My Lord and my God.

Next Sunday – Easter 2

Acts 2: 14a, 22-32. Luke links Pentecost to the Easter events by placing an account of the death and resurrection of Jesus into Peter’s mouth on the day we celebrate the coming of the Spirit. Paul tells us that Jesus was raised “according to the scriptures” without telling us where those scriptures are exactly though here we have one such prophetic passage mentioned – psalm 16: 8-11.

1 Peter 1: 3-9. The Jesus of the past is affirmed, and we expect him in the future, but this is a faith that includes the love of Jesus in the present. This letter is addressing people far removed from Jesus’ actual life in Palestine, in terms of time and location, much as we are ourselves.

John 20: 19-31.  Many scholars believe this to be the original ending of John’s gospel and it certainly reads like it. We have John’s equivalent story of “Pentecost” happening on Easter Sunday and the story of “doubting” Thomas. This episode is to underline the nature of resurrection faith. Thomas in fact proclaims “My Lord and my God” without needing to touch Jesus’ scars. Then follows the statement that all who believe without seeing the actual wounds of Jesus are blessed.

Saint Thomas is forever saddled with the epithet “Doubting” which I’m sure must annoy him!

After all, from his lips comes the most straightforward and direct statement of belief in Jesus in the Bible when he says “My Lord and my God” and he does so without actually putting his hands in Jesus’ wounds, even though that’s what he said he wanted to do.

Thomas also became a great evangelist to the Indian subcontinent and founded the church named after him there – the Mar Thoma church of southern India.

He exists as a great example of someone who can change their mind when confronted with truth and his subsequent missionary exploits mean that he would have been led by the Spirit of Jesus, a spirit that Jesus breathed on the disciples earlier in the scene.

In my Easter sermon, I connected Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Pentecost  as being all of a piece, each of which can only being understood in connection with the other two events.

Liturgically, in the church, we wait fifty days to celebrate the giving of the Spirit on the feast of Pentecost but we only do that because it suits us liturgically to  follow the scheme of events in St. Luke’s book of Acts and not John’s version.

But in John’s gospel the giving of the Spirit happens on Easter Sunday which connects those three great events into one weekend.

This is what I meant by not worrying about the historicity of the different gospel accounts and concentrating on the MEANING of the giving of the Spirit.

The cornerstone of the preaching of Jesus was “The kingdom of God”. The first time we hear Jesus, in Mark’s gospel, the earliest gospel, his message was “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand”.

Being energised and led by the Spirit of God is what it means to be a conscious part of the Kingdom of God.

Drawing on John’s gospel some more, his conversation with Nicodemus expands this very well. And remember Nicodemus was a respected religious teacher, but Jesus tells him that he cannot see or perceive the Kingdom of God unless he is born from above or undergoes a spiritual re-birth by being born again by the Spirit of God.

So, it turns out that the phrase “born again” isn’t a phrase invented in the 20^th century by American charismatic Christians, it goes all the way back to Jesus.

Spiritual re-generation can be a dramatic life-changing event like it was for St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or a gradual process of awakening. And even for Paul the dramatic event would only have introduced a process of spiritual regeneration, which according to Paul took place over about 14 years and would then have been honed in the cut and thrust of theological debate.

Spiritual awakening (judging by my own experience), comes in fits and starts, in dispersed by fallow periods, and even dark nights of the soul.

It is not a linear progression and will sometimes even sometimes contain periods of regression.

I admit that this period of enforced lockdown has nudged me towards a much more disciplined prayer life than I have ever had before, and I have researched and read more than I have done previously. So, you could say that for some of us, an unexpected bonus of being forcibly contained, was to spiritually reach out beyond our physical homes to seek God’s Spirit in a more disciplined and conscientious way.

And I do hope and pray that this occurs to each of you as well. For the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday are history. For them to affect the way we think and act in the present we need to be enlightened by the Spiritual regeneration that completes the process.

The amazing thing about Easter and Pentecost is that each and every one of us believers is an integral part of it.  It all happened because of us and for us. Pray to God to enlighten your mind soul and spirit, to align your thoughts more with his thoughts, and empower you to love more freely.