Second Sunday of Easter 1997

What the Resurrection means

In these six Sundays after Easter, as in the way the Sundays before Easter, we get to plumb the depths of what the Resurrection means. So today we get the variety of the rest of the readings of the next six Sundays: both are from the First Letter of John and the Gospel of John, but I’d like to talk about this passage from the Acts of the Apostles as one way of getting hold of the depths of the resurrection.

It is sort of a cliché among Scripture scholars that Luke tended to "lily-gild" his writing: everything was bigger and better than what had really occured. This opinion is very likely true, and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles itself shows that it is. We have this idyllic situation of all these believers in Jesus sold everything and shared absolutely their lives with each other. So we can say to ourselves, "come on Luke, get serious." But certainly this is true: the impulse that moved him to describe the Resurrection-influenced life of these people was real. If you look at the career of Jesus, the thing that got him into trouble and ultimately got him killed, was just this kind of breaching of social statuses. He didn’t pay attention to all those social markers that tell us who we are. In fact he positively disregarded them, and that is an enormously dangerous thing to do, because society as we know it can’t function that way. So what Luke is saying here is that one aspect of those social markers, possessions, has melted away too.

Now what does that mean? Has everybody become, to use a very profane phrase that a friend of mine always uses to talk about social workers, "a goddamned do-gooder"? Pardon the language, but I understand the impulse. There are all kinds of us who’ll say, "oh, I’m just here to do good..." So is Luke turning us all into a bunch of Lords and Ladies Bountiful who go through life dispensing wonderful things to all those needy others? I don’t think so, and this is where this business of deepening is useful. If we try to figure out who we are, I think that, although we may not be very conscious of it, an enormous amount of our identity is derived from what we own. Evidence of this is overwhelming, in fact I think that it is so overwhelming that we don’t even advert to it, we just take it for granted for the most part. But this is what I think Luke wanted to say: all those things from which we derive a sense of who we are dissolve and a whole different way of relating to people emerges.

The underlying reality here is of course that nobody has any sense of identity apart from everybody else. I’ll read a line from Raymond Panikkaar, the great Jesuit Indian theologian: "I can’t answer the question of who I am without asking, ‘who are you?’" That puts it very succinctly. What is going on is quite astonishing: I present myself not in terms of my wardrobe, or my bank account, or my degrees, or my Roman collar..., but simply - stripped of all that stuff - stand before another human being with nothing other than my own humanity incarnated in this particular individual. I really believe that’s one of the things Luke wanted to say, and because Luke was particularly interested, for reasons that are not entirely clear, in the poor, he fastened onto the notion of material possessions as this great determiner of one’s own sense of one’s self. That is a difficult thing to talk about. I mean, here we are in a country with a certain percentage of unemployment: a friend of mine, a graduate from King’s, called and said "here I am with a BA selling shoes at Eaton’s." But I live in fat-city, in north London, in a nice house, with my library and my dogs, and the certainty of being able to eat whenever I go to the fridge. And yet it is a fact that the normal position of the nearly six-billion people on this planet is that they are poor. This is something that we don’t advert to, and I don’t know how to be poor. I think that is basically my problem. I don’t know how to dispossess myself in such a way that all those other people come into the range of my consciousness. As long as I am living a satisfactory life, they don’t enter into it. They really don’t.

It strikes me as strange that two thousand years after the writing of these texts there is a phrase that’s going around as if it were a new discovery: we now have a "preferential option for the poor." It is really weird that that has to be singularized as an aspect of our lives rather than being seems as lying near the heart of what we are as Christians and as an institution. Often enough, the institution does not help with this very much. There is a melancholy reading on the bulletin board outside the chapel about the Congregation for Education of the Roman Curia in the Vatican having shut down a catechetical center in Mexico that was run by the major religious superiors, and it has been interpreted as a withdrawal from the concern for the poor--and Mexico is a mess...

What is going on here? The point is that is very hard to sustain this notion that we are supposed to be co-human with everybody. I do not know how that is supposed to happen in the providence of God; that’s God’s problem. My problem is to see if that’s even something that I’m at all concerned about. By and large, I don’t even think that it is.

The problems are enormous: there are cultural differences between me and the poor, and there are all kinds of other differences. Somehow those differences have to be not eradicated, but recognized and the desire must be implanted in me to try and transcend them so that I can stand, as I must ultimately stand before God, not with what I’ve accumulated, but simply as who I am.

So, I think that is what Luke’s been getting at, and I think if we want miracles, we’ve got this strange business with Thomas. I don’t know what would be the greater miracle: to see Jesus up and about, walking through walls, or seeing us human beings transformed so that we didn’t have all those extraneous things that determine who we are and how to be with each other. It is interesting, and obviously the two businesses are aligned in the preaching of the Resurrection. So I hope this is a step forward for me and for you to get hold of at least one major aspect of the Proclamation of the Resurrection and what it is supposed to mean in our lives.

To other sermons

RT 29/4/97