A Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Easter, April 28, 2019
St. Dunstan’s Anglican Church, Largo, FL
The Very Rev. J. Michael Strachan
Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31
When we walk through the drama of Holy Week,
we are walking through the drama of our redemption. Now, the story does start
far before the events of Holy Week and has continued long since, but the high
points of the story, the climax of the covenant, are the events of Holy Week,
particularly the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, which we have
just celebrated and in fact continue to celebrate because Easter is a season
and not a single day.
The drama of our redemption, the
fact that God has forgiven our sins, made us right with him, brought us into
his family, and promised to raise us from the dead on the last day, is a
glorious gift for which we should give thanks every single day. But there can
be a disconnect between the world around us that we see with our eyes and the
way that we expect the world to be. We say and sing that God in Christ has
defeated sin, death, and the devil, and then when we look around us what we
find is a very different reality, one in which sin, death, and the devil still continue
to reign.
Part of the disconnect is that our
theology and hymnody isn’t always as precise as it should be. We often speak of
God having defeated death on the cross, but the defeat of death happens not
when Jesus dies but when Jesus rises again and it happens for us when we rise
again the future. Death is the last enemy that shall be defeated, so the defeat
of death is a future even for us, even if Jesus’ resurrection guarantees our
own.
In the same way, we speak about sin
as having been defeated, and yet we all know the role it has in our own lives
and in the world around us. But at the cross we find the forgiveness of sins,
and not the defeat of sin. Sin didn’t disappear on Good Friday or Easter
Sunday, but because of Good Friday and Easter Sunday God can now forgive our
sins like any judge could do, but he can do so while being, as Paul puts it,
“just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:26). Without
the cross, God could forgive our sins, but then he wouldn’t be just. Without
the cross, God could hold us accountable for our sins, but then he wouldn’t be
the justifier, the one who made people right with himself. But because of what
Jesus did, God can be both just and justifier, and yet sin continues to roll on
in this world, doing its worst in our lives and in the world, despite the fact
that we live in a world where Jesus Christ has died, is risen, and will come
again.
The devil too continues to prowl
around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour, as Peter says, well after
the death and resurrection of Jesus, and so we might be excused if we too have
our Doubting Thomas moments where we’re unsure what to believe in the light of
the reality around us. We want to see something before we believe it. We want
our experience of the world around us, what we see, touch, and experience, to
match what it is that we are being asked to believe. And we aren’t the only
ones to experience this disconnect, nor was Thomas. We name the book
Revelation, except that’s not really the title. The last book of our Bile is
“the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ,” and an apocalypse is a genre written for
those people for whom the world doesn’t quite match up with the reality they
confess. In an apocalypse, the veil that separates our dimension from God’s
dimension is pulled back for a moment, and we are given a look into the other
side of existence. We see things only from our perspective now, but God sees
the world differently than we do, and through an apocalypse, we are invited to
view that perspective through the lens of the symbolic worldview of the Old
Testament.
And so we hear from the opening of
the book what is true despite what might appear to be the case. From the
world’s perspective, Jesus is a failed prophet; fro
