Text: John 20:19-23
Speaker: Joel Miller
When I say Christ is Risen, you say Christ is Risen Indeed.
Christ is Risen….
When I say Peace be with you, you say And also with you.
Peace be with you…
A month ago, on a Saturday in mid-March, Leadership Team met for our annual retreat. This includes a good meal and personal check ins, with a primary goal of coming up with a Vision for Ministry for the coming year. Our commissions and staff are encouraged to keep this vision in front of them to guide their work. Past Visions for Ministry have focused on sanctuary, practicing beloved community, accessibility, and, most recently, exploring our Anabaptist histories.
Arriving at a new Vision for Ministry is a mix of listening over time to the life of the church, and following the flow of what emerges on that particular day.
Depending on your disposition, this might sound like an intriguing process to be part of, or the absolute last thing you’d want to be doing on a Saturday in early spring. Fortunately, everyone who was supposed to be there showed up.
And after four hours we settled on seven words as our new Vision for Ministry.
Are you ready for it? Here it is:
We will cultivate a courageous peace witness.
Maybe it’s the war in Iran. Or the ongoing devastation of Gaza and Sudan. Or the loudness of White Christian Nationalism. Maybe it’s a natural follow-up from Anabaptist history to Anabaptism present tense. Maybe it’s a recognition that there are countless things to be anxious about so how do we cultivate an inner peace that enables us to live well in this world.
It was these and more that made cultivating a courageous peace witness feel like an important theme for the year to come. Stay tuned, and if you have ideas for what this could look like, talk to anyone on the leadership slate we’ll be approving at the congregational meeting.
Easter is a whole season in the liturgical year, and we’re lingering with this resurrection story from John, which includes Jesus’ repeated words: Peace be with you.
In this story, it’s still Easter Sunday. John writes: “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week…”
Before evening, Mary Magdalene alone has encountered Jesus post-resurrection. Only, like those travelers to Emmaus, she doesn’t recognize the person as Jesus, initially. There’s a pattern there. She thinks she’s talking with the gardener outside the tomb where Jesus was buried. And maybe she is. But when the gardener calls her by name – “Mary” – something shifts, tectonically, irreversibly – and it’s Jesus, right there, in the garden, working the soil and planting something so deep in Mary’s heart she’ll never be the same. Like creation is starting anew. There, in the garden, where it all began. Like the Garden of Eden has just rebooted, and all the paths of human unfolding that had been blocked off, and all the doors of possibility that had slammed shut on the human story have been reopened. These two in the garden, on the first day of the week.
Mary goes and announces to the disciples what she’s seen.
Mary is re-made. The disciples are not.
“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jewish authorities….”
The disciples are afraid. And for good reason. They are confidants of a recently executed man, guilty by association. There’s plenty of reason to believe a common fate awaits them.
Fear is an old, old instinct, deep in the evolutionary brain, almost as old as creation itself. Fear aids survival. And that’s what’s going on here. The disciples are in survival mode. Doors shut. Locked. Triple dead bolt plus that chain thingy that stops doors from opening very far if the locks are picked. Sympathetic nervous system firing on all cylinders. Adrenaline and cortisol pumping through the body on high alert status. Guards up. Not prime conditions to make sense of Mary’s talk of some Jesus gardener who called her by name.
That’s when, John says, “Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’”
So much for the security system. And so much for any kind of pattern with these resurrection appearances.
Bodies with atoms and cells don’t walk through solid objects, like walls and doors. But these disciples seem to be seeing and hearing the same thing. And it’s the body where Jesus directs their attention. His own. He shows them his hands, and his side. These are the wounds of crucifixion.
If you weren’t here last week and want to go more in depth with how transformation includes rather than negates woundedness and grief then I encourage you to go back and read Mark’s sermon where he explored this theme. It’s as if resurrection life is somewhere in that next concentric circle outward, containing but not limited by everything that came before it. Trees figured this out about a half billion years ago – how to grow outward into the next circle in such a way that holds all the previous circles of experience – wounds and all – within the same life. Humans: Still working on it.
Jesus, in whatever circle of existence you’re in when you can walk through walls but still like to garden and eat fish for breakfast, doesn’t have a lot to say to these recently fearful and now rejoicing disciples. Which makes what he does say, and do, all the more impactful.
He says: “Peace be with you.”
Before reading too much into that, it’s good to know this was a common greeting, not necessarily a theological proclamation. Even today Muslims and Arabic speakers greet each other with As-salamu alaykumm, Peace be upon you, and if you visit Israel, the most common way of saying Hello and Goodbye is the ancient Hebrew word for peace, Shalom.
What makes this more than just a casual greeting is that Jesus says to these fearful disciples, “Peace be with you” and then shows them something very unpeaceful. The very thing about which they were fearful – the violence inflicted on his body. And then, as if making sure they recognize this is much more than Hello, he says it again: Peace be with you.
It could have been different. Imagine the same scenario in which Jesus greets his followers, then shows them his tortured wounds and says “Look what they did to me. Now go and do the same to them.” That would be a certain form of justice, and that would be the kind of peace in which many still place their faith – peace through threat of overwhelming violence.
Jesus presents a different program. And he embeds it in a different narrative.
He says: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” You are to be as I have been in this world.
And then, John says, he breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And we’re back again in Genesis, at the creation, when the Spirit/Breath of God is hovering over the waters, and creation flows as creatures receive the breath of life.
It’s like a creation reboot in miniature, starting behind those locked doors, moving out into the world. Except the wounds of history don’t just go away. They’re all still there. The hands and the side and the fear and grief. More like a reimagination of the human story mid-stride. A daring proposal that homo sapien, clever human, could become homo pacificus, peaceful human.
It’s such an outlandish plot proposal that it will require a new relationship with the very air that sustains life. The wounded and risen Jesus exhales, and they inhale, they breathe it in, all of it, and whatever toxic air of despair and resentment and vengeance had filled their lungs and minds, gets displaced with the fresh breath that continually re-creates the world.
Peace be with you.
John says “Jesus breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you don’t forgive them, they aren’t forgiven.’”
Now that’s some real power. Forgiveness toward peace – not as some kind of dismissal of harm and wounds, but as a program toward the healing of creation. What Mary first experienced by the garden tomb in such a personal way, and what disciples of Jesus have been stumbling to grasp ever since.
If you follow the news, it’s been a big week for Jesus and war and peace. As Anabaptists committed to the way of peace, I love that it’s the leader of the Christian group we initially separated from who has pointed the world to that outlandish call of the gospel of Jesus Christ toward peace and human dignity. As Pope Leo said at the very beginning of this calendar year, to pilgrims outside the Vatican: “Dear friends, with the grace of Christ, let us begin today to build a year of peace, disarming our hearts and refraining from all violence.”
It’s good to know we’re not alone in this Vision for Ministry this year.
It’s a vision as old as creation, that’s been wounded and even crucified, but somehow, is still alive. Walking through locked doors, displacing fear with Holy Spirit.
Peace be with you.