Preached at Brockholes Methodist Church
27th April 2014: 2nd Sunday of Easter
1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31
There they were, Jesus’s friends, huddled together like penguins warming themselves in a snowstorm. They were frightened, disconsolate and alone. The entrance of the house where they were staying was locked tight and they’d barricaded themselves behind the closed doors. Grabbing all the blankets they could find, they covered the walls and windows to block out the light of their flickering lamps and the sound of their hushed voices. They sat inside hoping beyond hope that nobody would find them and that nobody would know that they were there.
Suddenly: a knock. There’s silence. The disciples looked nervously at one another, exchanging scared glances as if to ask, “What do we do?” They did nothing. They played dead, pretending no one was home, pretending that the house was empty. There it was again: another knock on the door, this time more urgent than before. Still, they sat there, silent, not saying a single word, too afraid to breathe let alone speak. Again, it came. Now the knocking was turning into a banging. Whoever it was, they weren’t going to go away. What should they do? Then: a voice. “Psst! Guys, it’s me—Mary. Quick, let me in! I’ve got something to tell you, something you’ve got to know. Open the door!”
Cautiously getting to his feet, one of the disciples slowly, carefully started moving away the tables and chairs propped against the locked door. “What do you think you’re doing?” another asked. “It could be a trap. What if she’s being followed? What if they tracked her from the tomb and have been waiting for her to lead them straight to us? What then?” “We can’t just leave her outside, can we?” said another. “We’ve got to let her in.” Reluctantly, they all agreed. So, clearing the pile of jumbled furniture from the doorway, they cracked the door open and let her in. Allowing Mary to slip inside, they cast their eyes suspiciously down the street, certain of seeing a detachment of the temple guard charging towards them. Seeing nothing, they quickly closed the door, locked it again and reassembled their improvised barricade of household fixtures and fittings.
Scarcely had this been accomplished when Mary, unable to contain herself, bursting like a bottle rocket, blurted out the news: “I have seen the Lord!” she said. “Shh!” the disciples hissed. “Keep it down, will you? We don’t want the whole world to know we’re here… Now, what was it you were saying?” So she told them again: “I have seen the Lord! There I was, at the cemetery—Peter and John, they’d already gone home by that point. I stooped down to look in the tomb and these two men were there. They were dressed in white and they asked me why I was crying. ‘What a stupid question!’ I thought to myself, ‘It’s a graveyard—people cry.’ But I told them, ‘Someone’s taken away my Master’s body and I don’t know where they’ve put it.’ Just then, another man came over. Naturally, I assumed he was the gardener. He asked me the same question, asked me who I was looking for. I told him, ‘Look, if you’ve moved it, just tell me and I’ll go get it.’ Before I could finish, he interrupted me. ‘Mary,’ he said. And I realised: it wasn’t the gardener, it was Jesus. I leapt up to throw my arms around him, but he told me not to. He told me he was ascending to the Father. Then he disappeared, but before he did, he told me to tell you everything. So, here I am!”
The disciples were stunned. They sat there listening politely as Mary recounted her story, as every good congregation always does at Easter; but honestly, they didn’t believe it. They couldn’t. Don’t get me wrong, they would have liked to; but they just couldn’t, it was too far-fetched, too removed from anything they’d experienced before. And so the doors remained firmly shut, and Mary’s testimony remained firmly shut in with them. The hours passed and the disciples went back to their worrying about the next knock on the door. Evening came and, thankfully for them, no new knock at the door arrived. Meanwhile, Mary sat by herself in a corner, wondering whether she was really as crazy as everyone now seemed to think she was.
As dusk fell, a new visitor arrived. This time, there was no knock at the door; he just appeared. No one opened the door; he just came in. And there he was, standing in the middle of the room as the disciples all sat up, rubbing their eyes, wondering if this was some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder playing tricks with their minds. “Ghost!” said one. “It’s a ghost, an apparition! We’re doomed!” But smelling their fear, seeing it in the whites of their eyes, hearing it in their trembling voices, the visitor simply said, “Peace be with you.” It was Jesus. He held out his hands. He showed them his side. The marks of the nails and the spear were still fresh in his skin. It was Jesus, alright. And this was no disembodied, non-physical, ethereal Jesus, either. This was the real, flesh and blood, crucified-but-risen Jesus standing in front of them. Mary was right: Jesus was alive!
In an instant, the disciples were filled with joy. They sprang to their feet, astounded. “Peace be with you,” Jesus repeated. “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” He breathed on them and a strong wind blew through the closed room. The hairs on the back of their necks tingled and stood on end. Finally, Jesus commissioned them to go and make known the love of God to release and free people from their sins. If they don’t, he says, people will stay stuck in their unbelief and their sins will continue to lay hold of them, to restrain and repress them. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Then, as quickly and quietly as Jesus had arrived, he slipped away again; disappeared. Still the doors stayed locked.
Not long after, there was another knock at the door. Dazed and confused, they checked to see who it was. It was Thomas. Thomas had been out buying food for everyone when Jesus had come. At first, nobody had the heart to tell him; but then they couldn’t stop themselves: “We have seen the Lord!” they said. “Not you too!” he replied. “It was bad enough when Mary said it, but now you’re all at it! Cut it out! If you’ve all seen the Lord, then let me ask you something: Why are you still sat here, locked inside like a bunch of scaredy-cats, eh? No. Unless I can wiggle my finger through the holes in his hands and poke my hand into his side, I simply won’t believe what you’re saying.”
A week passes and not much has changed: the doors are still locked, the disciples are still cowering inside and this time, Thomas is with them. We give Thomas such a hard time, but what alibi do the others have? They’d seen Jesus in person, he’d breathed his Spirit onto them and into them; what was their excuse? Anyway, there they are and Jesus shows up again. No need for a key; he just let himself in and made himself comfortable. Just as he did the first time, he greeted them with a word of peace. Then, turning to Thomas, he offered him his hands and his side saying, “Go on. Take a good look. See me. Feel me. Touch Me.” But he didn’t need to. He fell to his knees, choked with emotion and began sobbing. “My Lord and my God,” he wept, staring at the crucified-but-risen Jesus through tear-soaked eyes, “My Lord and my God!”
Winston Churchill once said that “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” That certainly seems to be the case when it comes to the truth of the resurrection. Mary had told them, first thing Easter morning that she had seen the Lord. Did they do anything about it? No. They just stayed there, locked up behind closed doors. Jesus walked through the locked doors—don’t ask me how, he just did. He revealed himself to his friends, he spoke to them words of peace and wholeness, he anointed them with the Holy Spirit, he gave them a job to do. Did it move them? No. A week later and they’re still in the same place, shut up behind closed doors. Poor Thomas, he gets such a bad rap. It’s the rest of us who should take the blame. There we were on Easter Day as Jesus showed himself to us, but what have we done about it? Nothing. Has it changed us? It certainly doesn’t seem to.
And yet, what I love so much about this story, what I think gives me so much encouragement from this story is that Jesus doesn’t give up on us. He keeps coming back. Even though we don’t get it, even though we’re slow on the uptake, even though Jesus can be standing right in front of us and we still don’t do anything about it, he keeps coming back. And that’s pretty good news for a fumbling, stumbling, mumbling disciple like me. That’s really good news. And even better still, locked doors don’t mean anything to him. It doesn’t matter how pig-headed or stone-hearted I am, Jesus can still find a way through. That’s the miracle of the resurrection. If Jesus can find a way through the locked door of death, he can raise me from the dead too! He can wake me up from my deadness and unresponsiveness to God and make me alive. God knows, in fact, he has! I wasn’t looking for faith when I became a Christian; rather, Jesus came looking for me and brought me into the church through the invitation of a friend who, having seen the Lord, came out of the locked doors wanting me to see him too.
C. S. Lewis once described himself as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” He explained his conversion as the blessed surrender at the end of a long siege. “You must picture me…” he wrote, “night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. … I gave in, and admitted that God was God.” And yet, he goes on: “I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing: the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?”
Jesus is well able to walk through locked doors. We can come to Church on a Sunday not anticipating much, just expecting to go through the motions and WALLOP! Jesus shows up and hijacks everything. We can carefully plan our agenda for the church council meeting, talking about how the church can best meet our needs, when all of a sudden Jesus turns up and starts asking us how the church can best meet his needs. Jesus can do that. There are no closed or locked doors to the risen Jesus—he can get into everything. What’s more, be on your guard because one day he will get into everything. So we may well ask ourselves: What are the doors that we’re desperately trying to avoid Jesus getting into? Are there parts of my life I don’t want Jesus touching—my work, my money, my relationships? If a locked door can’t keep Jesus out, hadn’t we best just fling open the gates and offer him a full, complete, unconditional surrender of ourselves?
John says that the disciples locked themselves away because they were afraid that the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem were still after them. Maybe, however, they were actually more afraid that what Mary said might have been true, that Jesus really was alive and they knew that faced with that truth, things would have to change. Perhaps the locked doors were a vain attempt to keep Jesus out. What’s clear, though, is that Jesus wasn’t locked out; rather, they were locked in. When confronted by resurrection, we discover the walls of our prison. We begin to realise that we are people constantly living in the shadow of death. We start to see that we’re trapped. Easter offers us life without locked doors; it proclaims freedom in all its fullness. It also shows us the helplessness of our cause. We need him who is Resurrection, who is Life; without him we are dead.
What does life in light of Easter look like? It looks like Hea Woo, a North Korean Christian, who, though imprisoned in a labour camp because of her faith, taught her fellow prisoners about Jesus, often meeting in the toilet to worship together almost inaudibly so as to be out of the sight and sound of the guards and despite knowing that if caught, she would almost certainly be killed. It looks like Sue in Durham, who, diagnosed with terminal cancer faced death with peace, courage and even joy, spending her time writing hymns and poems, creating beautiful pieces of artwork and campaigning for justice in Palestine. For them, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead opened doors otherwise firmly shut; it enabled and empowered them to live free from the spectre of death.
In a world where Jesus is alive and risen from the dead, there are no longer any locked doors, any dead ends, any lost causes, any people or places in which the presence and power of God is not able to penetrate. Our Easter hope is that Jesus can walk through every door and we can walk through them with him, even the last locked door of death. Nothing can keep Jesus out; he is renewing the world and as the Father sent him, so he sends us out to be messengers of that renewal. The Greek word for ‘Church’ is ekklesia. Literally, it means ‘Called out.” Jesus is calling us out from behind the locked doors to go and bring the knowledge of his love and forgiveness to the world. Easter is a call to the Church, to us—the followers of Jesus, not to be shut in any longer but to lower the drawbridge and get out there.
Has Easter changed you yet? Do you know a Jesus who can walk through locked doors? Let us ask and pray that we might. Let us ask and pray for the imagination to see how differently our lives and our world might look if we did. Let us ask and pray that Jesus might keep coming back, revealing more of himself to us and empowering us to come out of the castle and share with others our knowledge and love of him who releases us from our sins.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
And Can It Be? 