In Season

Homilies Through the Liturgical Year

Luke Timothy Johnson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781725295322
  9781725295315
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725295339
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

A selection of sermons or homilies preached over a fifty-year period explicitly linked to the church's liturgical year--thus, In Season. The sermons exemplify how engagement with lectionary texts, the church's cycle of worship, and the circumstances of contemporary believers, can all be brought into lively conversation.

EASTER TO CHRIST THE KING

THE DAY OF RESURRECTION29

Psalm 118:24

John 20:1–18

1 Corinthians 5:7–8

My sisters and brothers in Christ, Scripture declares: “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” This is the day, the day of resurrection, for Christians the holiest of days, the center of our very existence, the cause of our gathering in Jesus’s name.

This is the day, today: we declare by our presence here that resurrection is not only something that happened to someone else long ago in the past. Resurrection is a reality that continues to touch and transform us today and every day. The resurrection of Jesus means above all that the one whose suffering and death we have so closely followed during the time of Lent, and have ritually enacted during the sacred triduum, has entered into God’s life, has become life-giving Spirit who renews the face of the earth.

This is the Day, on which God’s triumphant power over, within, and through creation is asserted against the destructive forces of sin and death, turning the long and sad night of human alienation into the possibility of human reconciliation. Jesus, God’s Son, has been raised, and for us has become the sun of a new creation, whose radiance illumines and warms our lives.

This is the day the Lord has made. This eschatological day, this new creation day, is not one any human could accomplish. Beat with our wings as we might against the cage of death, we can never by our own strength break through. Wrestle grimly within the chains of sin as we might, we cannot by our own strength be unshackled. Only the one who first calls into existence that which is not has might enough for this, has a love sufficiently powerful to be caged in our mortal flesh and weighted with our sinful chains, and then leap from the spiced tomb, casting aside all mortal cover, all sinful weight, and fly—not away from us, no, but through the winged Spirit into a new closeness, a more profound intimacy with us, so that though not yet altogether free from mesh or lightened of mail, we also can hope one morning to fly, and can even now move more blithely through our groundling intimations and imitations of flight.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it. As at our beginning, so now; as now, so at our beginning. We rejoice in the power of God that so suffuses the human body of Jesus that he becomes “life-giving Spirit” (1 Cor 15:45). We rejoice in the gift of that same Spirit in our own bodies, in the flame that this rising sun has flung upon the earth, and in whose light, at last, we can see light, and so see all else new as well.

When we grasp that the resurrection means not the resuscitation of a corpse but the transfiguration of mortal flesh into glorified body, when we recognize that as it is now, so was it at the beginning, then we can begin to understand the puzzling stories told of the first experiences of the risen Lord among his followers.

These stories, such as the ones we have read this morning—Mary’s visit to the tomb, the disciples’ footrace, Mary’s conversation with the man she thinks is a gardener—these stories are notoriously ill-suited to the purposes of history. All four Gospels have empty-tomb stories, for example, but each version involves different visitors, different encounters, different messages, and different responses. Three of the Gospels also tell stories of encounters that followers have with Jesus. But these stories likewise involve different people, different places, and different results.

The stories cannot be harmonized or arranged into a satisfactory chronological sequence. Indeed, they resist history altogether.

For this very reason, they are most precious, most true, for they point to the fundamental mystery of the resurrection. The Jesus whom other humans now encounter is continuous with the earthly Jesus but is also discontinuous—in order to be present to all human bodies, the Spirit of Jesus must necessarily transcend (without abandoning) his individual body. To use language completely inadequate to the task, the resurrected Jesus is available to be encountered by others in time and space precisely because he is no longer himself defined by time and space.

The stories we read this morning, then, like all the resurrection accounts, are based on real human experiences of the past; we remember how Paul in 1 Cor 15:3–8, provides a list of some who “had seen the Lord,” many of them still around in his day.

But like all the resurrection stories, these are also fashioned in light of the continuing experience of Jesus in the church and seek to express not only what happened back then but also what continues to happen now. What a heavy burden, what an impossible load for narratives to bear! Yet because they accept that burden, these stories are radiant with the light they struggle to contain, and speak to us today the truth of the resurrection: Jesus is the same yet different; Jesus is absent yet more present than ever; Jesus is unmistakably himself yet can appear to anyone we might meet in a garden or on the road; Jesus cannot be grasped yet calls us by our personal name; Jesus is not simply a man we once knew but is now and forever “Rabbouni,” my master.

It is in the light of Jesus’s resurrection that we correctly perceive his earthly ministry. Jesus is not simply a peasant or poet or agrarian reformer or trader in quips. He is, as Peter rightly stated to the household of Cornelius, the Word God sent to Israel preaching the good news of peace, the One anointed by God with the Holy Spirit and power, which led him to go about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil (Acts 10:38–46). In short, we perceive the ministry of Jesus itself as God’s work in the world to transform, not the accidental arrangements of society but the fundamental structures of human existence.

It is in the light of the resurrection that we, like the first believers, reread Torah and find in Ps 118 not merely the resurrection verses with which this sermon began, but also the essential script of the messianic drama: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this is the Lord’s doing: it is marvelous in our eyes” (Ps 118:22). And seeing Jesus as the shunned and shattered stone that God uses to build a new temple in the Spirit also enables us to see all the scorned stuff of creation, all the bits and pieces we so easily dismiss, all the fragmented and broken bodies, all the shattered and shuttered hearts and minds, in a new and perhaps more cautious and perhaps more hopeful light; certainly, we cannot ever view any broken stones in quite the same way.

It is in the light of the resurrection, finally, that we are called to view our own lives in an entirely new way. The truth of the resurrection is not confirmed or disconfirmed by the analysis of ancient texts or the exhumation of ancient bones, but by the presence or absence of transformed lives among those who proclaim Jesus as Lord. “Christ our Paschal Lamb,” says Paul, “has been sacrificed; let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor 5:7–8).

My sisters and brothers, the only convincing sign of the resurrection in our world is the transformed lives of those who confess the resurrection. If we do not live as though in a new creation, why should anyone find the claim of a new creation credible?

If we do not bring a word of peace to our world, work for the healing of the sick, struggle to lift the burdens of those afflicted by all the demons for whom contemporary culture provides such a rich breeding ground, do we not become incredible, even to ourselves, and our sounds of rejoicing empty and embarrassing?

If we do not put aside the old leaven of malice and evil to speak and act in sincerity and truth, do we not discredit our risen Lord, do we not diminish the truth we have gathered here today to proclaim?

29. Preached at Cannon Chapel, Candler School of Theology, Easter 1996.

PARADOXICAL LIFE30

1 John 1:1—2:2

John 20:19–31

My sisters and brothers in Christ, to be Christian means having a high tolerance for paradox. The British essayist G. K. Chesterton once said that paradox is truth calling attention to itself by standing on its head. He called it the logic of topsy-turvydom.

Chesterton gives the example of the young nobleman Francis who lived in the Italian city of Assisi. One day he stood on his head and suddenly saw his native city, not as a strong fortress reaching into the sky, but as a fragile bauble dangerously dangling over a blue abyss. In this topsy-turvy moment, Francis for the first time saw his city truly, for he saw it as contingent, suspended over nothingness. Francis popped to his feet, shed his rich clothes, and began a life of radical poverty. If the truth of things is the non-necessity of things, if the deepest reality is that all is free gift from God, then why not live that way? Francis would have been more of a paradoxical figure only if, having once spotted that truth, he had continued to live in Assisi exactly as he had before, dwelling in his town now as a bauble and not as a fortress.

Something in us, t...

Table of contents

• TITLE PAGE
• INTRODUCTION
• ADVENT TO CHRISTMAS
• LENT
• HOLY WEEK
• GOOD FRIDAY
• EASTER TO CHRIST THE KING
• SAINTS AND ANGELS