In the name of God, our Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and Friend.
Well, here it is! The most offensive, outrageous and enraging truth about the Easter gospel! This is the part they don’t tell you about until now—until the 2nd or 3rd week of Easter, when doubting Thomas puts his hand into the wounded side of Jesus, and his fingers into the wounded hands and feet; and now today, a whole roomful of disciples are invited to touch those wounded hands and feet.
All during Lent—for the entire 40 days of Lent and then into Holy Week and beyond; beyond Easter and throughout Easter week, we hear the glorious expectations of resurrection life. Christ is risen, and no more does death have dominion over us! Remember that affirmation of Easter faith?
Christ has conquered death and the grave, and in him we too inherit his resurrection life! So rejoice and be glad, for the new life of the Risen One is ours who believe and receive His astounding gift to us! Yes, that is the faith we have affirmed and reaffirmed for days and weeks now.
But last Sunday and today we get to hear the rest of the story. Now we get to see wounded side and feet; to read ‘the small print;’ to read ‘between-the-lines’ of the Easter good news. And it remains to be seen whether you or I will receive these additional details as good news. On the contrary, despite our joy we may be just as disbelieving and wondering as the disciples are in today’s gospel.
For after he showed them his hands and his feet—after he even invited them to touch the wounds in his hands and feet; the wounds he received in the hideous hours of his crucifixion—“While in their joy, they were [also] disbelieving and still wondering.” (Lk. 24.39)
‘Disbelieving and still wondering despite our joy.’ That really describes the mental and emotional state of us post-Easter Christian disciples. Because we are all of us—from the earliest disciples in those days following the very first Easter, to those of us today who celebrated Easter 2 weeks ago—we are all of us “disbelieving and still wondering” about a Risen Savior who still bears the scars of his torture and crucifixion on his resurrection body.
Despite our Easter joy, I declare, we are scandalized by such a Savior.
My colleague at Emory calls him “The Disabled God.” * Sounds a little scandalous already, doesn’t it; even a sacrilegious maybe? This disabled God revealed himself to our Prof. Nancy Eiesland over the course of many years; the many years that she grew up “having been disabled from birth” (p.1).
At first she heard things that were confusing to her as a young child. “You are special in God’s eyes, that’s why you were given this painful disability.” Already as a young person that statement didn’t seem logical. Why would God afflict someone whom God specially favored? Rather the opposite, yes?
In addition she heard people say, “Don’t worry about your pain and suffering now, in heaven you will be made whole.” But since she had been disabled from birth, this made heaven sound like a place where one becomes an entirely different person; as if you are no longer yourself but become some replacement for yourself—a replica in her case who had never been disabled.
Thus, Prof. Eiesland says, “I came to believe that in heaven I would be absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God. My disability has taught me who I am and who God is. What would it mean to be without this knowledge?
Finally, she says, “My family frequented faith healers with me in tow. I was never healed. People asked about my hidden sins,” and then she adds a bit humorously, “but they must have been so well hidden that even I misplaced them.”
Nevertheless, she admits, “ Much of my life I waited for a mighty revelation of God. [And when] I did experience an epiphany . . .it bore little resemblance to the God I was expecting or the God of my dreams…”
Here’s the story of Nancy Eiesland’s ‘Aha!’ moment.
My return to intimacy with God began at an Atlanta rehabilitation hospital [the Shepherd Spinal Center ] for persons with spinal cord injuries. A chaplain asked me to lead a Bible study with several residents. One afternoon after a long and frustrating day, I shared with the group my own doubts about God's care for me. I asked them how they would know if God was with them and understood their experience. After a long silence, a young African-American man said, "If God was in a sip-puff, maybe He would understand."
I was overwhelmed by this image: God in a sip-puff wheelchair, the kind used by many quadriplegics that enables them to maneuver the chair by blowing and sucking on a straw-like device [thus ‘sipping and puffing.’] . . .
Several weeks later, [Prof. Eiesland continues] I was reading in Luke's Gospel about an appearance of the resurrected Jesus [that is, today’s gospel: Lk 24:36-39]. The focus of this passage is really on his followers, who are alone and depressed. Jesus says to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see."
This wasn't exactly God in a sip-puff, [Prof. Eiesland admits] but here was the resurrected Christ making good on the promise that God would be with us, embodied, as we are -- disabled and divine. In this passage, I recognized a part of my hidden history as a Christian.
[For] The foundation of Christian theology is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet seldom is the resurrected Christ recognized as a deity whose hands, feet, and side bear the marks of profound physical impairment.
This was my epiphany. The resurrected Christ is a disabled God -- one who understood the experience of the others in my Bible study in the rehab center, as well as my own. Encountering this disabled God became for me the source of a "liberation theology" of disability. Jesus Christ, as a living symbol of the disabled God, shares in the human condition; he experiences in his embodiment all our vulnerability and flaws. In emptying himself of divinity, Jesus enters the arena of human limitation, even helplessness. Jesus' own body is wounded and scarred, disfigured and distorted.” (http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/easter3b.htm)
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But seldom (as Nancy Eiesland goes on to declare), “seldom is the resurrected Christ recognised as a deity whose hands, feet, and side bear the marks of profound physical impairment . . . This disabled God understood the experience of those in my Shepherd Center Bible study, as well as my own, and called for justice not from the distant reaches of principle but by virtue of God’s incarnation and ultimate knowledge of human contingency. Christian theology, insofar as it is an incarnational theology, has a calling to stand by contingency, mortality and the concreteness of creation and suffering.” [p.2]
Encountering the disabled God then makes possible thoroughgoing re-analysis of the connection between the myth of bodily perfection and the theological lengths to which we are willing to go in order to protect it. If Christ resurrected still participated fully in the experience of human life – including mysteriously the experience of impairment – we must be scandalised by our theological tendencies to perpetuate the myth of bodily perfection in our defence of heavenly . . . perfection . . .
[Instead, let us examine and] interrogate our own rage at mortality. The truth of mortality is threaded in our bones and genes and yet we, who are categorised as “unhealthy”, find it hard to love God and ourselves. We would be a god. We rage within at God or at ourselves. We constantly kick against the limits of being human. We devise inhuman schedules, inhumane expectations of others and ourselves, and inhumane needs of wealth and success.
Stress-induced impairment will soon be among the leading causes of disability in the Western world, as we work our bodies beyond God-given limits. Affecting men and women in their thirties to fifties, stress-induced disabilities, like repetitive strain injury, stroke, and heart attack, teach us that we have yet to hear God’s call to be fully human, which means accepting our mortal limits. It is worth noting that our limits are neither constant nor uniform. Yet in the practice of ordinary faithfulness to our call to be human and to be for the others, we must learn to love our mortality as God does.
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What! “Learn to love our mortality as God does!” Are you serious? Learn to love our limitations and vulnerability? Learn to love being subject to relativity and contingency, instead of being godlike enough to give ourselves absolutes and predictability? Learn to love our human inability to be gods? Are you kidding?
How dare anyone expect us to love these aspects of our human existence rather than simply to endure and suffer them, and work as hard as possible to escape their tyranny! Now, do you hear your voice in this mortal complaint? Do you recognize that voice in the way you work and live and suffer and heal? Do you recognize your own voice in that tone of outrage and ‘in-rage?’ Well, that is the voice of a scandalized disciple who is offended at the scars and wounds in Jesus’ side and hands and feet. And the cure for that outrage and ‘in-rage’ is what one commentator on Alcoholics Anonymous has called, “The Spirituality of Imperfection” (Ernest Kurtz; New York: Bantam, 1992).
“Imperfection is related to limits,” Ernest Kurtz observes. And “as humans, we do not ‘have’ limits; we are limited (p. 47). He then proceeds to describe the way that alcoholics recovered their human capacity to stay sober in AA by simply acknowledging their humanity rather than fighting against their so-called “limits.”
In 1937 in New York, and in 1939 in its other center, Akron, Ohio, the members of Alcoholics Anonymous departed [from their earlier] Oxford Group auspices. Many factors weighed, but among the heaviest loomed the [ Oxford ] Group insistence on their “Four Absolutes:” Absolute Honesty, Absolute Purity, Absolute Unselfishness, and Absolute Love.
These ideals are still mentioned in some A.A. groups, but co-founder Bill W. spoke for the fellowship as a whole in 1940 letter in which he responded to a critic of A.A.’s abandonment of the Four Absolutes”:
The ideals of purity, honesty, unselfishness, and love are as adhered to by members of Alcoholics Anonymous as by any other group of people, but we found that when you put the word “absolute” before them, alcoholics just couldn’t stand the pace, and too many went out and got drunk again. . . .
As you so well understand, we drunks are all-or-nothing people. In the old days of the Oxford Groups, they were forever talking about the Four Absolutes. . . . [But] there we saw people going broke on this sort of perfection—trying to get too good by Thursday.
Instead of continually “trying to get too good by Thursday,” Kurtz tells us, alcoholics in AA had to discover a “spirituality of im-perfection. For the spirituality of perfection is what kept them drunk, and they only found recovery when they were able to acknowledge their humanity as “finite beings who thirst for the infinite, desperate creatures who ‘want to be God,’” and “all-or-nothing people who go broke on perfection” (pp.47-48).
Is it possible for us to claim this spirituality of imperfection for ourselves? Can we acknowledge that this is the gospel of good news for the 2 nd and 3 rd weeks after Easter? Can we hear the good news of our imperfections in that lovely scripture from 1 John also appointed for today:
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God…
Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.
And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. (1 John 3.1-3)
“When he is revealed, we will be like him!” Human like him or divine like him? How about both? How about: just as he is human and divine, so we will be human and divine-like too? Will we be divinely transfigured as he is today’s gospel? But also, will we be still human with the scars and wounds of our humanity as visible as his scars and wounds are visible in today’s gospel?
I put the question to you, then, brothers and sisters in Christ: Would we be pleased with these tokens of our humanity still visible in our transfigured, resurrected selves? Or do we want to be perfected ‘clones’ of ourselves, with all the signs and evidence of our life’s struggles somehow magically erased for eternity? Do we disparage our humanity so strongly that we want to annul it, when our Lord himself loved us so much that he embraced it?
In today’s gospel we hear this God who loves us saying ‘No!’ to that kind of white-washed perfection. Rather, he says, ‘Yes!’ instead to our full humanity—scars and all.
And thus by faith let us affirm that ‘it does not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when Jesus appears we will be like him, seeing him as he is. And because we have this hope, let us purify ourselves to be like him “in all his redeeming work.” *
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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* Note: The Collect for this 3rd Sunday of Easter—
O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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Also, consider this note on the use in 1 John of “pure” and “purify” in contrast with the word, “perfection:”
“A critical error in the history of Western spirituality arises from the out-of-context quotation of the words of Jesus . . . as recorded in [Matthew 5:48 ]: ‘Therefore be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.’ The term perfect is translated from the Greek teleios, which means more accurately “fully complete.” Verses 43 o 48 form a unit, the theme of which is the breadth of the love of the Father, who “lets His rain fall on the just and the unjust alike.” When taken in context, then, the point of the admonition to “be perfect” is to be compassionate in a way that treats all others fairly, equally.” Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Journey to Wholeness; New York : Bantam, 1999; p. 46.
This emphasis is consistent with the subsequent reading from 1 John appointed for the 5 th Sunday of Easter, 1 John 4.11-12:
Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected [completed] in us.
Comments? Contact The Rev. Thee Smith: tsmith@stphilipscathedral.org