LATEST SERMON; On the Way to Life

3rd Sunday of Easter

Easter 3, Sunday 19 April

Readings: Acts 2.14a, 36-41; 1 Peter 1. 17-23; Luke 24.13-35

Theme: On the way to life

During this season of Easter there is a fundamental question which is posed for Christians in the twenty-first century: how do we perceive the risen Christ. Jesus no longer walks the streets of Palestine as he once did over two-thousand years ago, so how is he present to us now and what does this mean for the life of the church?

These are difficult questions and we should not presume otherwise. Just how it is that God manifests Godself to us is something that should give us pause for thought. The first thing to note is that the church is essential to this act of perception. To come know God, means to come to know Christ and coming to know that Christ is mediated to us by the church. The church is the guardian of the word of God and of the sacramental mediation of God to us. It should also be the community who witnesses to the presence of the risen Christ among us in the way its members love one another. So, how are we to understand this mediation of God to us through the word and through the scriptures in the life of the church.

In answering these questions, the reading from Acts and the gospel story of Jesus on the road to Emmaus share a common pattern. Luke, the author of Acts and of the gospel, conveys how the resurrected presence of the Lord opens out the meaning of the scriptures which leads to baptism in the former and to the breaking of bread in the latter reading. The risen presence of Christ to us animates the liturgical of the church and that is why our services take the form that they do as constituted by the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the sacrament. Two parts of the liturgy united by the common aim of mediating the presence of the risen Christ to us.

In Acts, it is Peter who explains the meaning of the scriptures to the Jews. They are gathered for the Jewish feast of Pentecost. Peter explains that Jesus is both Lord and Messiah. Once those gathered for the feast realize this, sorrow at their own betrayal of the Lord leads them to ask for baptism, which is the means of the forgiveness of their sins and the reception of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Recognition of the presence of the Lord in the explained word leads to reception of the Lord in the sacrament. In both, Jesus is made present through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the resurrected presence of Jesus in the life of the church throughout the ages.

In the Emmaus gospel, it is Jesus himself who, beginning with Moses and the prophets, interprets just how the scriptures were about him. In this passage, a scriptural encounter of the two disciples with Jesus leads to recognizing his presence in the breaking of the bread. Once again, Luke uses the same pattern: explanation of the scriptures as about Jesus leads to recognizing his sacramental presence among them in the breaking of the bread.

Knowing this new presence of Jesus among the Jewish community in diaspora, the second reading from First Peter bids the church to love one another deeply from the heart. This is the witness which shows the world just what the presence of the risen Lord among us really means for how we are to live as church in the world after the resurrection. So, God’s presence in word and sacrament is meant to be transformative. It points us in the direction of the self-giving love who is Jesus, the very manifestation of God.

Our own encounters with the Lord also lead to mission beyond the community of the church; to the desire to share this new life of heartfelt love with those who have not yet encountered the risen Jesus. Just like those two disciples on the road, such encounters with Jesus should lead our own hearts to burn within us as we too share the joy of his risen presence with others. But for this to happen, we ourselves need to experience a real encounter with the Lord. This encounter is portrayed in our scriptures as the sorrow of the Jews when they realize what they have done to the Christ, that they have crucified him, and in the desolation displayed by Cleopas and the other disciple in recounting the tragic events on the road to Emmaus.

An authentic encounter with the risen Christ is often accompanied by a sense of sorrow for sin when we come to realize that we have lived for ourselves and not for him. Fundamentally, this is the human confusion of living as if we were God and not a creature of God. And such a realization means that we must relinquish a certain style of life which assumes itself to be independent of God, other people and indeed of nature itself. We are dependent creatures and in this three-fold dependence we come to know ourselves as creatures of God whose resurrected presence is mediated to us in the life of the church.