A Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter,

April 25, 2004, St. Paul’s

Acts 9:1-6

Ps 30

Rev 5:11-14

John 21: 1-19

In the name of the risen Christ. Amen.

I have a hypothesis about the Resurrection appearances. In today’s Gospel Jesus appears on the beach as Peter and John and the others are fishing. At first they do not recognize him, but when their nets overflow, John realizes who it is. Peter, ever impetuous, swims to shore; once they all are gathered, Jesus takes bread and fish and gives it to them.

My hypothesis is that this narrative stands to the experience which underlies it as a dream narrative stands to a dream. I don’t necessarily mean that their experience was a vision. I do not know what their experience was. When I hypothesize that the narrative stands to the disciples’ experience as a dream narrative stands to a dream, what I am thinking about is the relationship between the narrative we have and the experience it describes.

If you have ever tried to tell someone about a dream, at least any dream that is deep and full of enigmatic meaning, you will know what I mean when I say that dreams are one thing and dream narratives another. The narrative has structure, and, almost inevitably, greater conceptual clarity; even if the sense of the uncanny that often characterizes the dreams we long remember is captured by the narrative, nevertheless some of the elusiveness, the “feel,” of the dream is lost.

There is a sense of the uncanny that pervades the resurrection stories. Maybe some of you have tried to write or talk about your experiences of God; I have. If you have, maybe you have found, as I have, how hard it is to do. The content of the experience becomes more definite, takes on a form, when we try to put words to it; we use phrases like “it was as if…”. In the narrative we read this morning, even though it is the third time Jesus has appeared to the disciples, they do not recognize him by his appearance, and apparently they do not recognize his voice. When Jesus breaks bread and gives it to them, they do not dare ask him who he is. Why would the disciples want to ask if they already knew? And why did they not dare? Whatever the narrative has been unable to explain, it does express their sense of being in the presence of the holy.

Their experience seems to have been frightening and disorienting even as it was healing and empowering. Jesus was dead, and yet he is alive and there with them; how can that be? But the disciples’ despair is gone; the relationship has been renewed. In our empirically minded age, it is almost impossible not to wonder if death is the end. Yet Karl Rahner, a 20^th century Catholic theologian, protested, “But a few other things also existed previously [besides the biological system]: a person with love, fidelity, pain, responsibility, freedom. By what right really does one maintain that everything is over? Why should it really be ‘over.’ Because we do not notice anything any more? This argument seems a little weak! All that really follows from it is that the deceased no longer exists for me, the survivor.”

To argue in a general way that lacking evidence does not disprove something is a form of argument that is sure to lead to a lot of false conclusions. But that is not quite what Rahner is saying. His point is that whether not seeing should lead to the conclusion that something is not the case depends on what it is we do not see. “Becoming ceases when being begins, and we do not notice anything of it because we ourselves are still in the process of becoming,” Rahner writes (Foundations of Christian Faith, 270, 272). I suspect that how we feel about death depends a lot on when in our lives, and how, we have experienced loss, but what Rahner says makes some sense to me. Just because we do not notice anything anymore, should we expect to?

Like the disciples, we are not usually, unambiguously, able to see the larger life of which we say we are a part. On the other hand, like the disciples, we do seem to see intimations, not proofs, but hints, of the ways in which creation is grounded in eternity. On the beach Jesus broke bread and gave it to them; sometimes for us the eucharist is a time when we sense eternity too.

The Eucharistic imagery of Thomas Merton’s poem “Night-Flowering Cactus” expresses how intimations of the eternal can break into our experience. It was John Harrison, friend to so many of us, who taught me to appreciate this poem when, last fall, John was sitting in on the Merton class I was teaching. John had actually seen a night-flowering cactus; it is in bloom for only one night. Merton’s lines are not easy to grasp on one hearing, and so I will read only some parts of the poem to you.

“When I”--the speaker is the cactus--“When I come I lift my sudden Eucharist/Out of the earth’s unfathomable joy.” Merton’s image works in part because the petals of the flower are open to the heavens, like the elevated bread or wine. But more than that, the flowering of the cactus is Eucharistic because, like bread and wine, it has a depth of meaning; it reveals more than itself. “I neither show my truth nor conceal it/My innocence is described dimly/Only by divine gift/As a white cavern without explanation,” Merton writes. The innocence that can be at most dimly described is transcendent purity. “He who sees my purity/Dares not speak of it” the poem continues. We are told that on the beach the disciples dared not ask Jesus who he was. They knew and they did not know; they did not know and yet they knew.

That is what the resurrection appearances in our lives are like, it seems to me; they occur whenever the surface of our lives is disturbed by unexpected goodness or beauty or peace, some purity that we dare not try to explain and yet cannot ignore. They occur when we are brought to recognize that ultimately our lives are a gift. “For none of us has life in himself and none of us becomes his own master when he dies,” we read in the burial office. If we think that our lives are somehow ours, that we will be able to organize everything in the way we want and that that is how we will find happiness, we are living in illusion. Death is the ultimate case of defeat of that illusion; it is surrender to whatever IS. And the resurrection moments in our lives are those when we recognize that we are and will continue to be defeated and yet when, instead of despairing, we are able to know unfathomable joy.

Here is how “Night-Flowering Cactus” ends: “Then though my mirth has/quickly ended/You live forever in its echo/You will never be the same again.” John Harrison told me that was true of seeing the night-flowering cactus; he never forgot it. That is how the resurrection appearances were for the disciples too. On the beach they met the risen Christ, and the disciples never were the same again.

“Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work.” Amen.

The Rev. Lynne Spellman