Walking Through Walls (and Other Christ-like Practices)
By Rev. Karin Case
April 11, 2010
Second Sunday of Easter
Lessons: Acts 5:12a, 17-26 and John 20:19-31
If you find Easter challenging, if you find resurrection un-believable, if, like Thomas, you are left scratching your head and wondering, then today is for you! Each year on the Sunday after Easter we cycle back to this text from John 20, where Jesus appears and Thomas doubts. It’s interesting, because our lectionary follows a three-year cycle and this text appears in all three years. Not many texts that are so honored! I suspect that the lectionary-making whoo-haas know just how powerful it is and how much we need to hear it.
We see Jesus’ followers, traumatized and cowering in fear behind locked doors. We can identify with that. We know what it’s like to be shaken to the core when something terrible happens to someone we love. We know the feeling of hunkering down, the impulse to shut out the whole big bad world, so full of violence. We know it can be scary to stand up for what we believe, especially when publicly confronted, and especially when the stakes are high. We also know the healthy, self-protective instinct to hide when we are under real threat from the powers of the world.
This is a good story for us to hear. We identify so powerfully with the human emotions—the confusion, skepticism, doubt, and fear evoked by the events of Jesus’ last days. We can identify, too, with the bewilderment and disbelief of the disciples’ in their post-resurrection encounter with Jesus, a meeting that seems to defy the laws of nature. Many of us know by heart the story of Thomas. Thomas, who won’t take anyone else’s word that Jesus has appeared to them. Thomas, who insists on seeing for himself.
There are many things to love in this story. Thomas’s insistent honesty. Jesus’ tenderness toward him. The way Jesus gives the disciples the Holy Spirit and tells them “As God sent me, so I send you,” and so commissions them to become healers and evangelists. Pretty awesome stuff.
But I have to confess that my very favorite part of the story is when Jesus walks through the walls of the locked room. And he does it not once, but twice! John writes, “Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them.”
Say what? The story of the week after Easter is the story of Christ’s continuing presence that meets us in all the locked rooms of our lives. And there are so many locked rooms—places of fear, anxiety, grief and worry. So many prisons we create—unjust systems and repressive regimes, poverty and hatred and inequality, places where we cower because of violence, force and intimidation.
If the story of Easter is the story of the empty tomb, the story of this week is the story of the locked room. It is about a life-force, a breath of Spirit, a Presence that meets us behind closed doors, in our places of fear and grief. It is about a freedom that unbinds us and coaxes us to go out again into the world with renewed hope.
What do we know of that kind of freedom? The kind of vitality and purpose that defies physical limitations? The kind of freedom that disregards hard walls and locked doors? The kind of fullness of life that says “no” to death?
I am reminded of a story of a young mother, diagnosed with a terminal illness and nearing the end of her life. She had come to terms with her own death, but two losses were particularly hard. It was hard to let go of all the things she would not be able to share with her children as they grew up. And it was hard to let go of the very special role of parenting —guiding, comforting, and sharing life’s wisdom. So as a final gift, she made tapes of herself, speaking to her children—one tape for each special occasion in their lives: high school graduation, marriage, the birth of a child. In each tape, saying what she would want to share with them if she were there in person. This mother had the kind of inner freedom I’m talking about, the freedom—not to beat an illness—but to live passionately and fully despite the certainty of physical death.
The story from Acts 5 that Evan read for us this morning is a second story of radical freedom. Like the story of Jesus walking through walls, the story of the apostles’ late-night prison break symbolizes of the power of the Spirit to liberate us from the powers of destruction.
The persecution of Jesus’ followers began early. Acts portrays the tensions between the established authorities and the apostles as they went from place to place teaching about Jesus. They were locked up any number of times. And in the passage from Acts we read this morning, the high priest has thrown them in Jerusalem’s public prison for preaching the gospel. But during the night, an angel comes and opens the prison doors and leads them out, saying “Go, stand in the temple, and tell the people the whole message about this life.”
From prison, the apostles are freed for a deeper purpose. They will go out into the public square, out into the temple, out into the world, to tell about the life they know in Christ, the freedom that no lock and no prison bars can diminish.
In February 1990, as the world watched, Nelson Mandela stepped out of the Victor Verster Prison, in the Western Cape, where he had spent the last three years of his twenty-seven year imprisonment. Mandela is often celebrated as an exemplar of forgiveness, and with good reason. Whatever your opinion may be of the African National Congress, or of Mandela’s leadership as president of South Africa, he is extraordinary in his capacity to forgive. He emerged from prison, not bitter and broken, but strong and free. Able to forgive his tormentors, to emerge from the ordeal of imprisonment and to lead his nation into a new era of reconciliation.
Convicted of sabotage for his activities against South Africa’s apartheid government, Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison at Robben Island, where along with other inmates, he performed hard labor in a limestone quarry. Prisoners were segregated by race. Black inmates at Robben Island received meager rations and political prisoners, like Mandela, received few privileges. Mandela reports that as a D-group prisoner (the lowest classification) he was allowed only one visitor and one letter every six months.
Mandela is a person who is deeply free inside himself—as a quality of being. I suspect that freedom comes from knowing exactly who he is and what is important in life. At his trial in Pretoria in 1964, Mandela stated:
“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Like the apostles, released in the middle of the night, Mandela, too, is freed for a deeper purpose. With an inner freedom that knows no barriers of fear, of hard walls or locked doors. A freedom that makes no concessions to the powers of this world.
The words of the angel to the apostles say it all: “Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life.”
So, friends, what is the whole message about this life? What is it for you? If you found Easter challenging, try this day—this Sunday-after-Easter, where we—like the bewildered disciples cowering behind locked doors, we—like the apostles sprung from prison—are asked to make our own sense out of the whole thing and begin to tell the story in our own words.
What, friends, is the whole message of this life? What word? What declaration about the fullness of life rooted in God’s spirit, known to us in Jesus Christ do you have to share? What are the words to express this unbounded love that leaves grave cloths discarded in a pile, and rolls away the heavy stones of our hearts? What words can tell of this magnificent body of flesh and light that walks through walls of fear? The blinding, angelic presence that breaks the bonds of prison and flings wide the doors? This purpose that unbinds and unshackles, stronger any chains? This love that is not held by the powers of evil, this power that cannot be kept out by any walls we can build?
What are the words to tell the whole message of this life?