The nonrecognition of Jesus by the Disciples can seem unusual, difficult to understand. Context is of course important to any recognition – if you’re in what is thought to be the ‘wrong’ place or in the ‘wrong’ clothes, it might be easier to be uncertain who you are. When I lived in London, this was telling – it’s a big place and you might catch a glimpse of someone and not be sure who it was, and if you are to be confused anywhere, a busy capital city with millions of people walking around continually seems a good enough place as any. But then you speak t someone you know, walk with them – well maybe one or two people might be uncertain, but a handful? Seems unlikely, especially when the person you’re talking to is the very person you are fleeing from being recognised as a disciple of! But they recognise him when they eat, sometime later. That’s quite beautiful and unites the Disciples with the feeding of the five thousand – in that people can ignore the teaching, the discipling, but hang around for the free buffet – so we are not alone in occasional despair – but it was precisely at the physical feeding that, after all those years, they were genuinely converted and literally and spiritually turned themselves around to face the work of discipleship. They recognised Him in this meal, and here we are, doing the same thing in this rather peculiar way now, some two thousand years later. As they drew near to Emmaus, Jesus “made as if to be going further”. The disciples got him to stay with them, but, like Mary Magdalene that morning, they could not keep him with them for long. For Jesus was then a pilgrim; he was on a journey, an urgent one; he had to go further and the disciples – that is, we ourselves – must follow him. But, so to speak, we can’t keep up with him.Jesus went further, went ahead, in two ways:That morning, he had told Mary Magdalene, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father”. Jesus had to take his glorified human Body out of this cosmos, which is subject to decay, into God’s own glory. This was to establish the state of glory that we hope to share when he comes again to take us to be with him where he is, when he comes to transfigure our lowly body after the pattern of his own glorious Body. He has not come back for them, he has gone before them, to prepare a place for them and us in His Father’s house. As He promised. We are still on pilgrimage; we are like the disciples who cannot recognise Him, except through this meal – and I do not mean only in the bread and the wine, but in our sharing of it, in our fellowship. The Bible contains all that is essential for salvation – how could it not, as it is what He left us as our guide on this pilgrimage He has shared with us – and it also contains the establishment of the Church, and the gathering of her people in the Eucharist, so we are to recognise him here, in each other as well. We are the Body of Christ, and we are, as He was, on a pilgrimage that will end up united to the Father through the Son, guided by the Holy Ghost in the Church of God. Jesus went ahead of his disciples in another way. He went out from Jerusalem into the whole world. The power of his Cross and Resurrection has radiated from Jerusalem throughout all creation. Even those who lived as God’s friends before Jesus came, were drawn on their journey of faith and hope, drawn into God’s friendship, by the Sacrifice they glimpsed from afar, like Abraham and His sons forever. Jesus still goes ahead of his disciples into the whole world; the power of his Cross and Resurrection still resonates to draw all humanity to the true God, each person who has ever lived is drawn to the Cross, and here we make it visible in our lives so the world may believe – this is the first calling of the Holy Church of God, to be witnesses to the resurrection. The disciples at Emmaus would follow Jesus on that journey into the world. First they had to go back to Jerusalem to re-join Simon Peter and the other Apostles – to be one again, as we are called to be one. There the Holy Spirit, the great Gift won for us by Jesus’ Sacrifice, would form them into Christ’s own Body. Then they would be able to go out and preach the Good News, and from that beginning, here we are. In our mission, we are following Jesus, and he still goes ahead of us. We are, each of us, charged in some way to bring the Good News to those who need it, and this is because we are caught up in Christ’s own journey to each human being. When we reach anyone, however, we will find that Jesus has got there first. Jesus and the Spirit will be there already, awakening the thirst for truth and goodness, and it is therefore our calling to show how we live out our discipleship – and then the Kingdom grows, and we grow, and Christ lives in us and we in Him. And here He is, indisputably, in His body and blood and in His people, called and chosen to walk with Him on the road to salvation, and to turn back from seeking safety in Emmaus and seek people wherever He sends us.
I’m sure at some time or another we have all had a beautiful piece of pottery or ceramic or porcelain which has been dropped and broken. Heartbreaking. Devastating, especially if said item was an heirloom or a piece of nostalgia. We try to get the pieces back together, align them just right, use minimal glue, but strong glue, and hope that the join is invisible. That the item looks as it was before the break. I’ve done that, for sure. A number of times, with, I have to say, little success in hiding the blemish.But there is a Japanese process, artform, called kintsugi, which seeks to give prominence to the breaks. The pieces are indeed put back together but using resin mixed with gold. This results in the scars of the restored piece being accentuated. If the severed pieces are fixed back together with resin mixed with gold then they can’t help but be visible. But that is the whole point. Not only has the broken piece been mended but it is arguably more precious than before due to the gold. And it now has a story to tell. It has a history.Our Lord has risen from the dead. He has been crucified but He is back with His disciples in the upper room. He is whole again. His broken body is restored. But – he still has the wounds of His ordeal. He has the holes in His hands and the spear wound in His side. And these are precious because they tell the story of His salvational act on the cross. Even though His body, His resurrected body is His glorified body, the wounds that remain in His hands and His side are a testimony to the act of love in which He died. The wounds that the disciples see indicate that the person of Christ that they see, resurrected to glory, is in fact the same person who died on the cross. And in this way, the wounds also signify that the mystery of the resurrection comes only through the cross.I’d like to take a small side step here and think a bit more about Jesus’s hands. I read about a Dr Paul Brand who is a hand surgeon and who visited leprosy patients in Vellore, India. While he was speaking to these patients he discussed Jesus’s hands. How at the start they were infant hands, small, helpless, reaching for the comfort of His mum, Mary. Then as a boy, clumsily learning the art of carpentry, learning to write, learning dexterity. And then the adult hands of Jesus the carpenter – likely as not rough, gnarled, scarred with hammer wounds or chisel wounds. And then Dr Brand contemplated the healing hands of Jesus during His ministry. Such tenderness and compassion in those hands, infused with the Holy Spirit so that when he touched the afflicted, they were healed. And finally, Dr Brand, the hand surgeon contemplated Jesus’s crucified hands, hurting at the thought of the nails being driven through the mass of bones, tendons, ligaments, nerves etc that go to make up the hand and wrist. What those healing hands went through for us, sinners like us.The wounds in Jesus’s hands are beautiful. They tell a story. They have not been healed over; His hands have not been fixed so that the breaks can be concealed. No. They are very much there. The rest of His wounds, the lashings, the bruises, the stripes by which we are healed, have gone. We can surmise this because Mary didn’t recognise Him initially on that first Easter Day. The two disciples on the Road to Emmaus didn’t recognise Him. He was as unblemished as could be seen, except for His hands and His side. And this is not a ghost who appears in that upper room. This is not someone else pretending to be Jesus. This is Him. Right there with His disciples, minus Thomas, of course. This is the body, complete with wounds, which the grave could not contain any longer.So when, later, Thomas pretty much demands actual physical proof of Jesus’ resurrection, is adamant that he will not believe until he has seen the wounds and put his finger into the holes or his hand into the wound on Jesus’ side, he gets exactly that. He gets to see that proof, whether he actually did put his finger into the nail holes in Jesus’s hands or put his hand into the spear wound in Jesus’s side or not. And when he does see, he exclaims the most robust expression of faith in the gospel ‘My Lord and My God’. He identifies the risen Jesus as the Lord God, as Yahweh. My Lord and My God. Thomas makes the most direct, personal affirmation of Jesus’ divinity, and brings fulfilment of the entire gospel of John, a gospel which focuses on establishing the divinity, as well as humanity, of Jesus, and which begins with the statement ‘The Word was God.’Thomas knew Jesus. He will have heard, almost certainly, when Jesus had told His disciples that He would die and on the third day, would rise again. But still, he would not believe until he had seen actual physical proof. Today, we do not have the physical Jesus but we do have written testimony of His life, His teachings and His resurrection within the pages of the Bible. But despite what we do have, many simply do not believe. Many find faith difficult because they cannot see or touch Jesus, much like Thomas at first complained. Many doubt, many Christians may doubt at times. And this is not to be condemned because doubting can lead to a stronger faith. It can lead to questions which in turn lead to answers which, if accepted, means that doubt has done good work. The Holy Spirit works in us and through us to allay fears which may arise as a result of doubt. And as Jesus came to Thomas, so He will come today to those who seek Him, truly seek Him with their hearts. Though we cannot see Him, or touch Him, He makes Himself known through the work of the Holy Spirit. Some may see doubting as a flaw, as a weakness. Some may ask God to remove such weaknesses. But that’s not how God works. His power is made perfect in weakness, in our visible weaknesses. So let’s embrace our character flaws, our little foibles. Imagine them highlighted in gold. Let us offer them up to Jesus, who is God, so that He can use us, in all our brokenness, to reveal the glory of the resurrection.
Alleluia. Christ is risen. There is something deeply familiar about Easter morning. The lilies. The music. The brightness of the church after the restraint of Lent. For many of us, Easter carries layers of memory, childhood Easters with Chocolate gifts & easter eggs, family gatherings, new clothes, perhaps the echo of voices now silent but once singing beside us. Easter connects us not only to an event in Jerusalem, but to our own story, to Easter Sundays of years gone by.And yet Easter is never simply nostalgia. It is always new. In the Gospel according to Gospel of John, we are told that Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb “while it was still dark.” That small detail matters. Resurrection begins in the dark. Before proclamation, before understanding, before joy, there is confusion, running, breathlessness, linen cloths lying where a body had been. The beloved disciple “saw and believed,” we are told and yet, in the same breath, we are reminded that “they did not yet understand the scripture.” Faith often begins before comprehension. In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Peter stands in the house of Cornelius and does something extraordinary. He tells the story again. “We are witnesses,” he says. Not philosophers, not strategists, witnesses.In the Letter to the Colossians, we hear those striking words, “Seek the things that are above… for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” A new creation has begun, perhaps that is why Easter coincides so beautifully with our season of spring. The first shoots pushing through cold soil, blossom where there was barrenness, something awakens, life which seemed buried, rises. Over these past eighteen months, as you have welcomed me into the life and worship of St Stephen’s, one of the things I have come to cherish deeply is your rich Anglo-Catholic heritage. Not a nostalgia for its own sake, but a living beauty a respect for tradition . Incense rising, candles burning, the rhythm of liturgy that is older than any of us and yet received by us afresh.This year, our diocese marks it’s centenary, indeed next year St Stephen’s will also marks it’s 100th anniversary, the first new parish, in the then new diocese of Blackburn. That sense of perspective has felt especially poignant to me as I’ve reflected on Easter this year. One hundred years, think of the lives contained within that span, the baptisms, marriages, funerals. The wars endured, the celebrations shared. The quiet, faithful Sundays when perhaps only a handful gathered and yet the Eucharist was offered, and the light was kept burning. I sometimes smile when I think of the 1970s, my father’s flared trousers and kipper ties. At the time, they were entirely current, entirely convincing. But fashions are ephemeral, what feels essential one decade becomes quaint the next. The Resurrection is not like that, the stone the builders rejected, sings the Psalm, has become the cornerstone.Across a hundred years in the life of our Diocese and two thousand years in the Church, empires have shifted, cultures have transformed, technologies have redefined daily life. Yet each Easter, the same proclamation, Christ is risen. And each generation must hear it anew. One of the quiet wisdoms of our Christian inheritance is that we are not owners of the Gospel, we are custodians. The light of the Paschal candle, newly lit in the darkness, is never meant to remain in one place. It is passed, from taper to taper, from hand to hand, until the whole church is illuminated. That gesture is not decorative, it is theological. The light we guard is not ours, it is entrusted to us.Those who sat in these pews fifty years ago once held it for us. Those who laid foundations a century ago carried it through uncertainty and change. They brought to Easter what we bring, their fears, their hopes, their questions, their gratitude. And they proclaimed, in their time and in their context, that Christ is risen. Now it is our turn, in our homes, in our conversations, in the way we live, in the way we worship with reverence and joy. The Resurrection does not ask us to be fashionable. It asks us to be faithful. Mary came in the dark, Peter ran in confusion, the beloved disciple believed before he fully understood. The Church has always lived in that space, between darkness and dawn, between partial sight and full glory. And so this Easter morning, surrounded by beauty that is both ancient and fresh, we give thanks, for a faith that is ever ancient and ever new. A beauty that does not fade with fashion, a Lord who does not remain in the tomb. May this centenary year not turn us inward in preservation, but outward in proclamation. May the light we have received be light we gladly share. May the familiarity of Easter never dull its wonder, but deepen it.For this is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia
It is Holy Week, and we are called to be Holy, and over the course of the week there are all sorts of ways to grow in holiness, whether it be the plethora of services that we have on, or anointing with oils on Tuesday and Wednesday evening, or helping with the school easter play on Thursday, or cooking for the weekend and shopping without shouting at people, or avoiding eating your chocolate eggs yet, or just putting up with people in general – all these things can help us to increase in holiness if handled well. If you have an idle moment in the next week, which is maybe unlikely (although it is exactly what we should all be doing!), you can wander the streets of Bethphage on Google Maps. It doesn’t seem particularly remarkable today and I doubt it did when Jesus arrived there on his way to Jerusalem. I mean no offence to Bethphageans when I say that it has the feel of a commuter town about it: most of the people there now probably work in Jerusalem, just a couple of miles away. But in Jesus’s time, things might have been the other way around. Many in Jerusalem would have had their eye on Bethphage, a place that had acquired an enormous significance in the expectations of the religious leaders and thinkers of Jesus’s day. Bethphage meant something unflattering like ‘house of the unripe figs’ but it was to be the place where the ripening took place, the scene of a great clash between good and evil, the stage where the Lord’s judgment would finally be pronounced. Bethphage, in all of its ordinariness, was a sign of an awaited liberation.St Matthew’s Gospel assumes that we know all of that – and indeed we should, we have neglected our Bible studying for too long. St Matthew mostly seems concerned to show that Jesus, for all of his surprise and subversion, did precisely what the Messiah was supposed to do, in coming via Bethphage. It is important that we know that He went there. Matthew stresses that in the humility of the incarnate Son there is no loss of majesty. Nonetheless, we can see something of the otherness of Bethphage playing itself out in Jesus’s triumphal entry into the Holy City. By faith, we do indeed see God in Christ carving a new pathway into our world, a pathway that will lead onwards through the Lord’s death and into the glory of resurrection. We do indeed hear the city rumbling, not with the sound of earthquake but with the sound of exultation, the raucous singing of ‘Hosanna’, the bustle and movement of bodies as they gather themselves and others around the Messiah. We can easily sense the excitement, the feeling of fulfilment, the pulse that now is the favourable time, the intuition that something is indeed ripening in their midst. Here is the fulfilment of ancient prophecy, here is the King, here is the Messiah, exactly as He should be. But not quite. We know—as the first readers of Matthew’s Gospel knew—that the crowds will turn on Jesus within a matter of hours. Things are not quite right; the signs and symbols are all out of joint. The victorious Christ does not arrive on the warhorse but on a donkey. Palm branches were liturgically suited to the celebration of Tabernacles rather than Passover. The greeting ‘Hosanna’ literally means ‘please save us’, but does it sound more like triumphalism or desperation? Did they think ‘well, we were hoping for something else, but we can work with what we have got’? But it might also be that this is some kind of deconstruction of the rituals of power politics, the unmasking of their utter absurdity in their fulfilment by the living presence of divine power himself.There is certainly something playful about this, but pantomime doesn’t quite capture it: Jesus is not mocking or jesting, or even simply pushing the boundaries; he is deadly serious. The crowd are swept up into his dramatic act of redemption, drawn to participate in the deconstruction of their own illusions and fantasies of political liberation. No longer mere observers, they are now participants in the process of ripening. This, of course, will have consequences that they cannot yet foresee. Who is this? What will happen now? Maybe Bethphage is far too dull a place for a messiah from dull Nazareth to come from, and what of the donkey anyway? And the palm branches? It’s all a bit wrong, and there is a fear that things are going to get worse, not better. But reject your expectations, what we are going to get is what God gives us, and it will help us grow in holiness and hope, and it shows the sovereignty of God, on a donkey, in a dull suburb, with unexpected people, and the cries of ‘please save us’ will turn to the knowledge that we are saved, if we live this week with Him.
