Now and Then… | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

Now and Then, Then and Now | Second Sunday of Easter – April 19, 2020 | Sermon on John 20:19-31 | by Hubert Beck |

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.”

Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said do them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands, and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version

TODAY

There are times when one’s entire awareness of what is real is seriously challenged by seemingly unreal happenings. At such times that which is to be trusted or what is to be at best seriously questioned hangs in the balance because everything that seemed only a short time before to be stable, firmly established, unshakably in place, had suddenly been turned upside down and inside out, shown to be far less fixed than one had earlier imagined by such a turn of events.

The truth of this lies in the shambles that are scattered around the whole world in our day. Only six months ago everything seemed to be of a reasonably stable state of affairs. A rumble here or a growl there took place on a regular basis, to be sure, but by and large nothing of a serious sort was imagined that might upend the solidity of life. Such things were the material of comic books or science fiction, but they didn’t approach the stuff of the reality as it was being lived and experienced at the time. Most fears were focused on “big things” that could agitate the constancy of life such as a threat of war or a socialistic, communistic “takeover of government.” But such “big things” seemed even at worst a very distant possibility. Life was moving along quite nicely, thank you. Thoughts that a tiny, unseen by the everyday eye indiscernible “something” could much less would turn everything upside down was very far from people’s minds.

But that was six months ago – and today those tiny, unseen by the everyday eye, indiscernible “somethings” have exterminated yesterday’s certainties and left our world with an impossible-to-ascertain kind of future. Even assuming we will come out of this afflicted pestilence in some way and at some time or another, all the tomorrows that will follow it shall most certainly be of a different sort from those days that were experienced prior to this scourge. And to think that all this change started from some distant lab in a far southwestern part of China! Nobody there and then dreamed of the world-wide affliction that would issue from a small lab hardly discernible in the world that is now on its knees!

The world will look different. The world will be experienced differently. The future will be of an uncertain sort from this time on for a considerable period of time. Everything that once seemed so rock-bottom sure will be shaken to its core, traumatized in the extreme!

For how long? Who knows? This we do know, however . . . the external appearances of the world will remain much the same on a continuing basis while the effects of the virus will change whatever takes place from this time on in radically new and developing ways – most of which are not immediately clear.

THEN

Perhaps through this lens of today’s upheaval one can get something of a handle on what was beginning to take place more than two centuries ago on this, the second week after Jesus was raised from the dead.

When Jesus died on the cross, everything was as it was supposed to be. When a person was crucified he died. His corpse was put into a grave. That was the way it had always been, and that was the way it turned out to be then: Jesus died on the cross. His corpse was hurriedly prepared for burial and put into a grave. The only difference was that a guard was posted at the entrance of the burial cave because there were a few who suspected the possibility that friends, wanting to steal his body for any number of reasons, commendable or contemptible though they might be, might pull some deceptive trick that would cause his death to be considered a hoax, a ruse of some kind to serve their own purposes. Thus the special precaution of a guarded tomb.

It was what happened thereafter that turned the “real world” upside down, however. The one who had been put into the grave as dead kept showing up over and over again as a live person. His “grave” showed no signs of robbery, however, nor did his constant reappearances suggest any fraudulence. Such things just ought not to be, however – at least not in the “real world” of that or any other time.

Some women, however, spread word about visiting his tomb and finding it empty, populated instead by messengers proclaiming him risen from the dead. Those close to him before his death claimed to have seen him alive and well that same evening – even though one of them expressed grave reservations as to what the others were claiming to have seen. He, too, however, was dumbfounded when that crucified man also appeared to him with incontestable proof that he was the same man who had been crucified. Other men said they had encountered him while they were walking along – and even said that he had sat at table with them. Such reports multiplied and magnified in broader and broader circles.

The man had blown apart the world in which he had lived, died, and . . . . and what? Been buried, that’s what! But he wouldn’t / didn’t stay buried! He was seen and heard again with the same body, the same voice, even the same kind of instructive, commanding words concerning what should happen in times to come. In short, his appearances and words had been reported and expressed in a variety of ways that this “impossible” had happened – and before long it was made known throughout the then-known Roman world.

So something had to change concerning what was “real” in the world in which this happened. If he who had died was not yet nor any longer dead, what was there to say about living and dying? The man who had died was “changed,” to be sure, for he kept unexpectedly appearing in places that had been securely guarded and locked. But the “change” was not for him to explain. It was for those themselves who experienced this “changed man” to change the way they had understood him before all this took place . . . changed in a way that forced them to recognize the presence of the “changed one” in and for and through all that they said and did thereafter! And if he was “changed,” so was everything within which he had lived, was living, and . . . and what? What was happening to the world that they had known to be so sure and secure only three days and longer ago? Not only everything within which he had lived, but everything everywhere was no longer to be trusted, for the certainties tied to dying no longer held sway at anyplace or anytime!!! A change in everything had begun in that far-off empty grave and spread across the whole of time and place known to humankind. All the old “realities” were shaken to their core and a “new norm” had begun to settle in across the face of the earth.

It was THEY, then, who were changed by him whose “changed appearance” altered the way they understood all the issues of life and death. Rather soon thereafter – and very quickly, for that matter – they found that their own lives were to be changed into new and astonishing fashions, lifestyles, reasons-for-living, ways of understanding life, even ways of relating to other people much less to even speak about God!!!

They had little awareness of all that immediately, to be sure, for it was simply too much to take in all at once. But one thing was clear . . . nothing could ever be the same again! And in the immediately following times, as they began to sort all this out under the guiding influence of the Holy Spirit, they realized that the whole world with everything and everyone in it could never be the same as it had been before this man revised it all by means of his death and resurrection. It is hard to grasp what a world-wide and history-laden re-working of “reality” took place from that one single empty grave, announced as the former grave of one single man by a couple messengers. In a little over a month he “disappeared” from the scene in ways that made it plain that his disappearance never meant his departure from the world!

THAT “THEN” USHERED IN A NEW “NOW” – AND A NEW “YET TO COME”

Can you not see the similarity between that which happened “then” and the world within which we live in our “now” – and, of course, the dissimilarities also? For that matter, is it not possible to catch at least a small view of a distant “future” also through these comparisons?

The questions loom large and many today as legislators and managers, businesses and governments, everyday people and people of considerable influence try to figure out and “reassemble” the “newly revised realities” with which we must live in the post-coronal days yet to come. They speak of a “NEW normal,” an innovative standard for living in a “new world” of sorts, a fresh look at how to put all the pieces together again into a new form of “reality” since the “old realities” no longer apply. It is acknowledged that nothing will ever be the same again, given the devastation within which we live as the virus dictates all future actions, businesses, social lives, governmental decisions, and on and on and on.

Well, yes, things will still look the same, for the externals will not change. But how to live with and among those same things in the new way that must inevitably emerge from the wreckage that is still falling around us will be very, very different in ways we cannot fully imagine as we transition from what once was a “firm normalcy” to a “new, adjusted, altered reality” of tomorrow. How does one live with all the old appearances in ways adjusted to this new form of life? That is our social question of the day.

It was precisely that question and problem that confronted those whose understanding of “reality” had been jarred so severely by the appearance of “life in the face of death,” “life in the midst of death,” “life larger than death,” “life defying death.” Life as it had been lived before the Resurrected One had broken the bonds of death was simply no longer acceptable for that had been a life bounded by and tightly tied to death. But Jesus had consistently insisted that a person had to “die to one’s self” in order to make room for the “life that was fully and truly life.” What he had said then became visibly present in sight and demonstration and expression of the “life beyond death,” “life lived in spite of death,” “life in defiance of death,” a “life that will not perish” embodied by the one who had ushered in the way to the “new life” and now beckoned those to whom he spoke, as he had spoken to them when they had first met him, to “Come. Follow me.” He whose own life had been lived, ended, and raised again “in order that the world might be saved through him” John 3:14-17 had become the full and total personification of LIFE itself!

A NEW UNDERSTANDING AND A NEW LIFE

But they would have to understand that to “follow him” meant first and above all to “follow him to the cross” where the key to the resurrected life was being fashioned. People would have to stand with him in his battle against sin and death or else they would have to succumb to the powers of sin and death. Only if they were willing to follow him in that way would they be brought into the full realization that only the dead can be raised again! Anyone unwilling to die with him cannot be raised with him. It is only out of death that resurrection can take place!

But life in the turned-upside-down world of the resurrection could not then and cannot to this day remain the same kind of life that had shaped the lives of – and still shapes the life of – any and all whose “reality” remains one of merely “existing in the mold of this world.” When the “reality” of death giving way to life; the grave being emptied of its terror; a Risen One living and claiming his own in their baptism; the King of Kings seated at the head of the banquet table of his body and blood – when one’s “reality” is based on and depends upon things such as those, life looks very different, feels very different, lives and moves in a very different way, and exists in all its parts as a member of the resurrected body of Christ.

As members of the body of Christ, therefore, my friends, let your lives be seen and read as books that “are written so that others may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing they may have life in his name.”

It is a marvelous book, brothers and sisters in Christ – this book in which are written the names of all who have subscribed to the one who signs, seals and delivers that book of Life to the Father. May your names be among those written in that book. Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Hubert Beck

An ordained but retired servant of the Church

hbeck@austin.rr.com