The Church’s first scripture for today is from the New Testament, a book called “Acts of the Apostles”.
Acts of the Apostles is the continuation of the Gospel of Luke. The Gospel of Luke presents the revelation of God in Christ in the Incarnation- remember, it is our faith that the Lord Jesus is the Incarnation of God, which means that in Christ, God accepted a human nature and lived a real, human life, presenting himself to us as a man, God in Christ revealed himself to us not as a vague cosmic force or an abstraction of our mind or as a figment of our emotions, but as a living, divine person, capable of a relationship with us. God in Christ meets us face to face.
Thus, the testimony of the Gospel of Luke is how God in Christ reveals himself to us in a body, a human body. The book of Acts continues this revelation of Christ, but the body through which God in Christ is revealed is expanded to include a new kind of body- the Body of Christ we know as the Church.
It is for this reason that today’s excerpt from the Book of Acts presents the apostles as doing the kinds of things that the Lord Jesus did- working great signs and wonders, healing the sick and casting out the dark spirits of evil. All this is meant to indicate that the Church’s mission is Christ’s mission. The Church, which is the Body of Christ in the world, continues the revelation of Christ is space and in time.
The revelation of the Church as Christ’s Body in the world challenges the prevailing notion that many Christians have of the Church as being merely an institution, a faith-based building and grounds project, an expression of culture and ethnicity. These things are not necessarily wicked or bad, but to reduce the Church to these things is bad, as it limits the Church’s power and potential to be what Christ intends for the Church to be- the continuation of his mission in the world.
The lesson from today’s excerpt from the Book of Acts is therefore this- the Church is most who Christ intends the Church to be when we are doing what Christ did, when we continue the revelation and work of his Incarnation. When we Christians fail at this mission, the Church drifts away from its true purpose and meaning.
Treat the Church as a faith-based building and grounds project or an expression of culture and watch the Church fail and fade away. Set about doing what Christ did and the Church will exceed all your expectations.
The Church’s second scripture for today is from the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible.
The Book of Revelation is often construed as a text that predicts a violent future and the destruction of the planet. But this is just not the case.
The Book of Revelation is written to help Christians, particularly persecuted Christians understand how God in Christ acts to set a world gone wrong right and to bring about justice for those Christians who have sacrificed their lives as martyrs for the faith.
The language of the Book of Revelation is richly symbolic and not easy for us to understand. This is because the Book of Revelation was written at a time of persecution and the symbols and images refer to people and places that its original audience would have appreciated and understood. These people and places have faded from our memories and become opaque to us. It’s for this reason that Book of Revelation is so often misunderstood.
The symbolism of the Book of Revelation refers to events in history during a past time of persecution, but the text remains relevant to us because of its message and meaning, which is that God in Christ will ultimately prove victorious and the sacrifices of the martyrs in every age of the Church’s life will be vindicated. It may not seem that way in the immediacy of the Church’s circumstances, but the vision of faith reveals what worldly vision conceals.
More than even this, the Book of Revelation is about the Church’s worship, the Mass, which is the context in which the strange and fantastic visions are revealed.
Thus, today’s excerpt presents a vision of the heavenly temple, the revelation of Christ as the High Priest. This is signaled to us by the description of the golden lampstands and the figure in the ankle length robe and golden vesture. The Mass, the worship of the Church is the source of our spiritual vision, a participation in the things of heaven. It is how we learn to see and understand the mysteries of Christ and come to terms with his revelation.
The reduction of the Mass to a kind of cultural pageant or celebration of community concerns and values numbs us to the true meaning of our worship and blinds our spiritual vision. The Mass is a deeply symbolic, like the Book of Revelation, it is an event through which the truth of Christ as our High Priest is revealed. The Mass is first and foremost a revelation of God in Christ, and we distort its purpose and meaning when we prioritize some other value as being more important than him. If we are not coming to Mass to meet God in Christ, we are missing the point.
Finally, in his Gospel, the Lord Jesus is revealed in the glory of his resurrection. Christ was truly dead and now he is alive. He lives, not as a metaphor or as a symbol, but really and truly. The body that was tortured and killed has been raised from death to a new and glorified life. Only God can do this and God has done this in Christ.
The followers of the Lord Jesus find this frightening and even doubt it can be true. Many of us Christians act like the disciples in today’s Gospel, living in fear of Christ’s resurrection or doubting it can be so. Why? Because if it is true then our lives must change- the way we think and act and change provokes as much fear and doubt in us as the resurrection of the Lord. Change is difficult and too many of us, faced with change, choose instead to be ruined. Fear and doubt constrict us, which is the meaning of the locked door behind which the disciples are hiding.
The door is fear and our doubts are the lock.
But God in Christ cannot be held back by our fear and doubts and boldly and overtakes them with the same boldness with which he overtook the dark powers of sin, death and the devil. There is no door we can construct or lock we can contrive that can resist him. The gates of hell cannot prevail against him and neither can we. This is what his resurrection reveals.
And his resurrection happened in his body, a real body, and it happened in real space and real time. It is the fleshiness, the physicality of the resurrection that all disciples must come to terms with. This is what Thomas confronts and what all Christians must confront. We cannot qualify Christ’s revelation through clever equivocations or appeals to myths and metaphors. We cannot make it something it is not in order to justify our fears, doubts and refusals to change. The resurrection of the Lord remains what it is despite all our hesitations and refusals.
The lesson:
God in Christ doesn’t change because of us. We change because of him.
Father Steve Grunow 