Once more in the Gospel we return to the first Easter Day. Last Sunday we heard St John’s account of the two appearances to the Apostles in the Upper Room: the first on Easter evening, and the second the following Sunday, bringing Thomas to faith. We have just heard another account of that first appearance in the Upper Room, which St Luke describes as taking place after Cleopas and his companion had rushed back to tell the Apostles about their astonishing experience on the walk to Emmaus, how Christ had revealed to them His risen self in the blessing and breaking of the bread, and had explained to them how the Old Testament Scriptures had been fulfilled in all that had happened to the Him on Calvary.
Now we hear of the Lord’s appearance quite suddenly and those reassuring words, ‘Peace be with you’. The Apostles, however, in a state of alarm and fright, believe that they are seeing some kind of disembodied spirit. It is impossible that the man who was just now killed in so abominably cruel a way could be alive. Yet He doesn’t seem to sympathise with their fears, instead upbraiding them, ‘why are you so agitated and why do these doubts rise in your hearts?’ This is a constant theme in these appearances after the Resurrection. In St John’s Gospel, too, last week, St Thomas was especially upbraided by our Lord for his obstinate refusal to believe his companions when they told him that they had seen the Lord, risen from the dead.
Yet both Thomas in St John’s Gospel, and all the Apostles in this one, are made to change their minds precisely by the sight, and the touch, of Christ’s wounded hands and feet. It must seem strange at first that this should be reassuring, that to see and touch his wounds should even cause those frightened men to rejoice exceedingly. Why should the palpable evidence of the crucifixion fill them with joy? It is surely because from now on those wounds are the evidence that even that terrible death has not destroyed Him. More than that, not only has death not destroyed him, but He has brought the marks of the nails and spear into His new life, carrying them in His living body as a sign that He has not simply passed through death and left it behind like an old garment, but has absorbed death into Himself in a way that totally annihilates its destructive power.
So, too, He takes a piece of fish and eats it so as to prove to them - not that He needs that kind of nourishment any longer - but that He can still eat. This is not only another way of proving to them the sheer physical reality of His risen state, but it points towards something hugely significant about the risen state: the possibility of still being able to enjoy real food. Our Lord is, I believe, suggesting to the Apostles that, although He has now overcome the physical limitations of the body before death, His body still has the ability to enjoy nourishment in company with others, and thus He teaches us that when He has finally raised our mortal bodies and made them like His own in glory, we will likewise be able to eat and drink with Him in His heavenly kingdom.
Yet even so, all this is still only part of what He wants to teach them. After showing them that He is truly alive, He goes on to do what He had also just done on the road to Emmaus: He opens their minds to understand the scriptures. All that we read and understand in the Old Testament finds its meaning in Christ. Indeed, we only see and read Scripture in this way because Christ Himself has showed us how to read it. As I put it on Easter morning, the ‘fulfilment of the Scriptures’ of which we speak in the Creed, means not that Christ was compelled to act in certain ways simply in order to prove His credentials, but rather that those texts were obscure until He gave them their true meaning in His Passion. I think that this way of understanding the ‘fulfilment of the Scriptures’ also helps us to make sense of something else we hear in today’s first reading. Maybe you have wondered how it was possible that the High Priest, the Sanhedrin, all the chief priests and the Scribes, and all those who were whipped up into a frenzy to persuade Pontius Pilate that Jesus must die, could have failed to see that the Old Testament texts they read every week in the synagogue were even then being fulfilled in their presence, and through their own efforts. While they were doing those things to Christ, how can they not have heard those words of the prophet Isaiah echoing in their ears: ‘I offered my back to those who struck me...I did not cover my face against insult and spittle’, and in the psalms: ‘they tear holes in my hands and my feet...they divide my clothing among them, they cast lots for my robe’, and in His words on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ And how did they not catch themselves saying some of those very words in mockery, like ‘He trusted in the Lord, let Him save him! Let him release him if this is his friend’? Yet Peter says to the people in the Temple that ‘neither you nor your leaders had any idea what you were really doing.’ They did not know at the time, for all those Old Testament prophecies were opaque, were without their true context, until they had been fulfilled in the person and sufferings of Christ. And in this way, says Peter, was God’s Will fulfilled.
Peter ends today’s first reading with this call to repentance: ‘Now you must repent and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out.’ And how does our Lord end today’s Gospel? With a call to repentance: ‘So you see how it is written that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that, in His name, repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all the nations.’
In a world which no longer takes seriously the idea of sin, it is hard to get the urgency of this message across. Sin is not merely an infringement of the moral code, a breach of the Ten Commandments, serious enough as that is. Sin is far worse, it is an offence against the goodness and love of God and is a monstrous distortion of our true nature – so very horrid because we do not even necessarily realise just how much harm it does to us. Sin is at the root of all selfishness, the canker which blinds us to the horror of rebellion against God; and this can be nowhere more clearly and horribly seen than in the terrible things Christ endured solely for love of us and at our hands. All this ‘had to be fulfilled’ because of sin, and because God in His love and wisdom deemed that there was no other way to rescue us all from the stifling power of sin, and bring us back to the glorious image of the Creator, lost through sin.
A sense of sin is not morbid. It is a true sense of reality. It is like the sense of pain, without which we could do irreparable harm to ourselves. The denial of sin makes us unresponsive to God’s love. That is why the call to repent of our sins is central to the preaching of the resurrection. St John in the second reading says that he is writing to his children ‘to stop you sinning’. For St John, Christ’s sacrifice in us is not perfected until we have done with the corrosion of sin. Yet if anyone should sin, says St John, then we have our advocate with the Father, ‘Jesus Christ...[who] is the sacrifice that takes our sins away.’ Unless our sins are taken away, we cannot hope to share in Christ’s risen glory. It is by turning in repentance to our Advocate, Jesus our merciful Lord, and humbly acknowledging that, even though we had no idea what our sins were really doing, we, too were responsible for Christ’s sufferings, that we can find the way to life and glory. Simply put, we need to recover our love for our risen Saviour as He comes to us in confession, in the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. In the words of a familiar Easter hymn; ‘Paschal triumph, paschal joy, only sin can this destroy. From the death of sin set free, souls reborn, dear Lord, in Thee!’ It is the death of the soul, as well as that of the body, which is overcome by Christ at Easter, and here and now He begins to share it with us, but He will bring it to perfection only when we, too, have passed beyond death and into eternal life, and see Him face to face for all eternity in glory.
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