EASTER Sunday presented to us an empty tomb and abandoned burial cloths, which do not a resurrection make. Now we are filled in on the appearances of the Risen Christ that were the basis for the faith in Jesus’ resurrection. John’s account (20:19-31) narrates two appearances, one on the evening of Easter and another a week later. These appearances of Jesus give us the living legacy of Easter according to the fourth gospel, detailing together the various aspects of the one event.
Peace from the one crucified and risen
ON the evening of that eventful first day of the week that revealed the empty tomb, Jesus all of a sudden was in the midst of His disciples gathered together behind locked doors for fear of the Jews. To their troubled spirits He brought peace, not just the customary Jewish greeting, but the peace and joy that signal the set reality of the messianic times. His resurrection triumph indeed meant the disenfranchisement of the gloom and fear that had been shadowing humankind living in a world of sin and death. Easter morn has ushered in the light which vanquished alienation and substituted instead a new covenantal order between heaven and Earth in a realized eschatology.
Paradoxically, peace came delivered by one who was unjustly crucified and died and was buried. The evangelists were all intent on pointing out the continuity and identity between the crucified Jesus and the risen Lord. Jesus spontaneously showed His wound marks to His disciples. The evidence established the unity between the cross and the resurrection, and precluded any Gnostic downsizing of the ignominious passion and death of Jesus in a truncated picture of the glorious Christ.
Holy Spirit: Mission and life of faith
THE risen Jesus breathed on His disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Jesus fulfilled the prophecies (Joel 3:1; Ezekiel 36:27) with His gift of the Holy Spirit. He anointed and empowered His disciples with the same Spirit of God that in the beginning of creation hovered over the primeval wasteland and chaos and presaged order and life, the one Spirit of God that was later breathed into the formed piece of clay and brought forth a living human being (Genesis 2:7), and the same Spirit that anointed prophets, priests and kings. John beautifully coalesced with the resurrection the moment of the giving of the Holy Spirit, as well as the moment of the commissioning of the disciples.
The anointing and inspiration with the Holy Spirit programmed to action spells the mission. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” His disciples are now to continue what He has begun. The Christian community is to exist according to the mandate of mercy and forgiveness. The risen Jesus sent forth His followers to forgive sins in the context of His victory over sin. They are not only to regulate admission into the fellowship of faith, but must primarily be concerned with testifying to and establishing peace and forgiveness in the world. Christians are to share in the power of the cross over sin because they have been admitted into the unity of the Spirit of the risen Lord.
Part of the living legacy of the resurrection of Jesus is the life of faith it engenders. For the first Christians, the situation of having doubts and questions even as one believed got an encouraging boost. The saying “To see is to believe” was taken in earnest because Jesus Himself showed the scars of His suffering to His disciples and likewise to Thomas later. But the case of Thomas also exposed the saying to be inadequate. For later believers, the situation of seeing nothing at all really probes the depth of one’s faith. Without seeing the risen Lord, we rely on the testimony of authoritative eye-witnesses.
Alálaong bagá, faith is not based on evidence or on what one can see firsthand. Thomas believed because Jesus asked him to, although he was literally humored to see and feel things for himself, and for the evangelist to debunk any theory that the appearances were delusions or illusionary fantasies of the disciples. To believe and to be committed, one must move on beyond the sensational and the sensual. And that was what Thomas did with his final affirmation of Jesus: “My Lord and my God!”—representing the growing consciousness of the early Christians that the risen Jesus was one with and the equal of the almighty Lord of all creation.
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