Do You Doubt Your Experience of the Risen Christ?

2 Easter Sunday  Cycle C      April 24, 2022 

Acts 5:27-32 Psalm 150

Revelation 1:4-8  John 20:19-31

Lectionary Link

Have you had a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus Christ in your life?  Perhaps, I should ask, "Have you had a post-ascension appearance of Jesus Christ in your life?  Are you sure?  Can you tell me what it is?  Are you shy to talk about it?  Would you feel intimidated to talk about it?  Are you afraid someone might question the validity of your experience?  If the Risen Christ has become apparent to you; how so?  Is your post-ascension experience one that might be characterized as spiritual or an experience of the Holy Spirit?

 

Talking about such things might make us a little intimidated and worried about how someone else might judge our experience.  On the other hand, if one is boastful and bragging about a "profound" experience, maybe that would contradict the humility that should come with any divine encounter.

 

And if this topic of the nature and validity of our Christ-experience is uncomfortable for us, we can take comfort that this was also an issue in the early churches.  In fact, the famous Doubting Thomas story addresses this very issue, regarding the validity and affirmation of post-resurrection experiences of Christ.

 

Not everyone in the early church saw and talked with Jesus in his lifetime.  Not everyone was privy to the very few post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, which indicate that he had a super-constitution.  He could be almost instantaneously between Jerusalem and Galilee.  He seem to be able to pass through solid doors.  He could appear to his disciple to be eating fish as a way of proving the substantiality of his afterlife.  The immediate afterlife of Jesus was to have super-appearances, even though they were very selective.

 

And what is a commonsense conclusion?  Being there and first-hand experience of the Risen Christ is better and superior to everything else.  So, in the churches where many people were having Holy Spirit and multifaceted appearances of the Risen Christ tailored to the immediate circumstances of their lives, the status and validity of their experiences might be called into question.

 

And so, the Doubting Thomas teaching story in the early church.  As we analyze the Doubting of Thomas, an important insight arises:  What did Thomas doubt?  Did he doubt the possibility of the Risen Christ or did he doubt the credibility of his close and personal friends who told him they had seen the Lord?

 

Can we appreciate that this is a community and fellowship issue, a loss of faith in the words of friends with whom he had walked and followed Jesus?

 

When Thomas heard the disciples report about the reappearance of Jesus to the other disciples on Easter, what if he had said, "Wow, that's great guys.  I'm so pleased to hear this good news."  If he had said this there would be no Doubting Thomas story.  So, his doubt was a doubt about the reliability of his friends' testimony.  In short it was a fellowship issue.

 

The Doubting Thomas story is a community fellowship issue, a sort of speculating about who has the greatest post-resurrection appearance.  And if you only heard about second-hand or read about it, then your experience is definitely inferior.  The Doubting Thomas story is about dealing with the tendency of the followers of Jesus to dismiss the validity of other kinds of experiences of the Risen Lord.

 

And the definitive words of the Risen Christ, channeled in the church was this: "Thomas, blessed are you for coming to believe in my Risen afterlife after having this "show me," experience," but blessed are those who have not seen in this way and yet still believe."

 

The Doubting Thomas story is not so much about Thomas' experiences as to indicate the significant evidences of encounters with the Risen Christ.  And what are they?  A Holy Spirit event.  Proceeding from the mouth of the Risen Christ was the Spirit breath of Christ, the Christ who said, "My words are spirit and they are life."  A sense of participating in Spirit life is evidence of the Risen Christ.  Also a sense of being sent by Christ.

 

Next, the experience of Peace.  Peace be with you, is what Christ said.  Peace within oneself deeply felt is evidence of the Risen Christ.  This has become a part of the Eucharistic liturgy; a passing of the peace as a sign of the community in concord and trusting the reliability of each others’ witness to the Risen Christ.

 

And evidence of the Risen Christ is the practice of the forgiveness of sin.  Jesus said, "If you retain sins of others they will be retained."  We should leave the practice of retaining sins and practice the way of peace which is the way of forgiveness.

 

What is another evidence of the presence of the Risen Christ?  The ability to come to belief through both listening to the inspired words of others and through reading the inspired words of others?  How many of us have had our most profound experiences in reading?  And in reading the Bible?  Spoken and Written words are ways of having the presence of the Risen Christ invoked into one's life experience.

 

The punchline of this Gospel might be called a shameless plug for the validity of the written words of the Gospel of John: "But these are written so 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."  The Eternal Christ is the Word from the beginning whose words in the mouth of Jesus are spirit and life, and whose words about him in the Gospel of John can become the evidence of the Risen Christ in coming to belief.

 

St. Paul had completely different experiences of the Risen Christ than Peter and the disciples, but he did not think that his experiences were inferior to the experiences of the disciple.  In fact, St. Paul believed that Christ was All and in All, and that means there is an endless varieties of post-resurrection appearances of Christ.

 

And that includes your experiences and mine.  And let us humbly accept the nature of our experiences of the Risen Christ, and hope that they indicate the presence of Holy Spirit, the sense of being called and sent,  the experience of peace, the experience of forgiveness, and our adventures in believing that we've experienced because the spoken and written word.  Amen.