Sunday, April 23, 2017

Is It Live or Gospelmemorex?

2 Easter Sunday        April 23, 2017 
Acts 2:14a,22-32          Psalm 16
1 Peter 1:3-9          John 20:19-31  

Lectionary Link All writing has an occasion of when it happened.  Each occasion of writing has a purpose and function in the mind of the writer in light of who the reading audience is.

The Gospel writings were written for occasions and readers and listeners with strategic purposes.  The Doubting Thomas story was written for a specific purpose in the community where the Gospel of John was written.

It is easy for people who do not have close encounters of the most intimate kind to doubt the validity of their "secondary" experience.  In a court trial "hearsay" is not admissible as valid testimony.

Some of us of qualifying maturity can remember cassette tapes.  You perhaps remember the Memorex television commercial.  They would have a live performer and then play a Memorex cassette tape of the performance and ask the question, "Is it live or is it Memorex?"  So the people who sold Memorex cassette tapes were trying to say that a Memorex recording was indistinguishable in quality from an actual live performance.

What about the live performances of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ?  If you were privy to a live "performance" of a post-resurrection appearance of Christ, then such a privilege would mean that you had a superior experience of the Risen Christ, right?

The reason that the writer of John's Gospel wrote the Doubting Thomas Story was to affirm the equality of all of the Gospelmemorix experiences of the Risen Christ.

Yes, indeed the close encounter of the most intimate kind of face to face experience with the Risen Christ was important but such an encounter was different but not better than the encounters of knowing Christ through the witness that came from hearing speech or reading written accounts. 

What makes the face to face encounter with the Risen Christ different?   We can't be sure that everyone who saw Christ actually believed in him as the Messiah.  So just "seeing" Jesus with one's eyes did not mean they saw Jesus from their hearts to be convinced about his significance.

The greatest difference of seeing Jesus face to face and believing in him was the important task of sharing this to the next generation of believers.  When Jesus had died and re-appeared and then stopped appearing to his disciples, how was the Risen Christ to be known and experienced?  Those who saw Risen Christ realized that the Risen Christ could be known and believed in through the witness of their words and writing.  What does this mean?  It means that the Risen Christ became an accompanying reality in the physical presence of his disciples and the disciples became the physical witness of the Risen Christ with their body language, with their speaking and with their writing.  Those who walked with Jesus were amazed at the ability of people to believe in Jesus through their preaching and their writing.  This made them profess that the equality of experiences of the Risen Christ was due to the Holy Spirit, as the accompanying reality in the lives of those were so convinced.  

With the Holy Spirit, people of all varying kinds of experiences could have their faith and belief in Jesus confirmed within their lives.  With the presence of the Holy Spirit, people came to know that the Risen Christ was with them and this was not an inferior experience of belief, it was a blessed experience of belief.

People of the scientific empirical skeptical tradition want to limit believing to "seeing" and manipulating seeing with repeated and controlled experiments about how the Risen Christ could be made known.

The Gospel of John said that the Word was God.  The Gospel of John quoted Jesus as saying, "My Words are Spirit and they are life."  The writer of the Gospel of John believed in the equality of Word experiences with the Risen Christ.

The Risen Christ is known physically in the body language of people to are possessed with the Spirit-Word of Christ.  The word products of people who believe in Jesus, their spoken and written words about him and the witness of their body-deeds mean that the Risen Christ can be equally known and believed in every generation.  And that is how we accept our own experience of the Risen Christ today; our experience of the Risen Christ is equal to the experience of the disciples but it is different.  The Spirit of God is able to transmit and tailor the presence of Christ as interwoven within our lives today.

So, don't feel inferior about your experience of the Risen Christ.  Embrace and express how your experience is equal but different.  And share it with others.  Keep this transmission going.

And how can we know our experience of the Risen Christ is valid?  The Doubting Thomas story provides us the signs of the valid presence of Christ.  1-It is evident in the experience of peace, both inner peace without fear and peace among ourselves.  2-It is evident when we practice the forgiveness of sin.  3-It is evident when we arrive at being so convinced we share the message of the love of Christ in all of our word products, in our body language deeds, in our speaking and in our writing.

The Doubting Thomas story should be encouragement to each of us to accept the validity of our experience of the Risen Christ, to receive the peace of Christ and share it with each other, to practice forgiveness and to proclaim the Gospel of Christ to propel the witness of Christ into the future.  Amen      

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