Pascha II

The Second Sunday of Easter

Acts 5:12 – 16; Psalm 118; Revelation 1:9 – 11a, 12 – 13, 17 – 19; John 20: 19 – 31

When the last car left the parking lot and the sun set on Easter Sunday, Easter Monday returned us to our job or multiple jobs to make ends meet. Returned us to the loneliness of an empty home due to the death of a spouse or divorce or just pandemic weariness. To higher gas and food prices. To children continuing to suffer throughout the world. To our family situations. To the culture wars and Ukraine. I don’t think I need to review all the contemporary issues of our present times. We are all too conscious of them. We are weary.

The question is, how do we bridge the gap between the seeming disparity of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the realities of our lives?

We hear words today from, probably the most misunderstood and misused book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. The author identifies himself only as, John, our brother. John shares with us three things: our distress, the kingdom and our endurance in Jesus. We put these three aspects of our Christian lives into prayer at every Eucharist after the Lord’s Prayer: “Deliver us, O God, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days,that, by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sinand safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope –the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ”.

This prayer reveals that we live between memory and hope; between Christ’s first coming and his Second Coming. And “in–between” spaces in life are not comfortable places to be. We have a diagnosis but we do not as yet feel healthy. We know the basics of playing an instrument but we don’t as yet have the technique to play the Chopin Nocturne. We have the skills to be hired for a new position but not the depth of experience yet to command full respect from those we oversee. They are awkward places to be. They are places where a person can easily find excuses to give up and often do.

Though we believe and profess that Christ has defeated evil, the reality is we see and experience the evidence that evil is still very much alive. This causes some people to despair and give up on faith, prayer and hope. For others it causes them to enter the far more spiritually dangerous place of complacency. Here people go through the motions of faith but without the full commitment of mind and heart to Jesus Christ.

Sharing in our distress, our anxieties and trials, John, our brother, encourages us to persevere in Jesus Christ. Spiritual endurance, like athletic endurance, is the bridge between the seeming disparity and gap between the realities of our lives and the Resurrection. Endurance and hope connect us with the crucified and risen Christ. It is the person of Jesus Christ who has endured, whose death has opened the fullness of God’s life to us and himself persevered even when questioning God. And if Jesus endured trials and persevered so will we.

Listen to the wonderful paradoxes, these contradictions, which are brought harmoniously together in Jesus as he describes himself: “I am the first and the last. I was dead, but now I live forever. I am Alpha and Omega. I am the beginning and the end”. Jesus embraces and fills the universe, even Doctor Strange’s, Multiverse of Madness. Thus only Jesus Christ can declare, “I hold the keys of death and the realm of death and sin”. Nothing is beyond the grasp of Jesus to be brought to salvation and harmony within his very person. This is not just our hope; it is our reality.

Thus the Book of Revelation is filled with great visions not only of fantastic and grotesque beasts; cataclysmic endings; plague, famine and pestilence but in a screamer of a roller–coaster ride, we are taken up to visions of the great courts of heaven in the presence of our God and the slain Lamb who is alive. The Lamb who has conquered sin and evil. This is not just our hope; it is our reality.

Popular media and culture prefer the destruction caused by the beasts, it sells. The Christian seeking endurance while we wait for the Second Coming zeros in on the hope–filled scenes of saved multitudes singing the praises of a victorious God.

John was banished to a Roman penal colony on the island of Patmos. For what? For proclaiming God’s word and giving testimony to Jesus. To strengthen our endurance we too must continue to give testimony to Jesus, not just for the sake of others but for our own sake. In giving testimony to Jesus by the lives we lead we will find the hope to endure that we seek.