As a pastor, one of the most
critical parts of my job is to help people work through conflict. Not that I’m always successful. I am aware of relationships in our community
where there is so much hurt and mistrust, and the conflicted parties are so deeply
entrenched in their positions, that the most they can manage for each other is
avoidance, and when needed, a chilly civility.
And there are questions that touch on our common life, where there are
differences of opinion so pronounced, that we prefer not to talk about them. We have to admit that it is a fact of life
that, as the educator Parker Palmer once put it, “community is where you find
the person you least want to live with,” and maybe the best we can hope for is
to keep such conflicts from flaring into open hostility. But the resurrection of Jesus offers a better
hope than that.
The story of Jesus is, after all, a
story of conflict. And at time of the
Passover, the annual celebration of God’s decisive victory over the oppressors
of the people, Jesus took the conflict to Jerusalem. He brought his challenge to the chief
priests, the elders, and the scribes, right into the heart of their stronghold—into
the temple. The gospels tell how as Jesus
was teaching in the temple the ruling elite sent one representative after
another to spar with him verbally, to try to back him down or trip him up--and how
every time, their attacks blew back in their faces.
Because Jesus turned each loaded
question and devious insinuation into a subtle but devastating indictment of
his opponents, of their cowardice, injustice and hypocrisy, their complicity
with violence and idolatrous religion.
And with each of these encounters the crowd of on-lookers and their enthusiasm
for Jesus and his teaching grew. Until, fearing
a total public relations disaster, no one dared ask him any more questions.
But the conflict didn’t end there. Unable to take Jesus down publicly, the temple
elite did what the powerful often do when they have lost their moral and
political legitimacy. They resorted to treachery and violence. You know the story very well: how at supper
Jesus told his disciples that one of them, his closest friends, would betray
him to his death; how Judas Iscariot went out into the night, only to return
later, leading the temple goons to the garden where Jesus used to go to pray;
how he singled him out for them with a kiss.
You know how Jesus refused to
fight, or to let his disciples fight for him, and how they scattered and fled
as he was dragged away; how Peter followed, but when he was confronted, denied that
he knew Jesus, not once, but three times.
You know this story so there’d
really be no need to retell it if it were not for the fact that with the coming
of Easter, that story so often disappears.
It is forgotten immediately, as if, in raising Jesus from the dead, God
made the conflicts that led to his death irrelevant, or miraculously resolved
them. But such radical discontinuity
between Holy Week and Easter is far from biblical. Just look at Peter’s sermon in the Second
Chapter of Acts. It is a bold
declaration that God has set Jesus of Nazareth free from the power of death,
but it begins with an equally bold reminder to “you, my fellow Israelites,”
that “you crucified this man, whom God attested to you with deeds of power,
wonders, and signs, by the hands of those outside the law.”
The Acts of the Apostles tells how
the conflict that marked Jesus’ life and death doesn’t end with his rising from
the dead, which itself only serves to prove that the conflict runs deeper, and
its stakes are higher, than anyone previously thought. In the resurrection, God’s Holy Spirit not
only vindicates Jesus’ movement to renew Israel by a prophetic insurrection
from below. She also gives unprecedented
power and universal scope to that movement, so that it breaks out across the
world to challenge every “religion” that gives ideological cover to systems of exclusion
and domination, and confronts the idols of the nations in the name of Israel’s
God of creation, justice, healing and love.
But the Gospel of John tells us
that before that can happen, the risen Christ has to reconcile his own
community of disciples. It is a traumatized
community, not only because of the horrifying death of the teacher in whom they
had placed such hope, but because the treachery of the ostensible leaders of
their nation. And one of their own inner
circle aided and abetted that treachery, which they all passively acquiesced to
out of fear. That same fear still
gripped them as they gathered for the evening meal on the first day of the
week, and though one of them had not arrived, they locked the doors. Who knows what premonitions of further
betrayal haunted their minds as they thought of Thomas the Twin, out there somewhere
as darkness fell on the city, doing who knows what, with who knows whom?
It is into the middle of this
threatened little circle that the Lord came, bringing his peace. He showed them the marks of betrayal on his
body, and again said “Peace be with you.”
And they would need that peace when Thomas arrived. We are used to thinking of Thomas as the one
who doubted God, but it was not God whom Thomas doubted—it was his
friends. Maybe in the aftermath of
seeing Jesus they were full of love and joy, and disbelief that they had ever
doubted Thomas, but to him they seemed to be in the grip of a kind of group
delusion. Maybe he questioned why they
would say that the Lord come to them when he was not there—what kind of game
were they playing, and why didn’t it include him?
My point is that we don’t know how Thomas’
doubt might have divided this already frail community, if the others had not
received the Spirit of peace? This
peace is not simply an inner feeling. It
is an active power, the power to forgive. The spiritual power of forgiveness, flowing from
the crucified and risen Christ, is what breathed new life into the community of
Jesus’ disciples, as it has ever since, again and again and again. It is the power in which we are sent, as
Jesus was sent, into inevitable conflict, to speak the word of God’s
peace.
It is also the power of
discernment, because forgiveness can never be automatic. It must be free, a decision given and
received with eyes that see clearly the wounds that sin has made in the body of
God. But our standard of judgment must
be Jesus himself: Jesus, who said “judge not, lest you be judged;” Jesus, who preferred
agony on the cross to violence against those who misjudged him; Jesus, who sat
down at supper with the one he knew would betray him and gave him bread and
said, “this is my body, given for you.”
Such forgiveness is hard to achieve,
but simple to understand. You just have
to hold out your hand. We are talking
here about the difference between an open hand and a clenched fist. The open hand is what Jesus presents to
Thomas, when he shows himself at last, and Thomas understands that it is the
hand of God. This is a God who is not
afraid of conflict, but lets us doubt, and disbelieve, and probe the painful
places where the mere idea of God is not enough. And if we don’t give up, but keep working
through the conflict, a time comes when we find we are touching a living
body.
Our community is that body, a crucified
body, risen out of conflict, bearing wounds.
And with that resurrection we were also given the Spirit of forgiveness,
the power to make peace, to heal betrayal and come to trust each other
again. There is no more important work
for us than to learn to use that gift.
Because it wasn’t given for our enjoyment, so we could congratulate
ourselves on what a nice, warm, happy family we’ve become. It was given to us as a mission; it is the
Spirit in which we’ve been sent.
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