Sermon Easter

Saint Margaret’s Anglican Church Budapest, Hungary Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31 “…that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” One of the most touching, and I use that word advisedly, one of the most touching narratives or stories in the Gospel of John, perhaps in all the Gospels, is that of the encounter of Mary Magdalene with the Risen Christ. Father John made beautiful reference to this narrative in his sermon last Sunday. If you missed it, you can still find it online on our website. Mary, in the Evangelist John’s telling, becomes the first to actually encounter the risen Lord at the empty tomb; and she somehow mistakes him for the Gardener, of all people, nevertheless placing her and us back in the Garden of Eden, in Paradise, where it all began, and where Christ is now indeed the Gardener. It is in the midst of this early morning encounter that Jesus utters the now famous, and somehow deeply enigmatic, command, “Do not hold on to me,” as it is translated, “Do not hold on to me because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” In other words, do not touch me, do not grab hold of me, do not grasp me. What to make of it…? It is unclear in the text whether Mary had already embraced him or whether she was obviously about to. Some commentators suggest that she was actually trying to prevent our Lord’s rising, his Ascension, to the Father, by physically holding him down. Quite an image… In any case and without further ado, Mary hastens back to the disciples and announces that “I have seen the Lord.” Now, a scant seven or eight verses later in John’s Gospel account of the Resurrection, we are confronted with the story of the Apostle Thomas’s encounter with the Risen Christ, as we heard it proclaimed to us moments ago. Absent from the Lord’s first appearance to the disciples, Thomas declares emphatically that he will not believe what they tell him, that “We have seen the Lord.” He demands proof; demands to see and to touch the very nail marks, the very signs, of the Crucifixion before he will assent to believe. And, as we see, he gets what he asks for, as our Lord appears yet again to the disciples a week later, Thomas this time among them. And unlike in the story of Mary’s encounter, Jesus now paradoxically invites touch. “Put your finger here and see my hands,” he tells Thomas, “Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” Now convinced and filled with faith, Thomas literally blurts out, “My Lord and my God,” quite possibly the very first such overt declaration of faith in Christ’ divine nature ever made, making him now not the Doubting Thomas but the Believing Thomas, as he has long been called in the Churches of the East. But did Thomas accept our Lord’s invitation to touch him or not…? Good question. Some artists, such as Caravaggio, show him doing just that. Others, like Rembrandt, do not. The Evangelist John does not tell us. The sense of touch is so pervasive and so important that we sometimes do not even notice it. We do not feel the clothes on our back, until of course the preacher mentions them. We do not feel the earth’s gravity planting us firmly on terra firma. We do not feel our skin particularly until we bruise it or cut it. Of all the senses, touch is of this world, about as physical and real as you can get. Touch protects us from harm. But it is also the sense of touch which in many ways alerts us to a world beyond this realm, beyond ourselves. Without touch, infants and children do not thrive. Without touch and the love and intimacy which it can betoken and express, none of us would be here today thinking about it. So, if touch is earthly and physical, it is also ethereal and life-giving. It is sacred. Many biblical scholars think that the original version of the Gospel of John must surely have ended right here, right here with the stories of Mary Magdalene and Thomas. With touch. In a sense, the Gospel of John itself has now come full circle. After all, remember that “in the beginning was the Word,” are the very first words of the Gospel of John; “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Fitting then, that the Gospel should now end with Thomas’ proclamation, “My Lord and My God.” The Gardener of Mary Magdalene’s Garden of Eden encounter is the forester raised up upon the tree of life, the Cross, that meeting point of life and death, earth and heaven. If God is always in a sense beyond us, God is yet always with us as well. That is in essence the mystery of the Cross and the meaning of the Resurrection. The end of John’s Gospel leaves us then in good company with Mary and Thomas. Did Mary embrace the risen Lord Christ…? Did Thomas stretch forth his hand and touch the wounds…? Perhaps the Evangelist John’s message to us is that, like Mary and Thomas, we need not touch or embrace Christ at all; that, of our own, we cannot touch the divine. But the Good News of the Gospel is that in Christ, in his life and death, in his Cross and Resurrection, God has touched us. Today’s Gospel story is a dramatic portrayal of this simple Christian truth. And if in fact this is where the Gospel of John ends, or originally ended, it is also where the Gospel of Christ begins. For, it begins with us. It begins with faith. Mary and Thomas leave behind what they know for sure, leave behind what has been. And we with them now touch and embrace what is to be. So that we may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing we may have life in his name. So ends the Gospel of John in the original telling. And so too ends this sermon. Amen. The Revd Canon Dr Frank Hegedűs