Easter Week 2 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 117(118); 1 John 5:1-6; John 20:19-31

Three years ago a very good friend died just before Easter at the noble age of 93. She had a very unusual childhood. Not only did she not know her father was, she did not know her mother. She was raised by a woman who may have been a distant relation or perhaps a nurse-friend of her mother's who agreed to look after her. She had no brothers or sisters, no uncles or aunts, no children of her own. All her life she was fascinated by the question of her identity, making many efforts to piece the story together but never arriving at a satisfactory conclusion.

She believed that this unusual experience gave her a stronger and clearer sense than is normal of being the child of God. For to whom else did she belong in the world? She made a happy marriage later on and a successful career in the human sciences. She was a person of deep faith and prayer, which helped her to live through very dark times, especially in her young adulthood. In her maturity she was a woman of deep compassion who radiated an extraordinary kindliness, a woman with whom people were quickly ready, in a way that was somewhat mysterious, to talk about their own loneliness and perplexities.

She comes to mind today, not just because the anniversary of her death is around this time, but because we are thinking about the apostles' encounters with the Risen Lord. The temptation is to think that these encounters were simply a matter of them seeing him, but the reality is that they were in the first place about him seeing them. It is not so much that they confirm his identity as it is he who confirms their new identity.

There is a strong sensuality in the Easter readings, much about looking and seeing, hearing and touching, eating with him and listening to him, feeling his breath upon them once again. The beloved disciple saw that the tomb was empty and he believed. Mary Magdalen searched for him and recognised him when she heard him calling her name. Thomas will not believe unless he sees and touches for himself.

It is natural for us to want such experiences, to find, touch, see, and hold the one we love. It is how we know and experience things and it is how we know we are together. Death brings all this home to us. It seems that we need such sensations if we are to make Christ real in our world, relevant and true in our lives.

But Jesus says they are happy who have not seen and yet believe. This is not just consolation for those who were not around in those days. It rather brings out this point: that it is he who finds the disciples, it is he who seeks them out, it is he who sees them and calls their names. For faith is always a response to One who approaches us.

It is he who seeks them out, therefore, and makes them to be real. It is he who brings them to life in his new world. The disciples are the ones now entombed, needing to be set free and to be given courage, to be born again out of their imprisonment into a new life and a new identity.

'The fleshless word will bring us down', wrote the Scottish poet Edwin Muir, and the Eternal Word is still flesh in the glory of the resurrection. So our faith, which is austere, not seeing and yet believing, is also supported by three witnesses, as the reading from 1 John tells us, the water, the blood, and the Spirit. It means being supported within the life of a community in which Baptism and the Eucharist are celebrated, a community so animated by the Spirit that these sacramental realities are truly lived, the Spirit thereby revealing the depths of God's love for us and confirming us in our identity.

I believe that my friend who died three years ago had a strong sense of this, that it is in being seen by God that we are alive and true. It is in being held in God's sight that we find our identity. No matter what the circumstances into which we are born, our faith is a victory over the world. It is not a magic solution to real human problems but a way in which those problems can be transformed into glorious wounds. Faith is a way in which the dark walls that imprison people can fall away. Faith is a way in which a life that might otherwise be lonely and perplexing can be filled with light, can be victorious in love, can be full of wisdom.