6 - 2021

You may have noticed over the years that St John’s Gospel is so different from the other three. You may even have found his Gospel pretty heavy at times. Mark was the first to write a Gospel, and he focussed mainly on the actions of Jesus — his healings, particularly. Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily from the Gospel of Mark. Each in his separate way sought to insert into Mark’s action-packed story more, much more, of the teaching of Jesus. And those teachings of Jesus were concerned primarily with telling the first disciples, and us disciples in following generations, about how to live their lives, our lives, as Jesus himself did, geared to the practical task of co-operating with God in shaping the Kingdom of God on earth.

John wrote his Gospel some time after the other three. So he did not want to go over unnecessarily what the other three had already done satisfactorily enough. Towards the end of his Gospel he gave this explanation of his purpose: “There were many other signs that Jesus worked and the disciples saw, but they are not recorded in this book. These are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life through his name”.

So John’s Gospel is not so much about the details of life in the Kingdom. It is about teasing out in much greater detail than the other three did the deeper mystery of who Jesus is, namely, the Christ, the Son of God — and, as the Gospel reminds us, the Good Shepherd, the Light of the world, the Bread of life, Living Water, our Friend and so on. And the purpose of discovering more clearly just who Jesus is, is to relate to him personally, and in the process to come more alive.

Believing in Jesus needs to move well beyond knowing the catechism, even being familiar with the Gospels. Believing in Jesus is learning to trust him ever more deeply. And we learn to trust him by coming familiar with him and relating to him, person to person, in love. It is that personal love that motivates everything else we do. It is what makes all the practical teachings of the other Gospels possible, desirable and life-giving.

During the twenty centuries that the Church has been around, it has learnt much about how to relate to God and deepen our love. Basically it is what we call prayer. But we can pray for different purposes, and some ways seem to be more nourishing of the personal relationship than others.However we pray, we need to spend time with our God. As a book I read one time put it, we need to waste a lot of time with Jesus. And that is what our praying often feels like — but it’s much the same with any friendship. What seems at times like a waste of time is not so in fact. It is through the boring times, and particularly afterwards, that we come to learn so much about ourselves and about God.

Another thing about any friendship is that our knowledge of and love for the other keeps pace with our coming to know ourselves. And self-knowledge can feel at first quite painful and discouraging.

So usually to pray well and to keep at it, it can be helpful to have someone we trust and who may know a little more about it than we do to accompany us. There are also useful books available, too. Ask the priest.