Only love is believable Second Sunday of Easter Acts 2.42-47; 1 Pet. 1.3-9; Jn. 20. 19-31

A preliminary word about this passage from the Acts of the Apostles. All of these New Testament writings are political documents. That is, they are written to the view to influencing the social context. Certainly Luke, a Roman and a pagan before he joined this Jesus movement, was very careful to tailor his depiction of this early Jesus community in a way that would cause no offense to the Roman authority. We see this in many places in both the gospel of Luke and in the book of Acts. We know, for instance, in the year 54, the emperor of the time kicked all the Jews out of Rome, both the Jesus Jews and the non-Jesus Jews because they kept fighting. And the Romans were big on law and order. So Luke was, as I said, at great pains to show that these Jesus-Jews were really nice, peaceful people who wouldn't cause any trouble for the police. It is important, I think, to mention that. Not just because it is the case and provides the context for the document, but rather, there is a tendency to read the Book of Acts as if it were a literal description of what was going on, that these people didn't have their own agendas when they wrote it. For instance, the other element in this passage is about this absolute commonality of possessions: sounds wonderful but there is evidence, even in the book itself, that it didn't work. It should have worked. Luke was trying to say that that was what Jesus was about. That people could absolutely share their own lives with everybody else and, above all, their possessions. (Because that's where people identify themselves more often than not.) But again, this is all part of this effort to show that...we are all just nice folks here. The cops don't have to worry about us disturbing the public order.

Okay. Now this famous passage from the gospel of John. As a matter of fact, the very ending of the gospel of John, the twenty-first chapter which follows, was added by somebody else later. What's happening here? Well, when I was given these texts as a young would be Catholic, they said: Well, Jesus is obviously risen from the dead because you've got this guy running around with holes in his hands and his side and Jesus inviting people to stick their digits in his hands and their hand in his side So, that clearly indicates that all this stuff is somehow true. In other words, this text has been classically used as the great apologetic text proving the Resurrection. Well, let us say, even if you could prove this dead Jew is up and about now, is that going to move you to the faith? That God has raised this man Jesus. Is that going to tell you what faith in the Resurrection is all about? And he answers this very clearly and loudly, "No". The God of the Jews is not into magic tricks and if you think that God is important just because God can get all these dead bodies up out of the ground, well, we are wide of the mark. What is going on here is expressed in this climatic statement that the risen Jesus makes "Blest are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

Believe what? Believe that God can reanimate dead bodies? Clearly not. And as the historians among us know, even if that were true, could you just make the historical assertion that was God's doing this? No. God doesn't happen to be an agent in history the way Napoleon, or Alexander the Great, or any of us are. No. What the author of the fourth gospel is trying to say is that what we believe is that the human pattern of this man's life is in fact what God intended for all of us. Again, see how it works. It's not just that God has raised this man, and therefore done some big, spectacular miracle. That's not the point. The point is to see in this man's extraordinary life God's intention for all human life. The Resurrection simply means that God has validated that kind of human life. So it is a much more arduous faith , if you will, that is asked for here. It is a much more profound, a much more transformative faith. It doesn't require the sight of a formerly dead body with holes in his wrists or his feet in order to come to that faith. None of us has seen that. So, why do we believe? What do we believe and why do we believe? We believe because of all those people, the saints somehow managed to embody, in their own quite varied careers, the same astonishing generosity of this man Jesus. Or as Hans van Baltasar, the Swiss theologian said, "Only love is believable."

We didn't need Kosovo. We didn't need a half million or more Albanian Moslems being pushed around by those good Orthodox Christian Serbs to show how difficult it is to believe that love really is the ultimate basis and object of faith. That's the difficulty. Not dead bodies walking around eating fish sandwiches or having people stick their fingers in their hands and their feet. That's the difficulty in this world, in our world, at this moment. As Kierkegaard said, we don't know what experiences those people in Jesus’ time had. All you have to do is explore the Resurrection narratives and they are extraordinarily disparate and virtually impossible to correlate with each other. Yes, something happened to those men and women who came to believe that this man's life really was validated by God, that this man's career is the archetypal human career. That's what we are called to believe if we saw the risen Jesus or if we didn't see the risen Jesus. The difficulty for that kind of faith is going to be the same for them as it is for us. That's the point.

One final kind of pedantic footnote. This statement of Thomas, put in the mouth of Thomas: "My Lord and my God..." I just reread Raymond Brown's commentary on this passage. (Brown is probably the greatest contemporary commentator on the gospel of John. He is a Catholic priest.) He points out, together with most scholars, that when Thomas is supposedly calling Jesus, "God", that's not really what Thomas is saying. I won't go into his explanation because you can read any commentary on the gospel of John and find the same thing. Why is that important? That's not just a pedantic little footnote. You could say...Well, Jesus was God. It's all pat. It's all settled. This does not challenge me, really. But to believe in the Resurrection is precisely to confront the humanity of Jesus. Jesus, this man, who lived in this place. That's where faith is founded and is to reside. Not in some kind of facile escape whereby we can say, well He's God and I'm not. He could bring that off - I can't. No. We are moved as I said, to examine who we are. How we are. What we want to be. What we think is successful living. A successful human career. That's what we are called to do as we are always called to do by the gospel.

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