[img]http://www.catholica.com.au/sunday/images/Y-not_an_640x166.gif[/img] Second Sunday of Easter C April 7, 2013
On the evening of that first day of the week,
when the doors were locked, where the disciples were,
Jesus came and stood in their midst
and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.
The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.
As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
“Receive the Holy Spirit.
Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them,
and whose sins you retain are retained.”
Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve,
was not with them when Jesus came.
So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.”
“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands
and put my finger into the nailmarks
and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
Now a week later his disciples were again inside
and Thomas was with them.
Jesus came, although the doors were locked,
and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.”
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands,
and bring your hand and put it into my side,
and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”
Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples
that are not written in this book.
But these are written that you may come to believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that through this belief you may have life in his name.
These reflections on the Sunday Readings, as the title suggests, are an attempt to encourage the reader, the church-goer, to actively think about these readings. The liturgy as we have it does not provide either the time or the environment for thoughtful reflection on the meaning of what is proclaimed, justifying itself with the notion that the simple proclamation of God's Word is the essence of it. This reduces the participant to the status of a spectator giving agreement in a formal response but remaining unaffected. The best solution to this problem is to prepare in advance. The post-resurrection narratives, in their accounts of the many ways the disciples 'saw him alive during many days', seem to have the purpose of proving the fact of the resurrection . Of course, there is no proof. In fact the narratives themselves create more puzzles than they solve. How a risen body might be so free of physical restraint as to pass through a solid door remains unexplained, as does its ability to eat solid food, or be solid to the touch. Is this a ghost? The disciples were convinced it really was the Jesus they had been so familiar with, but what form he now took they fail to understand or make clear to us. John winds up his narrative (Ch. 21 is a later addition) with a blessing for those who can believe on someone else's word, however that someone might explain his own experience. Jesus gave the ultimate criterion: 'By their fruits you will know", and perhaps this is the only way we can have confidence that our faith is not self-delusion, in seeing how others live this faith and find in it a motive for joyful service of humankind. ***** Recently we were introduced to a writer who seems to understand the problems that literalism and dogmatic formulations involve. What he says in these short quotes should not be taken to mean that he considers the christian faith on a par with fairy stories, but that he recognises that the human mind reaches for truths beyond the reach of experimental physics, and in doing so it uses images and allusions - metaphors and poetry.
Catholic doctrine is, however, pure metaphor, and its practices, structures and rituals, poetry. Religion is relationship. Religion is our relationship to our source and sustainer. Therefore its doctrines can only be poetry, a work of art, a quintessential work of the imagination. Poetry (in the broad sense) is the tool we have forged to talk about relationship. It is necessarily inexplicit. It uses one set of images — words, pictures, music, movements, structures — to evoke another. And the reason is that the thing it is trying to express is inexpressible: relationship. Relationship is not definable. It is not something that can be known “objectively.” Only persons, subjects, can understand relationship from inside as a valence between subjects, and only persons can try to express it in the strange symbolic form we call poetry. [Citations from Tony Equale's blog at http://tonyequale.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/reflections-on-catholic-revisionism-garry-wills-why-priests/ ]
I don't know enough about the early centuries - Constantine's and Augustine's contributions to what developed into Western Christianity - to know whether Tony Eguale's synopsis is valid in all its parts. But I am thrilled to read his summary of religion as relationship and dogma as poetry. And then to read the examples Debb gives of Dorothy Sölle's theology in poetry! http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?id=129496 It's enough to make you try again to revisit those poetic narratives of the early communities and get inside them.
And so to the gospel selection for the Second Sunday of Eastertide:
They were very bad days, those Passover days.
That sabbath was the worst
guilt dripping like blood from open wounds:
we had nicked off, all of us, in fear, when they took him in
and he had made a mockery of our hopes by meekly going along with it.
True, he stood up to Pilate and told him where to get off
“You have no power over me but what comes to you from higher up.”
That got him nowhere and they killed him
and we had hoped he was going to lead us out of slavery
in another great Passover.
It was the worst Passover I ever had.
Now they’ve started talking about seeing him alive!
Not me. Not again. 'Once caught twice shy' is my motto.
He showed them his wounds, they said!
Well, if I can touch him, touch his bloody wounds, I might believe -
but it’s got to be another illusion, and I’ve followed enough of those already.
Alive? What could that mean? When the Romans do you in, you’re done for sure.
How can I explain this? I’ve changed: that’s all.
I'd always used my brains and common sense the way you should
refused to believe till I’d seen for myself
but then I started wondering:
What if death is not the end we think it is!
If dying is just passing over!
What if those old tales do have a trace of truth in them, of people coming back?
It wasn’t like that. We did not see a ghost.
We saw him, and his wounds.
We all became convinced this was not a dream or a blind illusion.
Our despair turned into hope, our fear into courage, our shyness into boldness
and we started telling one another: You know, mate, I think he is alive.
Maybe he’s been raised up by god.
He seems to be telling us to carry on what he began.
I found I could not think of death ever again as final defeat.
There’s a spirit abroad, like it’s the breath of god, stirring things up
Was it guilt or was it shame that made us aware that there were poor folk among us
who had no reserves. They were living hand to mouth and always hungry.
We’d never noticed them before: it’s not the fashion.
Families care for their own, and if you have no one you can always beg
and sometimes they don’t. That’s just the way it is.
We began to look after them as if they belonged.
It seemed to be the kind of thing he would’ve done,
but it felt odd at first: not something we’d been brought up to.
Over those first weeks the spirit grew stronger.
and began to meet together in a corner of the temple for prayer'
We started to explain to curious passers-by that Jesus whom they'd killed
lives on. His breath is alive in us.
We whispered it at first, and they looked curiously to see if we were mad:
then some caught on and joined us.
I think it was the peace that you could almost touch in our groups.
He always said: [i]I give you my peace[/i]
and we remembered his gentle lively smile.
There was a lot of forgiving to be done, of course.
We all felt guilty and more than one had thoughts of suicide.
Poor Judas went the whole way, but all we could do was tell each other we were sorry,
and bit by bit we came to understand what he had said:
If you forgive another’s sins they are forgiven...
We felt better after that.
Forgiveness is at the heart of the good news he gave us,
and that's why John features it in his closing pages.
Some would say it is the core, the very essence of his teaching:
not 'redemption' - buying back, but just forgoing debt, washing away,
absolving hurt to make at-one-ment: to make us one.
All the pain, all the hurt and anger, the misery of hiding guilty truths,
fostering those festering thoughts of revenge:
the only solution is allowing these
to be healed by the anointing human kindness
of the spirit of Jesus the anointed one.
Ah, but justice must be done, right order must be set right again,
balance is essential or the washing machine will come to a sodden halt.
The guilt must be made manifest, confessed to by the one offending,
and owned as mine and mine alone.
Only then can the filth be washed away, not by some harsh abrasive, some acid burn,
but by kindly forgiveness.
Many of those most hurt have come to this knowledge
and are hungry for the chance to give forgiveness
if only perpetrators would stop insulting more with lies and cover-ups
for fear of being seen in what they've done:
still locked in to self-serving self-protecting self-deceiving lies.
The truth will set you free.
They still call me Doubting Thomas, but that’s okay by me:
in fact it should be Tom the Skeptic
because I believe you’ve got to be always on the watch, as Jesus used to say,
not to get sucked in by one stupid fairy story or another.
Have they not turned the gift of Jesus dying
his hard-fought victory that cost his very life
into a diet of sweet sentiment and fancy faith?
I wouldn't have a bar of that, meself.
| |
|