Second Sunday of Easter

DIAGNOSIS (The Sickness): STILL CAPTIVE TO THE POWER OF DEATH

The Symptoms
STAGE 1 STILL LOCKED UP AFTER EASTER
Even after hearing the news that Christ is risen (20:18), the disciples are still in hiding, still fearing someone, something, that signals death for them. How different are today’s disciples even after our own celebration (again) of Easter?

The Deeper Infection
STAGE 2 FEAR-FULL, FAITH-LESS, LIFE-LESS
Fear, predicated to the eleven disciples here, is the opposite of faith. Thomas is more direct about his un-faith: “I will not believe.” His problem is not his doubt that Jesus came back from the grave. By his own words he’s not “doubting” Thomas, but “unbelieving” Thomas. And what is it that he will not believe? Answer: that which he confesses when he later does come to faith, namely, that a crucified Jesus could be his (or anyone else’s) “Lord and God.” How serious is such “not believing?” “Not believing,” says John, is not “having the Life in his name” (v.31).

Where Such Sickness Winds Up, the God-sized Problem
STAGE 3 STILL LOCKED IN DEATH IN THE GOD-RELATIONSHIP
Without the “Life in Christ’s name” people are “dead” to God. They are left without the three Easter gifts Christ bestows in the text: God’s own Peace, God’s Holy Spirit (as Breath = Life, or as Wind = Power), and God’s Forgiveness of Sins. (At root, these 3 are synonyms.)

NEW PROGNOSIS (The Healing): ROLLING BACK THE POWER OF DEATH

Christ Assumes our God-sized Problem to Heal Us
STAGE 4 LIFE NONETHELESS IN THE MIDST OF DEATH
God’s Number One Son breaks into the realm of death–initially in last weekend’s Good Friday and Easter, and here again as he enters the post-Easter death-space of the locked-up disciples. Upon entering he exchanges his plusses for our minuses. God’s Peace comes through the cross (note the importance of the death marks). Forgiveness of sins, God’s own Spirit for sinners, also come through Christ’s cross.

Healing the Deeper Infection
STAGE 5 BELIEVING = LIVING
Believing = having the Life in his name, trusting his forgiveness, breathing God’s own Spirit, enjoying God’s Shalom.

Living in the Old World With New Symptoms
STAGE 6 LIVING = WITNESSING: OUT OF THE LOCK-UP, SENT TO UNDO DEATH
Sent as the Father sent Jesus, and on the same mission: Out in the world, beyond the locked doors, rolling back the power that death has over others, who are still hiding in fear. Getting sinners forgiven, getting God’s Spirit into them, getting God’s Peace to people who don’t have it.

THE EGGTOOTH
by Kathleen O. Reed

In the last hour before birth

The chick inside its shell is

As good

As dead.

Eyes blind, legs limp, wings

Pinned against the wall,

A bone-bag sealed

Inside a tomb.

(As good as dead 

Except 

For the eggtooth)

When the filling full of egg and time

Flow into one another, not death

But birth begins.

In the back of the fetal neck

A mysterious muscle flexes for the first Time, triggering an armed assault

Engaging

The embryo’s only weapon.

As good as dead

Except

For the eggtooth, mounted at beak’s end, Pneumatic birthing drill-bit

Whirling through rock

Bound for daylight,

Breaking out

From death to life.

In the last hour before dawn

Certain women are

As good as dead.

Barely moving, crushed from inside out

By fear they let gravity

Roll them through the night.

They will place their tombs next to his, Their hardened wombs of stillborn hope.

They are as good as dead except

For the eggtooth —

Hope’s hammer, birth’s battering ram,

Spirit-driven drill, done

With three days of driving through Hell

And the dark diamond walls of Death —

This eggtooth, Christ’s cross,

Splits Easter open.

Surrexit vere! Ed