Sermon on 2nd Sunday of Easter - Fr Sam Rossiter-Peters

May be given to me to speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Please do be seated.

I believe that one of the most underrated forms of theology in the church is the theology we find in hymns. So often we reduce hymns to just our favourite tune or a comforting phrase, but the best hymnody contains a treasury of wisdom. One of my favourites is Before the Throne of God Above, and within it I turn to a line over and over again, and I have done throughout my Christian journey, when Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward I look and see him there who made an end of all my sin.

This idea that in the face of guilt and despair we can look to Jesus for hope is the very heart of the Easter message. We don't usually, or often at least, attribute despair to Satan, but most of us have known that sense of crushing weight, the weight of realising that we've done something wrong. We've felt that moment at some point in our lives, the rising tide when an old mistake comes back and the guilt fills us.

In those moments we stand accused, and in Hebrew the word for the accuser is ha-satan, the name given in the scriptures to the one who accuses us, the one who opposes us is Satan, the accuser. Accused is how I imagine the disciples felt in today's gospel reading when they first encountered the risen Jesus. They had, after all, let him down badly.

At the last supper they had all boldly declared, St Peter most loudly of all, that they would rather die than abandon Jesus, but within a came, they ran away. Few, if any, stood by him in his trial. Few, if any, followed him to the cross.

Most hid, locked away for fear of the Jews, as the gospels tell us, for fear of the religious authorities who had persecuted Jesus and handed him over to the Romans. So when Jesus rose from the dead, I imagine after that first immediate reaction of joy, the feeling that next followed was shame, guilt and accusation, because the disciples would have realised that if Jesus had truly risen from the dead, then everything that he had intimated about himself before the cross was indeed true. He really was the Son of God.

He really was the Messiah. And that meant that they hadn't just abandoned and betrayed a friend, their rabbi, their leader, their brother. They had deserted the Holy One of Israel, God himself.

And so in this gospel reading that we just heard, when Jesus stood amongst his disciples, gathered together except for St Thomas, in a room, again, hidden away for fear of those religious authorities, when Jesus stood amongst them and looked at them as he had done before the cross so many times, I'm sure that the disciples didn't feel very comfortable. I'm sure that they felt like they stood accused. I imagine that most of them felt that they had been disqualified from their discipleship, unworthy of the calling that Jesus had placed on them through the three years of his ministry prior to that point.

Maybe they even feared that Jesus had come to judge them. I called you to be my disciples, and yet in the hour of my arrest, in the hour of my trial, and in the hour of my death, where were you? But instead of saying any of that, instead of accusing them as he had every right to do, Jesus stood among them and said, peace be with you. When I've read this passage before, as I have done many times, I've always thought of peace be with you as a sort of just greeting, a bit like a posh hello.

But as I reread it this week, I began to wonder, what if Jesus' peace be with you was more than a greeting? What if it was a gift and a command? Because we're told in the scriptures that nobody needed to tell Jesus anything about themselves. He already knew the heart of what was going on inside of them. So when Jesus stood amongst his disciples, his closest friends, he knew what would be going through their hearts.

He knew that they would be feeling guilt and shame and humiliation and accusation, and into that he spoke peace. Not as a platitude, but as a proclamation. Not because they had done well, but because he had done well for them.

Not merely as comfort, but as commission. And then St John's Gospel tells us he showed them his hands and his side. This wasn't a throwaway detail.

He showed them his wounds, the wounds of the crucifixion. Not just as proof that it really was him, but as a sign of continuity. The crucified one is the risen one.

The peace he gives comes at a cost, but it is a cost that he paid. Those wounds, still visible in his resurrected body, were marks of peace. In them, the disciples were invited, not just to see pain, but to see victory.

Not just love, but loss. Jesus said, here are my wounds, and by my wounds you are healed. And then, having offered them, having commanded them peace, he gave them something else.

Authority. He breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Ghost. Whosoever sins he remit, they are remitted unto them.

Some say that the church began at Pentecost, that great day when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples in power, in a wind and in tongues of flame. Some say that it began with St Peter's first message. Some say that it began with St Stephen, the first martyr.

All of these are possible dates. But I think that it was this moment. It was the moment when Jesus stood amongst his disciples and said, I have given you a gift.

Go out and give it to other people. I have given you peace. I have won for you peace.

I have given you forgiveness. I have won for you forgiveness. Go out and give it to somebody else.

That's the ministry that we share in every time we come into this church, and particularly every time we come to this altar. At the altar, the cross is made re-present. Those wounds are presented to us, placed into our hands, the blood upon our lips.

Jesus is standing before his disciples in this Eucharist and saying, behold my hands and my side, see the wounds which won for you peace, which won for you forgiveness, which are for you victory. And then he says, go forward from this place and share what you have been given. You have peace, not because of anything you've done, not because you deserve it, not because you can earn it, but because I have given you it.

So go out and share it. You are forgiven, not because you deserve it, not because you can earn it, but because I have won it for you. Go out and forgive.

Amen.