Easter Day, Year B

Acts 10:34-43
Colossians 3:1-4
Mark 16:1-8

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Dr. Paul Brand practiced surgery in Vellore, a city in the tropics of southern India. He did pioneering work with leprosy victims to correct deformities to their hands and feet. Brand and his colleagues were among the few that would have anything to do with lepers, much less touch them or treat them. Dr. Brand was a missionary doctor, and on one occasion a gathering of lepers insisted that he preach to them. Searching for something to say, his eyes fell upon their hands, "dozens of them, most pulled inward in the familiar 'leprosy claw-hand,' some with no fingers, some with a few stumps. Many patients sat on their hands or otherwise hid them from view." ⁽¹⁾

Dr. Brand began to talk about the hands of Christ and speculated what they would have been like,

beginning in infancy when his hands were small, helpless, futilely grasping. Then came the hands of the boy Jesus, clumsily holding a brush or stylus, trying to form letters of the alphabet. Then the hands of Christ the carpenter - rough, gnarled, with broken fingernails and bruises from working with saw and hammer. Then there were the hands of Christ the physician, the healer. . . Christ touched the blind, the diseased, [the beaten, the unclean, the dead, and he healed them.] ⁽²⁾

Brand then began to describe what happens to the hand when a nail is driven through its tendons, and nerves, and muscles, and blood vessels. He said,

It's impossible to drive a spike through its center without crippling it. The thought of those healing hands being crippled reminds me of what Christ was prepared to endure. In that act he identified himself with all the deformed and crippled human beings in the world. Not only was he able to endure poverty with the poor, weariness with the tired, but - clawed hands with the cripple. ⁽³⁾

Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead with those same crippled, and yet perfected, hands. The risen Christ retains his stigmata, his marks of suffering; his body bears an eternal reminder of human suffering, an eternal imprint of God's unity with humanity. In Jesus, God has a whole new way of relating to human beings. God relates to us, loves us, in ways we don't expect, beyond convention.

That was good news to the lepers, those social outcasts, those untouchables. God gave himself to be one with them; he has reached out, touched, and become one with them and with all of humanity. When Dr. Brand had finished his impromptu sermon, the lepers lifted their hands, "palm to palm in the Indian gesture of respect, namaste. The hands were the same stumps, the same missing fingers and crooked arches. Yet no one tried to hid them [after Dr. Brand's sermon]. They were held high . . . with new pride and dignity." ⁽⁴⁾ That's resurrection and new life. The Resurrection does not only give us the hope of everlasting life; it also makes life in this world better, richer, more humane.

S. Thomas, the doubter, would not be convinced of the Resurrection until he touched and handled Christ's risen flesh, until he stuck his hands into Christ's wounds; he thrust his hands into Christ's side and into Christ's crippled, perfected hands to satisfy his doubt. In ways, Thomas is the perfect patron saint of our age. The burden of proof today has shifted from the skeptic, from the doubter, to the believer. The underlying current today insists that reasonable people do not seriously believe in resurrection or heaven or even the soul. So if you have doubts about the resurrection, if you show up only occasionally at church and wonder why you're there, you are in good company, and Christ welcomes you here, to his Church, this morning and every day.

The Church is no place for 'incestuous amplification.' Jane's Defense Weekly defines 'incestuous amplification' as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation." ⁽⁵⁾ The world has miscalculated its estimation of Jesus, and rather considers Christians to be self-serving, self-deceiving, self-aggrandizing. While the world has got it wrong about Jesus, unfortunately, the world is not wholly wrong about Christians. The Church does miscalculate and err. We need to welcome doubters and questioners. When used constructively, doubt is a way that faith matures, because in our questioning, if we look sincerely and charitably for an answer, if we commit ourselves a little bit, we will find that God answers. If you are seeking for God, be like Thomas: stick your hands into the Church, and feel around. We don't like everything we find, but we do get answers, and we do come to believe the risen Christ. We grow in confidence that cruelty, and loss, and pain, and suffering, and evil are not the last word.

If you want to believe in the risen Christ, and have some depth to your belief, then you can't be a conventional thinker. Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A's. The small-market, poorly financed team incredibly is among the best in baseball. They won their division last year and spent only $42 million on player salaries to do it. I'm not being sarcastic; in baseball these days $42 million is paltry, almost chump change. On average the other teams in the A's' division spent twice as much. To win as many games as the $133 million Yankees, Billy Beane put together a bunch of guys mostly overlooked by other teams: "guys who were too fat, too skinny, too short, too slow, or too old." ⁽⁶⁾ Michael Lewis, a baseball writer, argues that Beane's winning formula is to defy conventional wisdom. According to Lewis, in baseball, there has generally been an "inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before." ⁽⁷⁾ Well, that prejudice, that vice, isn't just in baseball people; it's in each of us, and we can't let it infect the way we see things. It narrows our vision; it narrows our heart. Willa Cather put it this way: "The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always." ⁽⁸⁾

If we want to see miracle of the Resurrection better, then we can't see as the world sees; we have to break with convention. S. Mark began his gospel in Galilee, and in the last scene of his gospel, which we heard this morning, Jesus has left instructions for the disciples to return to Galilee where they will see him. Jesus is calling his disciples back to the beginning of his way that leads to the cross. The Resurrection does not only assure us that God has defeated death, that we may have eternal life, but also that Jesus' way of the cross, his way of sacrifice and love, is truly God's way. It's a whole lot easier to see the resurrection, and to believe in it, if we have a life of service and sacrifice, if we take up the cross. The more we participate in Good Friday, the more we give ourselves away - to our families and friends, to strangers, to those in need - the more life and power we'll find in ourselves, the more joy in our lives. We are wonderfully made in God's image, and when we give of ourselves, his image grows in us, his life grows in us. The Resurrection changed Jesus; it brought him from death to life; and it can change us. Indeed, it has already started. For when we sacrifice and when we act with dignity or nobility or courage or mercy or love, then Christ is acting in us, healing our deformities, and we feel the beginnings of the resurrected life, a joy, a happiness like nothing else. That's Easter. My friends, have a happy Easter.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. Philip Yancey, from 'Jesus' Reminders' in Bread and Wine, The Plough Publishing House (2003), p. 320.

2. Ibid., p. 321.

3. Ibid., p. 322.

4. Ibid., p. 323.

5. Paul Krugman, 'Delusions of Power,' The New York Times, 28 March 2003.

6. Michael Lewis, 'The Trading Desk,' (Cover Story - 'Beaneball') The New York Times Magazine, p. 43.

7. Ibid.

8. Willa Cather (1873--1947), Death Comes for the Archbishop, bk. 1, ch. 4 (1927).