Easter 2 A

In the story from John for the second Sunday of Easter Jesus shows his wounds to his fearful disciples. It has always amazed me that educated adults with theological degrees want to take this story with flat-footed literalism instead of common sense. The Gospel of John is masterfully imaginative. I am suggesting here that John heightens the tension between images of living and dying in the manner of a Petrarchan conceit. Petrarch, a poet of the Italian Renaissance, would employ jarring metaphors that brought two seemingly incompatible images together, oxymorons, actually, like peace and war or fire and ice, to create startling and vivid imaginative turns. John Donne, more familiar to English readers, did the same in comparing marriage to a flea or separated lovers to the extended arms of a compass.

The tradition was intensely visual. The poetic conceit was closely related to “emblem” literature, for instance, verse that would be accompanied by an actual visual image, a wood engraving, say. Christopher Harvey published a book of emblems called The School of the Heart in which one emblem, “The Heart powred out”, expands on a verse from Lamentations (2.19): “Pour out thy heart like water before the face of the Lord.” The engraving shows a young man pouring from a large hot water bottle-like heart into a stream while an angel looks on, an intense literalisation of the image in Lamentations, which is accompanied by an epigram and a longer poem.

John sets life and death together like a Petrarchan conceit. In the face of death, loss, defeat and fear John gives us life in the jarring hyper-reality of an encounter that becomes an invitation to actually touch the wounds that Jesus displays. This is a resurrected body that eats grilled fish. You can’t take these stories any more literally than the verse in Lamentations about the heart being poured out like water, though some do, and, indeed, the intensity of Harvey’s literalisation adds to the perspicuity of the image. But it does so as an intentional device to pull our attention away from dead literalism and flattened, predictable language to reinforce the energy of the original imagery. This is what John is doing. He is saying that whatever the “risen-ness” of Jesus means in the life of the disciples, it has to do with the woundedness of crucifixion, and any appropriation of the living body of Christ in the life of discipleship is going to have to experience like woundedness in some form. The new life we are given in Christ, our resurrection, is going to include suffering and perhaps literal wounds and possibly even crucifixion. The jarring oxymoron in this conceit is the sense that death is life, the ability to pour ourselves out in our discipleship, to suffer, is what the new life in Christ is all about. It is a new way of seeing things that has to do with the way we accept the life of Christ as the shape of our own life (John 1.12). When Thomas does touch the wounds and kneels and says, “My Lord and my God”, it is not to make a confessional statement about the identity of Jesus in some theological, doctrinal sense, but to speak words of submission spoken in the context of conversion and transformation. This is my Lord and my God.

The jarring tension between the substantial and the insubstantial is of course set up from the beginning when Jesus walks through the door into the locked room to bring peace where there is no peace. The disciples are huddled in a fellowship of paralysis in a story that becomes John’s version of Luke’s Pentecost story. In a move that looks a bit like Harvey’s literalised image of the heart poured out, John has Jesus “breath” on the disciples, literalising a pun in Greek on the Holy Spirit (pneuma means both breath and spirit). The gift of the spirit enables the disciples to forgive sins, an extraordinary claim that gives them the power to live out the grace of God in ordinary life. Disclosing the presence of God, then, becomes the exercise of our ordinary humanity and common compassion. We don’t need all this religious folderol in order to forgive sins. We just do it, and we have to realize that when we don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. Christ ‘R’ Us. God is actualised in faithful human relationships.

The Gospel of John is alive with extravagant, vibrant metaphors that have confused the fundamentalists of this world to no end. Even Raymond Brown gets hung up on the need to take such images as literal events occasionally. Our reading concludes with the observation that Thomas has believed because he has seen. Given the way the idea of “seeing” has been developed, we may be assured that “seeing” her is that new way of seeing that is gained by a transformed life. Certainly John is not caving in to small-minded empiricists like Richard Dawkins and their mirror images in American televangelists like Pat Robertson here. Nor does the play on seeing and not seeing in verse 29 have anything to do with blessing the credulous. Either this verse vibrates with the essential paradoxes of this reading or it has nothing to do with the gospel it seems to sum up. The truth comes somewhere between seeing and not-seeing, and has more to do with how we live as embodied beings bearing the life of Christ in the world through what we do than it does with what we believe, in the conventional meaning of that word. In John, belief is always connected with action or it is nothing. No understanding of resurrection has any validity outside of the witness of our discipleship.