Were you here last week, either online or in person? The threshold for our reflection today, the springboard from which we might make a journey together, is Philo’s arresting declaration last week from the pulpit: “I deny the resurrection.” By quoting that sentence separated out from the entirety of her thinking, I am doing Philo’s exposition of her faith a disservice, I know. It was heady stuff for some of us and perhaps jarring – or puzzling – for others.
I want to acknowledge that I am not here at Durham St because it is a place where the presbyter preaches a denial of the physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. I am here because it is a place whether the presbyter can preach that message. You don’t have to deconstruct your faith to a prescribed degree to ‘belong’ in this church. In fact, I reckon we acknowledge, with warmth and no small affection, that we are not all ‘in the same place’ on our faith journeys. However, I hope we are all committed to supporting each others’ journeys.
Like the world outside our doors, we’re diverse by design, not by accident.
So, let’s get to work. For those of you who were hoping for an easier ride than “I deny the resurrection” this morning, and I can assure you I counted myself in that number, how about we consider John’s record of a very personal invitation to Thomas in today’s reading?
“Put your finger here; see [the marks where the nails were in] my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into [the scar where the spear pierced] my side.”
No, I don’t want to either.
Instead, as I pondered last week’s message, I found that I wasn’t concerned that much with whether you sighed with relief, stiffened in shock, or quietly yawned when you heard Philo’s testimony. What I’m concerned with is the “So What?” of the resurrection, with what happens to us all next. What we will all do next.
And by ‘The “So What?” of Resurrection’ I do not mean that I am concerned about the mechanics of human salvation either. Do the hardline Evangelicals have it right? Is Jesus waiting for you to utter the words “I accept you Lord Jesus as my personal Saviour” so that when you do, he can activate the sheep escalator instead of the goat trapdoor? Or do the Orthodox have it right that Jesus has already once and for all guaranteed the raising of all humanity from the dead? I’m happy to leave that kind of “so whattery” to God.
I’m interested in something more immediate. I’m interested in John’s gospel’s closing words: the “Life in Jesus’ name” here and now that the author says they’re writing for. I’m interested in the “So What?” of resurrection in your life and in my life and in our lives together at Durham Street, right now, in the autumn of 2025.
For me, the most interesting part of the gospel today is not the detail of what happened in the locked room of the story, but what frames it. That’s where the “So What?” is, I think.
Before its resurrection centrepiece, the story opens with the gospel writer’s memory of a community that was huddling together behind locked doors out of fear. This is a community so traumatised, so grief-stricken, so tired and ground down, or perhaps even (in an odd kind of way) so stubbornly filled with hubris and a certainty about what the rules of the game were, that for that community it felt like it was impossible to experience new life. Do you identify with any of that?
Is there personal trauma in your life that you are surviving, but without hope of anything new and life-giving in your future? Or are some of us so vicariously traumatised by what we see among our friends and family, the people we work with, or in our news feeds; so traumatised that we are losing hope of anything new and life-giving for our society or our world?
Are some of our whānau right now so caught up in grieving for what has been lost, personally – oh how much some of us have lost! – or do some of us find ourselves so possessed by a kind of grief for what has been lost by our community, that we have no trust that there’s anything new or life-giving ahead?
As for me, I mainly identify with being tired. Bone tired sometimes. Worn down by the endless stressful grind of it all, the fighting and pushing and striving for healing when it seems that no matter what I do, healing doesn’t come; when the only thing that seems to change at the hospital I work in is that it gets increasingly difficult to do my work. Are some of us so tired that even rumours of resurrection feel impossible?
We see yet another kind of preface to resurrection a lot at the moment in the world. At first it appears to be an opposite to the kinds of experience I have outlined so far: it is characterised by a certainty, even a triumphant certainty, about how things are and how things work. It holds up signs proclaiming that there are only two genders, that Moslem and Catholic people are going to hell, that it was Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, that White Lives Matter, that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist, that we must grow at any cost, and that we must put ourselves first. However, this way of living has also often abandoned all hope for something new and life-giving – it angrily seeks to retreat to a mythical past or into a prison of its own choosing. Only the insane and the misguided hope for something new and different in those worlds.
All this is what the front end of the frame of the gospel story looks like. I wonder if this is pretty much the front end of every treasured story in our scriptures which describes a pivot from death to life; which is to say, pretty much all of our scriptures. So why wouldn’t we identify with something in this mix? I’m pretty sure all of us identify with fear or defeat, or grief, or trauma, or stubbornness, or pride, or dogmatism at least some of the time.
Again, I declare that I am less interested this week in the details of what happens in the centre of John’s account, but it is clearly momentous – let us agree to call it “resurrection”. That something very important and very Godly happened is enough for me.
So let’s move straight to the end: what is the concluding frame of the story as outlined for us in the ending words of John’s gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles reading this morning?
We are told that the disciples became “overjoyed”. And that they spread word first to their wider community, telling other whānau that “We have seen the Lord!”
We see that the power of resurrection leaves even a person who could not, would not believe in the possibility of new life becoming able to recognise that God has brought it into being: ‘Thomas said, “My Lord and my God!”
We see there’s a shift in its togetherness that gradually moves the community out from the locked room and into the marketplace. “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name,” [the High Priest said]. “Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man’s blood.” Peter and the other apostles now find themselves replying “We must obey God rather than human beings! … We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit”.
The author of John’s gospel, presumably decades after their first experience of resurrection, says that their hope is so big now that it extends to us. The writer hopes that “by believing you may have life in his name.”
Resurrection did happen. Everyone agrees on that in our faith tradition. It is the central tenet of our religion. Obviously we don’t all agree on exactly what that means, but here is the witness of the church and also my witness to you today: Jesus is Risen!
I have seen resurrection in my own life and with my own eyes. And I reckon I might be missing it more often than I’m noticing it, because my observation is that the Holy Spirit doesn’t demand or require an audience to do the work of resurrection.
Are you confused about what the picture of resurrection looks like? Well, look at the frame. Don’t allow your questions about the details of the resurrection prevent you from looking at the changes it brings about in people.
For me today, it is noticing the frame of today’s gospel story that reveals that resurrection can and does penetrate any kind of barrier – fear, defeat, grief, trauma, stubbornness, pride, and dogma. New life does come. Death is never, ever the final word.
Resurrection so powerfully means new life that it can transform us to be able to experience joy again; it can give us the precious ability to see God in our very midst where before we saw nothing of the sort; we can be given the grace to bow down where before we might previously have been puffed up, waving our ideological placards; and we can gain the courage to be obedient to the ways of God’s Commonwealth even when this brings us to the attention of those in power.
In short, even our dead bones can come back to life.
E te whānau, “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” Amen.