Transcript
From John’s gospel: “Jesus came and stood among them, and said, ‘Peace be with you.” I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It is customary for clergy to say a prayer associated with putting on each of many particular vestments before a liturgy. When putting on a stole, a priest kisses it at the neck and prays, “Give me again, O Lord, the stole of immortality, which I lost by the transgression of my first parents; and although I am unworthy to come unto thy Holy Sacrament, grant that I may attain everlasting felicity.”
Not Adam and Eve but my parents Phillip and Akiko celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary last week. When I was ordained a priest at St Bartholomew’s in New York—the city my ojiichan Yoshiharu loved and lived in for a decade a hundred years ago (after training here in Philadelphia at La Salle)—my okasan presented me with a white stole I’ve worn in Eastertide and at weddings. I’d be wearing it now except that it’s being repaired.
The white or ivory-colored fabric is raw silk she sourced from the wedding dress which she made for herself and wore on the 6th of April 1956. The indigo silk she redeemed from the kimono which was her mother Kura Tamaoki’s favorite. Obaachan would patch it whenever it got worn thin. “Japanese kimono,” my Yokohama mama says, “This is what they do, right? They don’t throw out kimono when it wears out.”
The kanji she embroidered on the stole is 信, Japanese for faith or trust. “I’m not an embroiderer,” she says, “and you know, I cannot believe I did that. But I took my time and it turned out perfect. I love it!” 信 is drawn or written from the kanji for ‘man’ and next to it, reading right to left, the kanji for ‘word’. What does faith look like in the Japanese mind? A man standing by his word.
It’s the same in the Hebraic imagination. We read in Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”
God creates by fiat, by speaking. This is one of the more than a few differences between God and me. Yesterday morning, I looked out over Victoria’s flower bed and said, “Let there be mulch, spread just so around these peonies and roses.” And nothing happened. My back can tell you it did not happen because my mouth said so.
In his epic Paradise Regain’d, the poet John Milton has Jesus say to Satan who is trying to tempt him,
Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood
But Satan smitten with amazement fell.
He said and stood. One thinks of Martin Luther’s hymn A Mighty Fortress,
The prince of darkness grim,
we tremble not for him;
his rage we can endure,
for lo! his doom is sure;
one little word shall fell him.
The Spirit broods over the formless void, over the ṯōhū wā-ḇōhū. God breathes over the chaos.
This morning’s text from John’s gospel gives us a scene redolent of this, the whiff of it. The disciples are behind locked doors. Fear has sealed the room. It’s ṯōhū wā-ḇōhū all over again. They had hoped Jesus was the one to redeem Israel. Now, nothing. And John wants us to notice that.
That is where faith begins. Not in courage. Not in clarity. Not with people who’ve got everything figured out. It begins with frightened people trying to keep the world outside.
Jesus comes anyway. He does not wait for the door to open. He does not wait for your fear to become faith. He comes into your room as formless and void as it is, into your fear. Into the shut little world we make for ourselves when everything has gone wrong.
They’re locked up for fear of the Jews. They were locked up, I want to say, for fear of the Jew, of one in particular. The one they left in the lurch and abandoned when he needed them most.
“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.”
That’s what the risen Lord Jesus does. He comes to you wounded when you’re afraid. And in the Holy Sacrament he gives you his very body and blood. That’s all.
Locked doors are not a problem for the one who creates the heavens and the earth. He rearranges the furniture. By the transgression of our first parents we lose the stole of immortality. Wearing the mantle of our flesh, he picks it up. And he places it around your neck again.
That’s where the risen Christ always finds us, where we’re hiding. Where we go when we’re too afraid to stay with him, to follow where he wants to take us. To go with him into the mysteries of his death on a tree. Into the mysteries of that life which he is determined to give us.
It’s as in the last lines not of Paradise Regain’d now but Milton’s elegy Lycidas.
And now the sun had stretch’d out all the hills,
And now was dropp’d into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
He said and stood. He comes into the room. He breathes, “Peace be with you.” And apart from that breath we have nothing to say. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
