Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, 
that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: 
because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, 
which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
St. Matthew vii. 13, 14
     
Our opening words from St. Matthew’s Gospel give us a segue into our study of the meaning of Resurrection in this Eastertide. Here our Lord Jesus Christ, curt and candid as usual, tells us that most people go to Hell, and few go to Heaven. Pardon me for cutting to the quick, but these are Jesus’ words. And contrary to the wishful thinking of puerile Popes, Christ means what He says. Christ intends that His words be taken as a stark warning to all who bank on Cheap Grace or think that their religion and all their good works are going to save them. None of this is good theology, and it certainly isn’t Biblical. Most men go to Hell because they choose the broad way over and against the strait gate and the narrow way that alone leads to salvation. This certainly qualifies the good news and the peace that most men artificially conflate with the musings of jolly old Buddha, earnest Confucius, the fraudulent Gandhi, and other religious armchair amateurs whose philosophies never graduated to high table at a covered-dish supper. Comparative Religion isn’t intellectually compelling. The ease with which postmodern Christians neglect the harder sayings of our Lord is troubling, to say the least. And while we might engage in a slothful wishful thinking about how all men go to Heaven, such jejune feeling neither squares with the Gospel nor leads to the Kingdom. 
        
No, I fear that the Christian religion is much more about the hard truth and our ongoing struggle to apply it to our lives.  Christians have every reason to rejoice in the knowledge and love of God found only in Jesus Christ and to believe that the Good News or Gospel alone leads us to salvation. But there is more. Jesus also says, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (St. John xiv. 6) Salvation means the return of man to God through the Redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, and by participating in His Atonement of our sins. Jesus died and rose for us, and yet it is up to us to respond. Jesus has won our salvation, and we cannot have it except we will it by and through Him. This means that Christ expects us to have a relationship with Him. Unless we find the strait gate and enter by the narrow way that He establishes for us, we cannot reach Heaven. Entering the strait gate requires our moral effort and decision. This means that the life that He lived, the unearned, unmerited, and undeserved suffering and death that He endured, and the Resurrection He commenced must all become our own that we participate in willingly, sacrificially, and joyfully. This is the message of Eastertide.
         
To find the strait gate and to enter the narrow way is difficult. The old adages no pain, no gain, no suffering, no salvation, and no Cross, no Crown are all consecrated by the earthly life our Lord lived and intends for us to live. Christ will sanctify us by the Father’s Grace in a patient progress that leads us out of sin and death and into righteousness and new life. The pattern He consecrates and blesses will involve sacrifice, suffering, and death before we find new life. Christ never promised us immediate and paranormal perfection. This is a gift to be bestowed upon us as we find the strait gate and enter the narrow way that leadeth unto life. (Idem) 
         
Therefore, what we have before us is the promise of an eternal reward to them that embrace Jesus Christ. Again, embracing Jesus Christ in our hearts and souls is the hard part. In Eastertide, we learn that no sooner has Christ risen from the dead than He tells His Apostles, Now I go my way to Him that sent me; and none of you asketh me, Whither goest thou? (St. John xvi. 5) Like men in all ages, we want God with us and for us, tangibly present in the flesh. We want the immediate gratification of Christ with us in the way closest to us, through our senses. We believe, immaturely, that His absence from us in the fleshwill breed catastrophic sadness and sorrow. Yet we, with the Apostles, must learn that Christ cannot save us until His suffering, death, and victory over our sin is something that we embrace inwardly, spiritually, and rationally. His fleshly Incarnation is only the beginning. We must find the strait gate and narrow way that leadeth unto life inwardly and spiritually through the indwelling of Christ the Word through the Holy Spirit. Christ intends to come alive in our souls by working His redemption into us. Christ desires to dwell in us spiritually and intellectually. If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. (St. John xiv. 23)
         
With the Father, Christ intends to come to us and pitch their tent on the soil of our souls. But for this to happen, we must expect the same temptation and troublemaking that the Devil brought to Jesus. Christ’s Redemption, accomplished once for all, must be tried and tested from the ground of our souls through persistent faith.
 
If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you….The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also. But all these things will they do unto you for my name’s sake, because they know not him that sent me. (St. John xv. 18-21)
 
Salvation is a process of becoming little Christs. (C.S. Lewis) The world might very well hate us and persecute us because it knows not the Father who sent the Son. (idem) Christ was made flesh to order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men. (Collect Easter IV) The comfort and strength of the same Holy Spirit will enable us to love the thing that [the Father] commandeth and desire the thing that [He doth] promise (Collect…) in His Son. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. (St. John xvi. 7) 
        
Christ will come to us from the Father, inwardly and spiritually, through the Spirit. St. James exhorts us to Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.  Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. (St. James iv. 7,8) Jesus tells us that when He sends the Comforter unto us, He will reprove the world of sin. (St. John xvi. 8) The Comforter is the Holy Spirit, who must come to convict us of our sins, which were the cause of Christ’s passion. St. Thomas Aquinas says that he will convince, rebuke, the world, as the one who will invisibly enter into their hearts and pour his charity into them so that their fear is conquered, and they have the strength to rebuke. (Aquinas: John’s Gospel) We must not only repent but rebuke all sin with courage in the Name of Jesus. Next, the Comforter will reprove…the world of righteousness. (Ibid, 10) Aquinas reminds us that St. Paul, the greatest of convicted Christians, proclaimed that we are sold under sin… There is none righteous, no, not one. (Romans iii. 10, Ibid) and that the world must be convicted always of the righteousness that [we] have ignored or neglected. (Idem) Through the Spirit, the Father will reveal to us how we have rejected the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Finally, the Comforter will rebuke…the world of judgment because the prince of this world is judged. (Idem) Aquinas warns us that the Devil and an unbelieving world will be judged. Thus, the world is reproved by this judgment because being unwilling to resist, it is overcome by the devil, who, although expelled, is brought back by their consent to sin: "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies" (Rom 6:12, Idem) In Christ’s death, the Devil was robbed of any power he had over us. In the end, through the Spirit, we must not only rebuke sin, acknowledge our own unrighteousness but also hold the Devil in contempt by ongoing surrender to the Father and His Word, Jesus Christ, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
        
Christians should never seek an easier, softer way. The journey into Christ’s Resurrection is a pilgrimage whose suffering, sacrifice, and death must be measured and tempered with all faith, hope, and love. St. James exhorts us:

My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience… Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.
(St. James i. 2-4) 
 
Patience enables us to suffer the Devil’s divers temptations with joy and blessedness. We must cleave to the Good, come what may. St. James continues:
 
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the Word of 
Truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (St. James i. 17, 18)
 
The gift of the Father is Jesus Christ, His only begotten Word. Jesus, the Word of God’s Truth, will prune away the dead wood of our old hardened sinful selves to implant the new life, the beauty of holiness, the first fruits, from the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes to bring alive every good gift that God intends for us to use in His service, leading us through the straight gate and narrow way. Every good and perfect gift should overcome our spiritual exhaustion and fear. So, with John Henry Newman, let us beg of Christ Grace wherewith to enter into the depths of our privileges, to believe, to use, to improve, to glory in our present gifts as members of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. (Sermon xvii, J.H.N.)

Amen.
©wjsmartin

But praised be the LORD, who hath not given us over
for a prey unto their teeth. Our soul is escaped even as a bird out of the
snare of the fowler; the snare is broken, and we are delivered.
(Ps. cxxiv. 5,6)
 
Easter Tide is all about avoiding those things that are contrary to our profession and follow such things as are agreeable to the same. (Collect EasterIII) We do this, of course, because if we have been admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, this habit of life will ensure that our pilgrimage is sanctified and that we shall be saved. In Easter Tide, we undertake the hard labor of dying to our old selves and coming alive to the new life that we find in the Resurrected Christ. We die to ourselves as we petition God to show [us] that are in error the light of [His] truth. (Idem) Satan’s power must be banished. And all of this must come to us by the Grace of the Holy Spirit. Christ desires for us to partake of His Resurrection and participate in the New Life that He has won for us. But the power of hope and belief in His Resurrection involve a transition from one state to another – from sin to righteousness and from death to life, in rejecting Satan and embracing our Heavenly Father’s will. 
         
Thus, the Resurrected Christ invites us into a relationship that will deliver us to His Kingdom. But this is difficult. We are so at home in this world, in the realm of immediate gratification or its denial. The discomforts that threaten us would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, whose comforts were scarce. St. Peter’s exhortation this morning to become strangers and pilgrims (I St. Peter ii. 11) is now considered a tall order indeed. His insistence that we must abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul; having [our] conversation honest among the Gentiles (ibid, 11,12) strikes us more like the ludicrous last gasp of late Victorian piety. What is St. Peter talking about? Evidently, with lust now a virtue and with what was always considered unnatural and profane now in vogue, he must have been out of his mind. Poor, primitive St. Peter is no match for postmodern hedonism. Now, our old selves have not merely forgotten the secret things that belong to the Lord our God (Deut. xxix. 29), but we hold them in contempt.

Of course, St. Peter lived in the then civilized world. Both Jew and Greek slave and free, lived in a world ruled and governed not only by Roman Law but a great deal of moral agreement about marriage, the family, and Natural Law. The best upright Roman would have found little wrong with the Jewish morality. More advanced Roman thinkers were intrigued to find that what they discovered about God through the study of nature, the Jews had by revelation as recording in their Sacred Scriptures. The success with which the Apostles converted the Greeks and Romans to Christ must be a testimony to a common need for a common cure for the ills of man in this world. Demonizing the ancient Greeks and Romans seems a fool’s errand. Both the Greeks and Romans were situated intellectually and spiritually to embrace Christ, the way, the truth, and life. (St. John xiv. 6) 

Needless to say, we do not find ourselves living in a world with the luxury of either Greco-Roman philosophy or Jewish revelation. Our world has surrendered to the worship of untamed and disordered appetites. The sanest of men can find rest in neither culture nor religion. The culture of the modern state is wholly corrupted by the protection of the irrational and unseemly. The churches have surrendered to the perverse and profane with an eye to profit.  The words of the Psalmist ring truer than ever.

THE foolish body hath said in his heart: There is no God.
Corrupt are they and become abominable in their wickedness: there is none that doeth good.
God looked down from heaven upon the children of men: to see if there were any that would understand and seek after God.
But they are all gone out of the way, they are altogether become abominable: there is also none that doeth good, no not one. (Ps. liii. 1-4)
 
For the power of God to liberate us effectually, we must declare spiritual war on this world and its ship of fools, who say there is no God. Fools trust in their wits and the stirrings of their hearts. He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool. (Prov. xxviii. 26) A fool despiseth wisdom and understanding. (Prov. i. 7) The fool rejects both the knowledge of God that comes from the study of nature and the faith that comes from revelation. Because he is at home in this world, he exults only in a temporary possession of happiness. Because it is convenient to his fleeting, idolatrous passions, he is glad to think that God, who moves all things and informs all things, remains unmoved by his sin. He has forgotten the wisdom in the wise man’s understanding: 

Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
even there shall thy hand lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me.
                           (Ps. cxxxix. 7-100
        
The wise man warns us that we ignore the Invisible God because we have forgotten that we are strangers and pilgrims, not to be at home in this world but passing through to return to the God who is the source of all life and truth. The wise man knows that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. (Romans iii. 23) The wise man has believed and understood that God’s Invisible Wisdom, Power, and Love have come into the world to save sinful man in Jesus Christ. He has come, and He has gone. We come, and we too shall go. The wise man knows too that human life is made to be judged and measured by God’s life, light, and love in Jesus Christ for eternal happiness or eternal misery. 

In this Easter Tide, today Jesus says to us, ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. (St. John xv.20)  Mourning and lamentation for the wise man do not disappear with the Incarnation. Rather, they comprise an essential moment in that spiritual movement whereby Christ carries us from the death to sin into new and Redeemed Human Life. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that the wise Christian will be sad for three reasons. First, by sadness of evil, man is corrected. (Easter III: TA) When Christ promises to depart from us in the flesh, He will correct us inwardly and spiritually. Unless we mourn our sinful rejection of Him, the Resurrection virtue that Christ longs to infuse into our bodies and souls will remain dormant. Sorrow for our abandonment of His ever-present sacrificial love renews our passion for finding it anew. Second, by temporal sadness, man escapes eternal torment. (Idem) Temporal sadness is worth suffering when the reward is deliverance from Hell. Third, by a mean measure of justice, we acquire eternal joys. (Idem) Punishment through the just punishment for our sins now acclimates us to the virtue that leads to eternal joys. Then we begin to treasure the meaning of Christ’s lasting victory over our sins in this body of death. Temporary suffering will be converted into soaring desire for the exceeding and eternal weight of God’s glory.
          
Jesus is teaching us that for so long as we are in these earthen vessels, with St. Peter, we must become strangers and pilgrims in this world. If we seek Him out amidst it all, His Invisible Presence will enable us to persist. 

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. (St. John xv. 4, 5) 
 
If Christ lives in us now Invisibly, our sorrows shall be transformed into the permanence of His joy in our hearts. He likens it to a woman who is pregnant or with child. A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you. (Ibid, 21, 22) The expectant mother endures all manner of suffering and sorrow in joyful expectation of her child’s birth. So too the wise man must endure the suffering and sorrow that accompany the conception of the Word of God in the womb of his soul before he is born again from above and by the Invisible God. John Calvin tells us that Christ means that the sorrow which we shall endure for the sake of the Gospel will be profitable. (J. Calvin: Comm.)
       
St. Augustine reminds us that, 

At present, the Church is in travail with the longing for this fruit of all her labor…now she travails in birth with groaning, then shall she bring forth in joy; now she travails in birth through her prayers, then shall she bring forth in her praises. (John xvi)
 
The end that we seek is the consolation of the Divine Presence. So, over and against ungodliness, St. Peter tells us that our incipient joy should be caught up with well doing, [that we] may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men, and not using [our] liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. (Ibid, 13) Christ tells us today, I will see you again, and you will rejoice. (St. John xvi. 22) If we believe in Him, He will take our bodies and souls into all joy, and others shall join us as strangers and pilgrims, visibly and truly embracing the love of the Invisible God, that no man shall take away from us. (Idem)

Amen.
©wjsmartin

This is thankworthy, that if a man for conscience endure grief,
Suffering wrongfully.
(1 St. Peter ii. 19 )
 
Our Epistle reading for The Second Sunday after Easter taken from St. Peter’s First Epistle speaks of suffering. This might seem strange. After all, we are in Easter Tide. Suffering was studied at length on Good Friday. Easter Tide should be about joy – the surging relief and rising happiness that come to us when we meditate upon Christ’s victory over sin, death, and Satan. But dear old Saint Pope Gregory the Great, who is mostly responsible for our Church Lectionary, wants us to remember that our Resurrected life in Christ is a treasured gift to be received and perfected in willing hearts through constant suffering and warfare. As joyously focused on Christ’s Resurrection as we should be, the Church Fathers knew only too well that the prudent and cautious pilgrim who seeks to enter God’s Kingdom must fight a daily battle of suffering and dying in order to rise and be joyful.
         
Easter Tide teaches us that suffering is a necessary component in the process of our sanctification and redemption. Last week, we learned that Christ’s Peace comes to us to infuse the forgiveness of sins and the New Life into our hearts. Today, we learn that the assurance of its rule in our lives demands a kind of spiritual struggle that tends to be threatened by the devices and desires of our own hearts. (General Confession, BCP p. 6) And what better teacher have we than St. Peter himself, to teach us about the taming of premature zeal as we embrace the reality of the Risen Christ? He writes: For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. (1 St. Peter ii. 19,20) Peter believes and knows what Christ has done for us already. Peter, too, knows how his own character had to suffer the consequences of a faith that had not been tried by fire. Peter had to die to his own sinful betrayal of Christ before the Holy Spirit could rise in him. Peter knew too that for as long as he lived, he would suffer the temptation to betray Christ or to become soft on his own past weakness. The union of Christ’s Suffering, Death, and Resurrection had to become for him the pattern of New Life. The Peace and Forgiveness of Sins which Christ had established would become his own prized possession only by way of dying and rising. For I have given you an example, that ye should do [to one another] as I have done to you. (St. John xiii. 15)
         
For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men. (Ibid, 15) The message is clear. By embracing the forgiveness of sins, Christians are called to suffer and die as they are habituated to the forgiveness of sins. Christ is the forgiveness of sins that rises in man’s heart only by way of suffering for the Truth. A man suffers to die to malice and ill will and come alive to the well doing. God’s well doing has overcome sin in Jesus Christ. Christ’s mercy tempers judgment, His generosity destroys selfishness, and His forgiveness breathes love and hope into new lives. St. Peter is quick to admit that this process is difficult. He writes his Epistle to a community that is struggling to allow Christ’s Resurrected goodness to overcome the instinctive urge to repay others with an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. St. Peter acknowledges that most men, including Christians, must struggle to die to the old man and come alive to the new. Most men’s souls are tempted not to forgive. Evil’s assault upon men from the outside in other people is of secondary importance to him. It is only when men begin to suffer inwardly and spiritually that the forgiveness of sins is received as what we neither desire nor deserve but desperately need if we would be Risen with Christ. This will put to silence the ignorance of foolish men since God’s love is rationally consistent with His being and offered always through Jesus Christ and by the Holy Ghost.

St. Peter reminds his flock today that Christ Jesus was the only Person in history who endured and overcame evil through goodness because the loving forgiveness of sins was perfectly alive in His heart. St. Peter reminds us that Christ embraced the forgiveness of sins as what was natural to Him, as God’s Son. He did not sin, neither was guile found in his mouth; who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered he threatened not; but committed himself to Him that judgeth righteously. (1 St. Peter ii. 22,23) Yet Christ, in a sense, had more reason not to forgive, since He did not wrong and committed no sin. So, He responded to man’s sin against Him with God’s love or the forgiveness of sins. God forever intends that man should repent and believe so that he can live and not die in his sins. God’s goodness saturated Christ’s heart. In turn, Christ intends to love His enemies into friendship with God. In His suffering death, Christ was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Cor. v. 21) St. Peter agrees.

Who in His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes you were healed; For ye were as sheep, going astray, but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls. (Ibid, 24,25)  
 

What the Apostles realized long ago was that the Crucified Jesus, who rose up from death on Easter Day, was God’s Good Shepherd. But what became clearer and clearer was that the Good Shepherd, in laying down His life for them, was still seeking out His lost sheep from the hard wood, the rod, of the Cross. Christ’s own struggle to conquer sin through suffering is the model for Man’s victory over sin. Christ pursues His end, our salvation, come what may. As God’s forgiveness of sins made flesh, Christ loves the sinner much more than his sin. Today, Jesus likens himself to both the Good Shepherd and the door through which He will carry us back to the Father. We can become His sheep if we begin to confess that we were lost sheep needing to be found by Christ the Good Shepherd.  Dr. Farrer explains Jesus’ words in this way:

What does Jesus say?  A man cares naturally for his own things.  He does not have to make himself care.  The shepherd who has bought the ground and fenced the fold and tended the lambs, whose own the sheep are to keep or to sell, cares for them.  He would run some risk, rather than see them mauled; if he had only a heavy stick in his hand, he would beat off the wolf…He says that he cares for us as no one else can, because we are his.  We do not belong to any other man; we belong to him.  His dying for us in this world is the natural effect of his unique care.  It is the act of our Creator. (Weekly Paragraphs for the Holy Sacrament: Easter II)
 
Christ would run some risk rather than lose His lost sheep. Belonging to Christ comes when we confess that we are lost sheep now being found by the Lord who is our Shepherd, the rod and staff of whose Cross comfort us. (Psalm xxiii. 4)

But we protest: All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every man to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah liii. 6) Our false pride, masquerading as humility, exclaims that the Good Shepherd is too good to heal us. But though we are lost in sin and death, we must remember that He is greater than our sins, or His forgiveness is greater than our sins. I am the Good Shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known by them. (St. John x. 11, 14) Jesus implies that He knows us better than we know ourselves. His knowledge penetrates the secrets of our hearts. He knows how sin has enslaved us. He understands that He must struggle and suffer, as He alone can, to conquer our sin. The Rod that comforts us is His Cross, from which He becomes the forgiveness of sins for us. The Staff that comforts us is His Resurrected love that can extend the forgiveness of sins to others. The Rod of the Cross awakens us to how much He loves us. The Staff of the Resurrection herds us into the comfort of hope in His New Life. From His Cross, Jesus the Good Shepherd invites us to participate in His Good Death. Jesus the Good Shepherd now desires to lift us onto His shoulders in the New Risen Life where sin, death, and Satan can harm us no more.

Because we belong to Jesus, we can reciprocate His desire for us. We can begin to know Him as the Good Shepherd, who prepares a table before us in the presence of [our] enemies; [who will] anoint [our] head with oil; [so that our] cup runneth over. (Ps. xxiii. 5) His forgiveness of our sins can lead us into sin’s death. His Resurrection can mean that we can forgive all men their sins against us. Suffering the assaults of malicious men can become the occasion for overcoming evil with good.

Today, my friends, as we continue to wend our way through Easter tide, let us remember always, with St. Peter, that we have erred and strayed from [Christ’s ways] like lost sheep. Jesus insists we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture. (Ps. c. 3) We belong to Him and He longs to have us forever. And, always, with Cardinal Von Balthasar, we shall remember that

Without Easter, Good Friday would have no meaning. Without Easter, there would be no hope that suffering and abandonment might be tolerable. But with Easter, a way out becomes visible for human sorrow [and suffering], an absolute future: more than a hope, a divine expectation.
 
Amen.
©wjsmartin
 
 
 
 

 As my Father has sent me, so send I you. (St. John xx. 21)

Through Holy Week to Easter Day, when we tried to walk with Jesus Christ through his Passion and into His Resurrection. In it, if we were conscientious, we were moving from death into new life. First, we meditated upon the external and visible events that comprised the last days of our Lord Jesus Christ. Second, we allowed the facts to affect our souls, as His death became our death, and His Resurrection the seedbed of that new life through Him that leads us to Heaven. Our souls began to open to Christ as the forgiveness of sins and the promise of new life. I pray that we have begun to receive God’s Wisdom, Power, and Love made flesh, which alone can make us very members incorporate of His Body. I hope that who and what He was becomes who and what He is for us. Christ is not dead, but lives for us.

The danger that confronts us is that we tend to treat Jesus as not alive but dead, not risen from the dead, but long gone. G.K. Chesterton noted the tendency, even within the churches, when he said, Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you anymore. (The Everlasting Man) Though their works live on and can perfect us to a degree, the authors are dead. Chesterton continues: Imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. (Ibid) Think about what it would be like to have some great thinker or artist back from the dead to help you to interpret and respond to the mad, mad world we inhabit.

Perhaps this is not unlike what the Apostles were thinking, when they began to mourn Jesus’ death after the Crucifixion. Why, if only He were here? they must have thought. And yet when He was here, men were determined to ruin Him. Would it be any different? So, they mused on the might-have-beens. But they remembered, too, that they had abandoned, forsaken, denied, and betrayed Him. So now they were assembled behind the doors for fear of the Jews. (St. John xx. 19) They recalled their cowardice, treachery, and unfaithfulness. But against this, they feared more what guilt by association might mean for them. The followers of Jesus of Nazareth feared for their own lives.

Their faith was feeble, their hopes confused, and their love for Him uncertain. They were selfish.
Next, we read that 

Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. (St. John xx. 19)
 
Their master and teacher had returned. The first day of the week is now the first day of the new creation. Christ mysteriously but silently comes through the door. Christ had already appeared to individuals – to Mary Magdalen, Peter, the two men on the road to Emmaus. But, appearing to individuals is far less convincing than the combined effect of a community. He comes to His flock, uniquely defined by their collective faith, as fragile as it might be. He shows them His hands and His side to confirm their faith in Him, that they might not have it by hearsay only, but might themselves be eyewitnesses of His being alive. (M. Henry) He does not reveal Himself to His enemies yet and does not reveal Himself to those who had no interest in God or the salvation He has promised to bring. As St. Peter will recall a bit later, Him God raised up the third day, and showed Him openly; not to all of the people, but unto witnesses chosen before God, even to us who did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the dead. (Acts x. 40,41) An event of supernatural making presents itself to them. The Apostles are baffled, bewildered, perplexed, puzzled, and flummoxed. Those who fled the Cross wondered: Did He truly die? Perhaps, in the end, He was spared; we did not see with our own eyes. Others might have thought: This is an optical illusion. Perhaps He was never a true man and that even now He is nothing but a Spirit. And if it will take time to cultivate the faith of His Apostles, there is no small wonder that He did not appear to the chief priests and people.

For forty days Jesus comes to His flock with the eternal love of God that He has always revealed. He will teach His friends about the great mystery of the new life. He will teach them about how His coming was prefigured in the Old Testament and that He is its fulfillment in the New. He will teach them about the forgiveness of sins that He is. He will show them that without His suffering and death there could be no new life. For the new life that He brings into the world is perfect forgiveness that alone can overcome the grip of evil through love. His love will draw the new life out of them as His Holy Spirit emboldens them to be forgiven and to forgive. He will teach them that His suffering and death are a pattern for their own in the soul’s journey back to God. 

If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you….If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you…. (St. John xv. 18-20)
 
Peace be unto you: as my Father has sent me, even so send I you; and He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive the Holy Ghost.(St. John xx. 21-23) The Word made flesh is with them, and He calls them into His service again. He breathes His Word into them, and they begin to become living members of His Resurrected Body. He has laid down His life for them, and now He gives it back to them renewed, rekindled, and roused. These He restores, comforts, warns, and inspires. (Newman, Witenesses of Resurrection, 184) The onslaught of fear and the cloud of confusion recede into the past as He forms them into Himself slowly and methodically, as their faith grows that that they might show forth His praise. (Idem)

So the Apostles begin to live the new life. Christ is the vine and they the branches; Christ is the root and they are the shoots. As Chesterton says, What the Apostles were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener, God walked again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but at dawn. (The Everlasting Man) The Apostles’ mental unrest and uncertainty flee. The Master has returned as He had promised and is now teaching them how to live the new life in the garden of a new creation. Their faith in Him is being grown into new life with new meaning, where God the Gardener and man the new life reveal to the world the great possibilities in creation’s redemption.

In this joyful Eastertide Jesus Christ calls us into the new life. St. John tells us this morning, Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is He that overcometh the world, but He that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?(1 John v. 4,5) What the Apostles begin to see is that faith in Jesus Christ is the victory that overcomes the world. They see that this [Jesus is He] that came by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that bear witness, the Spirit, and the water and the blood. (1 John v. 6) The Spirit has raised up the One who has poured out water and blood to make man just with God. The Spirit has raised up the One who has died one death for the sins of the whole world. The Spirit has raised up the One who calls all from death into His new life. The Spirit enlivens the One who will be the Gardner that tills and tends the Garden of the new life in the hearts of all who believe and follow. Through the waters of Baptism, His Spirit will cleanse and purge the spiritual seedlings of all pestilence. The Spirit will cultivate and grow God’s Word in the soul so that obedience to the Father might flower and blossom. The Blood of the Eucharist will drown sin in death and flood the heart with a longing for all goodness. Spirit, water, and blood will raise man up from the ground of his death into the breath of that Love that leads into the new life. His Spirit will animate a new Body- the Church, that fertile Garden that will bloom with beauty and blush with delight.

And yet none of this will come to pass unless we lost souls, who are promised redemption, face the Resurrected Jesus Christ. Solomon tells us that this process will be strange and painful. In the sight of the unwise [we shall] seem to die: and [our] departure [will be] taken for misery; and [our] going from [them] utter destruction….(Wisdom ii 2) But once they see what is happening to us, they will conclude that we are in peace. For though [we] be punished in the sight of men, [our] hope is full of immortality. And having been a little chastised, [we] shall be greatly rewarded: for God [will prove us], [to find us] worthy for himself…And…[we] shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble. [We] shall judge the nations, and have dominion over the people, and [our] Lord shall reign for ever. (Wisdom ii. 5-8)

Then we shall find Blessed Gueric of Igny’s words surprisingly true:

The man who enters Christ’s garden becomes a garden himself, his soul is like a watered garden, so that the Bridegroom says in praise of him: ‘My sister, My spouse is a garden enclosed’ (Cant 4, 12). Yield the fragrance of incense. Blossom like the lily, and smell sweet, and put forth leaves for your adornment. (The Garden of Delight)

Indeed, yield fragrance, blossom, shoot forth, and reveal the beauty and love of the Risen Christ to the world!
 
Amen.
©wjsmartin