John 21:1-19

Introduction
John 21 is a significant passage for me. Let me take you back to 1985. It’s Low
Sunday, the Sunday after Easter. I am a church steward in my home church. A Local
Preacher from another
church in the circuit was preaching on this passage. All I know is that on
that morning something clicked with me. It began a journey of discovery that
led me to theological college and eventually into ordained ministry. Chris West
has a lot to answer for!

It’s also a passage that has been important for me since I
began reading the books of the late David Seamands,
who taught much about how the Gospel relates to our emotional brokenness. His
interpretation of this story and others had a beneficial effect on my life and
on others.

So I bring a lot of gratitude to John 21, along with a large
number of existing assumptions. In my preparation this week, I have tried to
start with a blank sheet of paper. That hasn’t been entirely possible, but I
hope I can be like the wise and faithful homeowner of whom Jesus spoke, who
brings out from the storehouse things both old and new (Matthew
13:52). I want to approach this account of Jesus at the water’s edge by
showing that he’s not at the edge of our lives, but at the centre. The risen
Christ is at the centre of every part of our lives.

1. Fish
The seven disciples are back on their home territory, the Sea of Galilee – or
as ‘home’ as the Roman Empire will allow them to think of it, since Rome has
renamed Galilee as the Sea of Tiberius in honour of the emperor Tiberius. It’s
as home as you can get but it also has unwelcome influences.

‘I’m going fishing,’ says Simon Peter, ‘Anyone care to join
me?’ And his six friends go off with him in the boat.

Despite what some Christians might think there is nothing
implied in the story that is critical of Simon Peter returning to his old
profession of fishing. This isn’t despair or unbelief. He has met the risen
Christ and hope has been restored in his life. Going back in the fishing boat
isn’t an act of bad faith. He’s back at his old job and it’s OK.

Except it’s not OK. It’s disastrous. They go out to fish at
night – it was the best time – and it’s a complete failure. The most fruitful
time and they catch no fish. Then a mysterious stranger appears on the shore.
In the muzzy tones of daybreak, they can’t recognise him – quite a theme of the
Resurrection stories. Almost certainly they also don’t recognise Jesus because
they’re not expecting him.

And maybe this strange figure can make out a school of fish
in the great lake as the first sunrays creep over the horizon. Or perhaps he’s
not a fisherman at all. What does he know? Whatever, let’s do as he says and
let down the nets on the other side of the boat.

And you know what happens. They go from nought to a hundred
and fifty-three in a matter of seconds. (It sounds more like a Ferrari than a
fishing boat.) As they sail towards the beach ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’
(whom I take to be John) recognises the man who has called out to them. ‘It is
the Lord!’ And good old impetuous Peter dives into the water and rushes to him,
or as quickly as he can through the water, hampered by newly wet garments.

What has happened? Jesus has shown up at the workplace, and
he has blessed and transformed it.

How many of us find our place of work is rather like the
experience of the fishermen overnight – a lot of slog and no sense of
accomplishment? I spent seven years in the Civil Service and when I left for
theological college, even the atheists were jealous. I have one or two funny
stories from those times – not least from when I dealt with National Insurance
contributions and a self-employed woman returned her papers, saying she was
jacking in her career due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’. She was a clairvoyant.
However, largely it was a dreary, discouraging job, even if I was helping
people who needed Social Security. I don’t think I had any sense that Jesus in
his risen presence could be with me at work in the way he was with me in church
activities.

But in John 21 Jesus doesn’t limit himself to the religious
stuff. Some people have tried to find all sorts of significance in the number
of fish, the one hundred and fifty three. But to me there is no convincing
symbolism there, however laden with symbolism John’s Gospel is. I think the
simple fact is, the risen Christ transformed the working environment and made
it fruitful.

I am not suggesting that being open to the risen Christ at
work automatically makes everything fine. This is a broken, fallen world. There
will still be suffering, toil and meaninglessness at work. It is the curse of
Adam, who in the biblical story of the Fall was told that in the light of sin
the ground he tilled would be cursed and he would toil all the days of his life
(Genesis 3:17). But the
Cross of Christ redeems the effects of sin’s curse, and his Resurrection gives
new power to live. So if we by faith believe that he is present with us and
ahead of us at work, the workplace may become fruitful for us. But if it
doesn’t and it remains an oppressive place to be, then he is still present,
sharing the pain with us.

Yet in saying all this I am aware that I am addressing a
congregation containing many for whom paid employment is in the past. This
probably sounds irrelevant to you. So I invite you to see what is underlying
this. It is the conviction that we meet the risen Christ in the ordinary
routines of life as much as we meet him in the singing of hymns, the saying of
prayers, the sharing of the sacrament and the ministry of the word. Here in
this story when the disciples get to shore, Jesus somehow already has some fish
and he’s cooking it. (Where did he get his
fish?)

On Good Friday we as a family had fish and chips for our
dinner, not out of the Catholic tradition of ‘fish on Friday’ but because our local chippie had a special offer.
And I suggest to you that next time you eat fish, remember the risen Jesus on
the beach with seven of his disciples. It’s like the Salvation Army tradition
of expecting to meet with Christ at every meal, not simply at Holy Communion.

The miraculous catch of fish and the breakfast that followed
call us, in the words of Michael Frost, to the
holy task of ‘Seeing
God In The Ordinary’. He is present in everyday life and he uses the raw
material of mundane living to make his presence known and speak to us. God has
always been doing this. He spoke to Amos through a plumb line (Amos 7:7-9) and a basket of
fruit (Amos 8:1-3). Jesus
drew lessons from a fig tree (Mark
11:12-14). Let us, as Michael Frost says in his book, learn again to be
attentive to this truth, to ‘shudder properly’ at God’s speech through
creation, to hear him in stories, see him in others and embrace the spiritual
discipline of astonishment. All this is raw material for our discipleship
because we believe that Christ is alive and with us.

2. Forgiveness
It’s 1985. It’s that service I mentioned at the beginning, where this passage
spoke powerfully to me and eventually led to theological college and the ordained
ministry. When Chris the Local Preacher expounded this passage, he likened
Jesus to those craftsmen who are master restorers of damaged paintings. The damaged
painting in the story is, of course, Simon Peter. And Jesus restores him.

Peter’s damage is the three times he denied Jesus (John 18:15-18, 25-27). Here, as
we well know, Jesus gives Peter three opportunities to affirm his love for him,
in place of the denials.

Moreover, this work of restoration by the risen Jesus is
good news for us. How many times have we let Christ down or even denied him?
Have we wondered whether he still loves us, or whether he is still willing to
use us in the work of his kingdom? As a Christian and as a minister I have seen
a wide variety of versions of this. Some have over-sensitive consciences – what
psychiatrists would label ‘scruples’. I think of one person who felt God would
not accept her, because she had misread the words of the Holy Communion service.
That may be an extreme example, but it is a true one and more common than you
might think, given a combination of a severe interpretation of the Gospel and a
person with low self-esteem.

For others, though, it is something more serious. It may be
a failure to speak up on Christ’s behalf at a critical point, as Peter did. It may
be a moral failure, such as unfaithfulness to a spouse. It may be a criminal
act that may or may not have been detected. Some think they have committed the ‘unforgivable
sin’ of ‘blasphemy against the Holy Spirit’ (although ‘blasphemy against the
Spirit’ is specifically calling the Holy Spirit’s work the work of the Devil – Matthew 12:22-32 – and
therefore those who are worried they have committed this sin are those least
likely to have done so).

But if Christ can restore a coward like Peter, and in the
Old Testament can use another coward like Abraham, a murderer like Moses and an
adulterer like David, then it seems that God indeed is the master restorer of
human beings. What he has done once, he can do again. If he can make a
slave-trader like John Newton into a Christian and later a campaigner for the
abolition of the industry in which he made his money, he can restore broken
people like you and me.

Failure may feel like a death, and it is. However, our faith
does not stop with death: it goes through to resurrection. Therefore, Christ
raises up failures. He forgives them and gives them a new start. Failure is
never the final word with Christ. He restores. He has restoring grace for those
of us who know we have let him down – and some of us have let him down badly.

To be sure, his restoring work is not the parody of
forgiveness that we sometimes hear, where someone says, ‘Yes, I forgive you, it
was nothing.’ If forgiveness is needed, then it wasn’t nothing, it was
something, and it hurt. And neither is it as trivial or flippant as to say, ‘God
forgives – it’s his business.’ Failure hurts both parties and to walk through
it to healing may well be painful. The three times Jesus asks Peter, ‘Do you
love me?’ make him face up to his failure. But Peter faces those denials in the
loving presence of Jesus. The story says ‘Peter felt hurt because [Jesus] said
to him the third time’ (verse 17). Yet he goes through with it, because he is
with Christ, and he finds healing.

I have two friends with deep hurts in their lives that have
damaged relationships, especially with their spouses. Both have received
Christian counselling. What is common to both is that whenever the counsellor
has put a finger on the root issue they have run away and stopped receiving the
counselling. They have been unwilling to walk through the pain. As a result,
they have never dealt with their problems. They remain unhealed, broken people,
and their closest relationships remain very disordered. If only they truly knew
that the risen Lord would be walking with them as they faced their pain.

But Peter does come out the other side. Jesus restores him. And
with restoration comes a renewed calling. ‘Feed my lambs’ (verse 15); ‘Tend my
sheep’ (verse 16); ‘Feed my sheep’ (verse 17). He is more than forgiven; he is
re-commissioned. For those here who know they have failed Christ today, the
good news is that our risen Saviour will walk with us as we face the failure
and come through to forgiveness. Then there is this bonus: Jesus still has a
calling for us. We may think he is crazy, but he isn’t. He didn’t simply
forgive us so that we could wait placidly on the platform for the glory train; he
forgave us so that we may have a new lease of life in the service of his
kingdom.

Conclusion
So let us be open to the risen Christ taking us by surprise. We may find
his presence in the ordinary life of work and the world, and respond to him
there. Alternatively, it may be more like Peter and Jesus’ private conversation
– and for us, that would be something like prayer. Either way – or both –
Christ is risen to let us know that God has not finished with us. He has
unfinished business with each of us. As Paul puts it:

I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work
among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.
(Philippians 1:6)

Alternatively, as the t-shirt slogan has it, ‘Please be
patient with me: God hasn’t finished with me yet.’

Technorati Tags: DavidSeamands, Galilee, Tiberius, SimonPeter, CivilService, NationalInsurance, clairvoyant, work, resurrection, Jesus, Christ, fishandchips, MichaelFrost, SeeingGodInTheOrdinary, Amos, Matthew, Mark, John, forgiveness, restoration, scruples, HolyCommunion, blasphemy, HolySpirit, JohnNewton, slavery, denial, counselling, Philippians

John 21:1-19

Introduction
John 21 is a significant passage for me. Let me take you back to 1985. It’s Low
Sunday, the Sunday after Easter. I am a church steward in my home church. A Local
Preacher from another
church in the circuit was preaching on this passage. All I know is that on
that morning something clicked with me. It began a journey of discovery that
led me to theological college and eventually into ordained ministry. Chris West
has a lot to answer for!

It’s also a passage that has been important for me since I
began reading the books of the late David Seamands,
who taught much about how the Gospel relates to our emotional brokenness. His
interpretation of this story and others had a beneficial effect on my life and
on others.

So I bring a lot of gratitude to John 21, along with a large
number of existing assumptions. In my preparation this week, I have tried to
start with a blank sheet of paper. That hasn’t been entirely possible, but I
hope I can be like the wise and faithful homeowner of whom Jesus spoke, who
brings out from the storehouse things both old and new (Matthew
13:52). I want to approach this account of Jesus at the water’s edge by
showing that he’s not at the edge of our lives, but at the centre. The risen
Christ is at the centre of every part of our lives.

1. Fish
The seven disciples are back on their home territory, the Sea of Galilee – or
as ‘home’ as the Roman Empire will allow them to think of it, since Rome has
renamed Galilee as the Sea of Tiberius in honour of the emperor Tiberius. It’s
as home as you can get but it also has unwelcome influences.

‘I’m going fishing,’ says Simon Peter, ‘Anyone care to join
me?’ And his six friends go off with him in the boat.

Despite what some Christians might think there is nothing
implied in the story that is critical of Simon Peter returning to his old
profession of fishing. This isn’t despair or unbelief. He has met the risen
Christ and hope has been restored in his life. Going back in the fishing boat
isn’t an act of bad faith. He’s back at his old job and it’s OK.

Except it’s not OK. It’s disastrous. They go out to fish at
night – it was the best time – and it’s a complete failure. The most fruitful
time and they catch no fish. Then a mysterious stranger appears on the shore.
In the muzzy tones of daybreak, they can’t recognise him – quite a theme of the
Resurrection stories. Almost certainly they also don’t recognise Jesus because
they’re not expecting him.

And maybe this strange figure can make out a school of fish
in the great lake as the first sunrays creep over the horizon. Or perhaps he’s
not a fisherman at all. What does he know? Whatever, let’s do as he says and
let down the nets on the other side of the boat.

And you know what happens. They go from nought to a hundred
and fifty-three in a matter of seconds. (It sounds more like a Ferrari than a
fishing boat.) As they sail towards the beach ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’
(whom I take to be John) recognises the man who has called out to them. ‘It is
the Lord!’ And good old impetuous Peter dives into the water and rushes to him,
or as quickly as he can through the water, hampered by newly wet garments.

What has happened? Jesus has shown up at the workplace, and
he has blessed and transformed it.

How many of us find our place of work is rather like the
experience of the fishermen overnight – a lot of slog and no sense of
accomplishment? I spent seven years in the Civil Service and when I left for
theological college, even the atheists were jealous. I have one or two funny
stories from those times – not least from when I dealt with National Insurance
contributions and a self-employed woman returned her papers, saying she was
jacking in her career due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’. She was a clairvoyant.
However, largely it was a dreary, discouraging job, even if I was helping
people who needed Social Security. I don’t think I had any sense that Jesus in
his risen presence could be with me at work in the way he was with me in church
activities.

But in John 21 Jesus doesn’t limit himself to the religious
stuff. Some people have tried to find all sorts of significance in the number
of fish, the one hundred and fifty three. But to me there is no convincing
symbolism there, however laden with symbolism John’s Gospel is. I think the
simple fact is, the risen Christ transformed the working environment and made
it fruitful.

I am not suggesting that being open to the risen Christ at
work automatically makes everything fine. This is a broken, fallen world. There
will still be suffering, toil and meaninglessness at work. It is the curse of
Adam, who in the biblical story of the Fall was told that in the light of sin
the ground he tilled would be cursed and he would toil all the days of his life
(Genesis 3:17). But the
Cross of Christ redeems the effects of sin’s curse, and his Resurrection gives
new power to live. So if we by faith believe that he is present with us and
ahead of us at work, the workplace may become fruitful for us. But if it
doesn’t and it remains an oppressive place to be, then he is still present,
sharing the pain with us.

Yet in saying all this I am aware that I am addressing a
congregation containing many for whom paid employment is in the past. This
probably sounds irrelevant to you. So I invite you to see what is underlying
this. It is the conviction that we meet the risen Christ in the ordinary
routines of life as much as we meet him in the singing of hymns, the saying of
prayers, the sharing of the sacrament and the ministry of the word. Here in
this story when the disciples get to shore, Jesus somehow already has some fish
and he’s cooking it. (Where did he get his
fish?)

On Good Friday we as a family had fish and chips for our
dinner, not out of the Catholic tradition of ‘fish on Friday’ but because our local chippie had a special offer.
And I suggest to you that next time you eat fish, remember the risen Jesus on
the beach with seven of his disciples. It’s like the Salvation Army tradition
of expecting to meet with Christ at every meal, not simply at Holy Communion.

The miraculous catch of fish and the breakfast that followed
call us, in the words of Michael Frost, to the
holy task of ‘Seeing
God In The Ordinary’. He is present in everyday life and he uses the raw
material of mundane living to make his presence known and speak to us. God has
always been doing this. He spoke to Amos through a plumb line (Amos 7:7-9) and a basket of
fruit (Amos 8:1-3). Jesus
drew lessons from a fig tree (Mark
11:12-14). Let us, as Michael Frost says in his book, learn again to be
attentive to this truth, to ‘shudder properly’ at God’s speech through
creation, to hear him in stories, see him in others and embrace the spiritual
discipline of astonishment. All this is raw material for our discipleship
because we believe that Christ is alive and with us.

2. Forgiveness
It’s 1985. It’s that service I mentioned at the beginning, where this passage
spoke powerfully to me and eventually led to theological college and the ordained
ministry. When Chris the Local Preacher expounded this passage, he likened
Jesus to those craftsmen who are master restorers of damaged paintings. The damaged
painting in the story is, of course, Simon Peter. And Jesus restores him.

Peter’s damage is the three times he denied Jesus (John 18:15-18, 25-27). Here, as
we well know, Jesus gives Peter three opportunities to affirm his love for him,
in place of the denials.

Moreover, this work of restoration by the risen Jesus is
good news for us. How many times have we let Christ down or even denied him?
Have we wondered whether he still loves us, or whether he is still willing to
use us in the work of his kingdom? As a Christian and as a minister I have seen
a wide variety of versions of this. Some have over-sensitive consciences – what
psychiatrists would label ‘scruples’. I think of one person who felt God would
not accept her, because she had misread the words of the Holy Communion service.
That may be an extreme example, but it is a true one and more common than you
might think, given a combination of a severe interpretation of the Gospel and a
person with low self-esteem.

For others, though, it is something more serious. It may be
a failure to speak up on Christ’s behalf at a critical point, as Peter did. It may
be a moral failure, such as unfaithfulness to a spouse. It may be a criminal
act that may or may not have been detected. Some think they have committed the ‘unforgivable
sin’ of ‘blasphemy against the Holy Spirit’ (although ‘blasphemy against the
Spirit’ is specifically calling the Holy Spirit’s work the work of the Devil – Matthew 12:22-32 – and
therefore those who are worried they have committed this sin are those least
likely to have done so).

But if Christ can restore a coward like Peter, and in the
Old Testament can use another coward like Abraham, a murderer like Moses and an
adulterer like David, then it seems that God indeed is the master restorer of
human beings. What he has done once, he can do again. If he can make a
slave-trader like John Newton into a Christian and later a campaigner for the
abolition of the industry in which he made his money, he can restore broken
people like you and me.

Failure may feel like a death, and it is. However, our faith
does not stop with death: it goes through to resurrection. Therefore, Christ
raises up failures. He forgives them and gives them a new start. Failure is
never the final word with Christ. He restores. He has restoring grace for those
of us who know we have let him down – and some of us have let him down badly.

To be sure, his restoring work is not the parody of
forgiveness that we sometimes hear, where someone says, ‘Yes, I forgive you, it
was nothing.’ If forgiveness is needed, then it wasn’t nothing, it was
something, and it hurt. And neither is it as trivial or flippant as to say, ‘God
forgives – it’s his business.’ Failure hurts both parties and to walk through
it to healing may well be painful. The three times Jesus asks Peter, ‘Do you
love me?’ make him face up to his failure. But Peter faces those denials in the
loving presence of Jesus. The story says ‘Peter felt hurt because [Jesus] said
to him the third time’ (verse 17). Yet he goes through with it, because he is
with Christ, and he finds healing.

I have two friends with deep hurts in their lives that have
damaged relationships, especially with their spouses. Both have received
Christian counselling. What is common to both is that whenever the counsellor
has put a finger on the root issue they have run away and stopped receiving the
counselling. They have been unwilling to walk through the pain. As a result,
they have never dealt with their problems. They remain unhealed, broken people,
and their closest relationships remain very disordered. If only they truly knew
that the risen Lord would be walking with them as they faced their pain.

But Peter does come out the other side. Jesus restores him. And
with restoration comes a renewed calling. ‘Feed my lambs’ (verse 15); ‘Tend my
sheep’ (verse 16); ‘Feed my sheep’ (verse 17). He is more than forgiven; he is
re-commissioned. For those here who know they have failed Christ today, the
good news is that our risen Saviour will walk with us as we face the failure
and come through to forgiveness. Then there is this bonus: Jesus still has a
calling for us. We may think he is crazy, but he isn’t. He didn’t simply
forgive us so that we could wait placidly on the platform for the glory train; he
forgave us so that we may have a new lease of life in the service of his
kingdom.

Conclusion
So let us be open to the risen Christ taking us by surprise. We may find
his presence in the ordinary life of work and the world, and respond to him
there. Alternatively, it may be more like Peter and Jesus’ private conversation
– and for us, that would be something like prayer. Either way – or both –
Christ is risen to let us know that God has not finished with us. He has
unfinished business with each of us. As Paul puts it:

I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work
among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.
(Philippians 1:6)

Alternatively, as the t-shirt slogan has it, ‘Please be
patient with me: God hasn’t finished with me yet.’

Technorati Tags: DavidSeamands, Galilee, Tiberius, SimonPeter, CivilService, NationalInsurance, clairvoyant, work, resurrection, Jesus, Christ, fishandchips, MichaelFrost, SeeingGodInTheOrdinary, Amos, Matthew, Mark, John, forgiveness, restoration, scruples, HolyCommunion, blasphemy, HolySpirit, JohnNewton, slavery, denial, counselling, Philippians

Following yesterday’s post on this subject and Bill Kinnon‘s kind comment on it, I went back to his site tonight and found a link to this post by Heidi Daniels. I’ve left a comment there: her experience is of pastors who wanted to mediate her relationship with God. So much for the Reformation heritage of the priesthood of all believers, then. Clearly much of the Protestant, evangelical and charismatic churches (and I still count myself within those traditions) only pay lip service to that great doctrine.

It’s also been interesting to be in a meeting tonight where we effectively did some ‘digital faith’. We were discussing holding a Saturday festival for the ecumenical partnership in which I serve, but without making it some boring AGM. Partly we arrived at the idea of a festival rather than an AGM by surfing between different ideas that had been expressed earlier in the meeting. Then when we talked about some of the format for the festival, we wanted a section where people could express their hopes, dreams and visions for the partnership. We haven’t got it all nailed down yet, but basically we want an interactive, open-ended conversation rather than just the church leaders telling the members of the congregation what to do. I think we agreed there would need to be some input to begin the process – someone has to start the interaction, and maybe there is a leadership duty to do that – but I think we were unconsciously using the digital model I discussed yesterday.

Technorati Tags: BillKinnon, HeidiDaniels, digitalfaith, church, ministry, priesthoodofallbelievers

Tomorrow’s Gospel passage has meant a lot to me for a long time. So much so that I found myself with a lot of small, scattered thoughts about how the Resurrection has key themes for mission. So much seemed relevant to the more ‘missional’ approach. So not three developed points but seven bullet points this week!

John 20:19-31

Introduction
in the house where I grew up there was a very small toilet next to a tiny
bathroom. The time came when Dad decided to knock them into one. I was about
thirteen and in bed with the ‘flu. My seven-year-old sister took great delight
in wielding a hammer alongside Dad as they brought down the wall and made one
room of more reasonable size.

It’s Resurrection evening, the disciples are behind locked
doors in fear, and the risen Jesus appears. He is recognisable but his body has
acquired new powers. He doesn’t need to break down the walls to get in, but this
story is about breaking down walls in other ways. In particular, it’s about
breaking down walls to release his followers in mission. What walls does he
break down? What does he bring in their place so that frightened and
unbelieving disciples might share in his Father’s mission?

1. Peace
The disciples are imprisoned behind a wall of fear. Their trouble-making
teacher has been executed and now the authorities are surely going to round
them up. Despite the women going to the tomb that morning, followed by Peter
and John, fear still holds them prisoner. To them, Jesus appears and says, ‘Peace
be with you’ (verse 19).

The risen Christ brings peace to fearful followers, because
if he is alive then what can ultimately defeat them? Opponents may come with
dire threats and even take blood, but if the disciples of Jesus believe in the
Resurrection then whatever happens to them, death is defeated and fellowship
with Christ is permanent and eternal.

Is it not common for fear to choke our participation in mission?
We fear what friends will say if we talk about our faith. We fear trying
something in case it fails. But the risen Christ says, ‘Peace be with you’ to
us, too. Granted, it can take a long time for his truth to calm our racing
pulse and lower our blood pressure, but he says it nevertheless. It is possible we shall be ridiculed for
speaking about God and Jesus and it may be that we try some community action
that doesn’t come off, but human mockery and failure are met by the peace of
Christ. And in any case, we may not fail! Or we might be part of a sowing
process. The wall of fear is there to stop us taking missionary risks, but the
risen Christ says, ‘Peace be with you – so go on, take some chances in faith!’

2. Joy
The second wall after fear is despair: the disciples’ dreams of the last three
years have been violently dashed. But Jesus shows them his hands and his side –
yes, it is him! ‘Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord’ (verse
20).

I can never hear that verse without thinking of a favourite
story. While I was a student at Trinity
College, Bristol we had a visit one week from the Bishop of the Arctic. He would come to
the college every few years, apparently to recruit missionaries. The first
Christian missionaries to the Arctic had come from our college.

He told a story in his sermon about those first
missionaries. They were translating the New Testament into the Inuit tongue
when they came to this verse. But the language had no word for ‘joy’. One day a
missionary went out with one of the Inuit hunters and his dogs. Upon their return,
the dogs were given some meat to eat and the missionary thought, ‘Now there’s a
picture of joy. I’ll ask what the word is to describe the dogs.’ As a result,
that first Inuit New Testament translated John 20:20 as, ‘Then the disciples
wagged their tails when they saw the Lord’!

And the risen Christ replaces our despair with a wagging of
our tails – with joy! The despair of death can envelope us. Church decline takes
its toll on us. Recent forecasts suggest the extinction of the Methodist Church by 2030. But suppose
that’s not quite how things should be seen in the light of the Resurrection? Maybe
it’s more like a Canada-based thinker on the contemporary scene called Alan Roxburgh has recently
put it:

Those who say the church
is dying in the West are mistaking the phenomenon of transition for death.
They’re not the same! We may say the church we have known and experienced for
the last 150 years or so no longer has legitimacy as the sign, witness,
instrument and foretaste of the kingdom. But that’s very different from saying
the church is dying. We shouldn’t confuse the two. The church in the West isn’t
dying and it won’t because God keeps turning up in all these places we so
easily give up on because we see them as hopelessly out of tune with the times
or just not getting what needs to take place. The stories emerging in these
places are harbingers of God’s emerging life in old churches.

Maybe the risen Christ
wants to meet us so that we can make the transition from the old dying ways of
church to new expressions of his resurrection life that defy society’s
expectations of us. Maybe if we lay down our obsession with institutions, programmes
and all the things that are church as we have known her for most of our lives
and set out instead to meet our risen Lord then surely we shall be bearers of
his life for the world.

3. Purpose
Next,

Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father
has sent me, so I send you.’ (verse 21)

A culture of death, dominated by fear and despair, is one
that makes you wonder whether there is anything worth doing. What purpose is there,
for which we might live or die? But the risen Christ gives his disciples a
purpose: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ Here is purpose: it is to
continue the Father’s mission that Jesus began. They don’t have to invent
anything from scratch; they are simply to do what Jesus did.

And yes, I know that sounds a lot easier to say than to do. But
the template is there, in the life and ministry of Jesus. We don’t have to
worry about techniques, we don’t have to invent new programmes, we merely have
to take Jesus as our lodestar for mission. Look at what he said and did. Then put
that into operation. Bring good news to the poor, grace to sinners, healing to
those in pain. And that means, as I’ve emphasised before, looking hard at what
we presently do to see whether it contributes towards a missionary end or
whether it just makes us feel good. Our call is not to be in the church but to
be the church in the world, for that is the purpose to which the risen Christ
commissions us.

4. Power
This stuff is all very well – peace to overcome the fear that paralyses
mission, joy to deal with crippling despair, purpose instead of aimlessness or
an inward-looking death – but we still may feel unable to rise to the
challenge. For that problem, Jesus has another word:

When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ (verse 22)

You can have all the arguments you like about this verse,
especially about how it relates to Pentecost that came seven weeks later, but
maybe John is just telescoping into the end of his Gospel a summary of
important things he wasn’t going to cover in detail. What we know for sure is
that Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to his disciples for the missionary task. If
our purpose is to continue the mission of the Father for which Jesus was
incarnated, then we do mission in the Jesus way. And Jesus, for all his divine
status as the Son of God, also functioned (in the words of Jack Deere) as ‘a
man in the power of the Spirit’.

And that surely means we need to make the journey from
Easter to Pentecost, as the Easter season itself does. I have a theory that for
many Christians Easter Day is our favourite. It gets us over the misery and
violence of Good Friday, but we never make the journey to Pentecost, because we’re
afraid of all that emotional Holy Spirit stuff. But the Holy Spirit is the
missionary Spirit, and to be a missionary people requires the Spirit just as
Jesus needed did at his baptism. If we are troubled, then one worthwhile
question is this: does Jesus ever give bad gifts?

5. Authority
If there’s one thing the disciples in the locked upper room don’t feel they
have it’s authority. They are weak and vulnerable, waiting for the secret
police to break down the doors and take them away for questioning, torture and
execution. But for mission Jesus bestows authority upon them:

‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if
you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ (verse 23)

Again, we have a difficult verse
here – and I suggest it doesn’t mean a priestly power to forgive sins or
otherwise at formal confession, because that is God’s prerogative (cf. Mark
2:7, Acts 8:22) – but at heart I think this too is one to give us missionary
shape. This is about the Gospel message.

And I believe it’s about the
Gospel message in both word and deed. It’s Gospel word in the power of the
Cross, where people find release through the death of Christ. It’s the Gospel
deed as we practise forgiveness. It’s no accident I just spoke of people
finding ‘release’ at the Cross, because that is what forgiveness is: we release
people, that is, we set them free from all obligations to us.  We don’t ‘hold’ them under obligation to us because
of their sinful acts against us. Forgiveness is missionary: it proclaims and
demonstrates the Gospel.

6. Patience
What a mistake we make in singling out ‘doubting Thomas’ from the other
disciples – as if they had been full of faith before meeting the risen Christ!
At least Thomas is honest when his friends tell him, ‘We have seen the Lord,’
and he replies, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my
finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe’
(verse 25). But there is no record of him being berated.

And Jesus seems to bide his
time, too. He waits for that next time when Thomas is with the disciples, and
at that point meets with him and leads him to his confession of faith: ‘My Lord
and my God!’ (verse 28).

The missionary endeavour is as
much about process as about crisis; it’s about patience as well as about crunch
decisions. People take time to become followers of Jesus Christ. We may fail to
notice that, because the experience of previous generations was of a shorter
apparent gap between first contact with the Gospel and a commitment to Christ. But
those experiences came from times when people had a greater familiarity with
Christianity and the Bible than today. Now we need to be in for the long haul
with people. There will be patience in the building of relationships, and
indeed we won’t simply be making relationships just to make ‘God fodder’ of
people. No longer can we entertain the idea that we’ll muster up the courage to
bring people to one church meeting or evangelistic event and if it doesn’t
click into place spiritually for them there it’s curtains. Patience is a gift
for mission today.

7. Inclusiveness
A little detail I’ve overlooked before – I’ve never seen the significance of
this until now:

‘A week later his disciples were again in the house, and
Thomas was with them.’ (verse 26a)

Thomas was with them. The doubting man was not excluded
because he had questions tinged with blunt honesty. He was still included. Perhaps
it was because the others were still conscious of how they had felt only a week
earlier. They remembered their own doubts. Such remembering enabled them to
continue to include Thomas.

In a way, this links with what I have just said about
patience. For Thomas, the group of disciples was clearly a safe space where he
could air his questions and doubts. It has become increasingly important in
missionary approaches in recent years to create these safe spaces. So whatever
you think of the Alpha Course, one of its undoubted strengths is that people in
the small discussion groups are allowed freedom to say whatever they think of
the week’s topic, and the group leaders are under orders not just to shut them
down with a standard Christian response. The approach of the cell church movement
has been to introduce people to the Christian community via the small group,
where – amongst other things – there is open discussion.

Conclusion
Thomas, allegedly the great doubter, but I think the great questioner, ends up
with a personal audience with the risen Christ, and a much greater blessing
than he might have expected. Yet Jesus promises a larger blessing than that to those
who come afterwards:

‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are
those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ (verse 29)

What blessings might be in the offing if we allow the risen
Christ to shape the way we share in the Father’s mission with him? What if his
peace enables us to break free of fear? If he gives us joy that conquers
despair? If his resurrection fills us with the purpose of sharing in that
mission? If he gives us Holy Spirit power to be his witnesses? If the authority
the risen Christ gives us is not the type that lords it over people but brings
forgiveness in word and deed? If we share his patience with doubters and
include them while they are on the journey to Christ, sharing our journey at
the same time? What if

Technorati Tags: resurrection, Jesus, mission, peace, fear, joy, despair, TrinityCollegeBristol, BishopOfTheArctic, Inuit, AlanRoxburgh, purpose, HolySpirit, authority, forgiveness, patience, Thomas, doubt, inclusiveness

Tomorrow’s Gospel passage has meant a lot to me for a long time. So much so that I found myself with a lot of small, scattered thoughts about how the Resurrection has key themes for mission. So much seemed relevant to the more ‘missional’ approach. So not three developed points but seven bullet points this week!

John 20:19-31

Introduction
in the house where I grew up there was a very small toilet next to a tiny
bathroom. The time came when Dad decided to knock them into one. I was about
thirteen and in bed with the ‘flu. My seven-year-old sister took great delight
in wielding a hammer alongside Dad as they brought down the wall and made one
room of more reasonable size.

It’s Resurrection evening, the disciples are behind locked
doors in fear, and the risen Jesus appears. He is recognisable but his body has
acquired new powers. He doesn’t need to break down the walls to get in, but this
story is about breaking down walls in other ways. In particular, it’s about
breaking down walls to release his followers in mission. What walls does he
break down? What does he bring in their place so that frightened and
unbelieving disciples might share in his Father’s mission?

1. Peace
The disciples are imprisoned behind a wall of fear. Their trouble-making
teacher has been executed and now the authorities are surely going to round
them up. Despite the women going to the tomb that morning, followed by Peter
and John, fear still holds them prisoner. To them, Jesus appears and says, ‘Peace
be with you’ (verse 19).

The risen Christ brings peace to fearful followers, because
if he is alive then what can ultimately defeat them? Opponents may come with
dire threats and even take blood, but if the disciples of Jesus believe in the
Resurrection then whatever happens to them, death is defeated and fellowship
with Christ is permanent and eternal.

Is it not common for fear to choke our participation in mission?
We fear what friends will say if we talk about our faith. We fear trying
something in case it fails. But the risen Christ says, ‘Peace be with you’ to
us, too. Granted, it can take a long time for his truth to calm our racing
pulse and lower our blood pressure, but he says it nevertheless. It is possible we shall be ridiculed for
speaking about God and Jesus and it may be that we try some community action
that doesn’t come off, but human mockery and failure are met by the peace of
Christ. And in any case, we may not fail! Or we might be part of a sowing
process. The wall of fear is there to stop us taking missionary risks, but the
risen Christ says, ‘Peace be with you – so go on, take some chances in faith!’

2. Joy
The second wall after fear is despair: the disciples’ dreams of the last three
years have been violently dashed. But Jesus shows them his hands and his side –
yes, it is him! ‘Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord’ (verse
20).

I can never hear that verse without thinking of a favourite
story. While I was a student at Trinity
College, Bristol we had a visit one week from the Bishop of the Arctic. He would come to
the college every few years, apparently to recruit missionaries. The first
Christian missionaries to the Arctic had come from our college.

He told a story in his sermon about those first
missionaries. They were translating the New Testament into the Inuit tongue
when they came to this verse. But the language had no word for ‘joy’. One day a
missionary went out with one of the Inuit hunters and his dogs. Upon their return,
the dogs were given some meat to eat and the missionary thought, ‘Now there’s a
picture of joy. I’ll ask what the word is to describe the dogs.’ As a result,
that first Inuit New Testament translated John 20:20 as, ‘Then the disciples
wagged their tails when they saw the Lord’!

And the risen Christ replaces our despair with a wagging of
our tails – with joy! The despair of death can envelope us. Church decline takes
its toll on us. Recent forecasts suggest the extinction of the Methodist Church by 2030. But suppose
that’s not quite how things should be seen in the light of the Resurrection? Maybe
it’s more like a Canada-based thinker on the contemporary scene called Alan Roxburgh has recently
put it:

Those who say the church
is dying in the West are mistaking the phenomenon of transition for death.
They’re not the same! We may say the church we have known and experienced for
the last 150 years or so no longer has legitimacy as the sign, witness,
instrument and foretaste of the kingdom. But that’s very different from saying
the church is dying. We shouldn’t confuse the two. The church in the West isn’t
dying and it won’t because God keeps turning up in all these places we so
easily give up on because we see them as hopelessly out of tune with the times
or just not getting what needs to take place. The stories emerging in these
places are harbingers of God’s emerging life in old churches.

Maybe the risen Christ
wants to meet us so that we can make the transition from the old dying ways of
church to new expressions of his resurrection life that defy society’s
expectations of us. Maybe if we lay down our obsession with institutions, programmes
and all the things that are church as we have known her for most of our lives
and set out instead to meet our risen Lord then surely we shall be bearers of
his life for the world.

3. Purpose
Next,

Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father
has sent me, so I send you.’ (verse 21)

A culture of death, dominated by fear and despair, is one
that makes you wonder whether there is anything worth doing. What purpose is there,
for which we might live or die? But the risen Christ gives his disciples a
purpose: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ Here is purpose: it is to
continue the Father’s mission that Jesus began. They don’t have to invent
anything from scratch; they are simply to do what Jesus did.

And yes, I know that sounds a lot easier to say than to do. But
the template is there, in the life and ministry of Jesus. We don’t have to
worry about techniques, we don’t have to invent new programmes, we merely have
to take Jesus as our lodestar for mission. Look at what he said and did. Then put
that into operation. Bring good news to the poor, grace to sinners, healing to
those in pain. And that means, as I’ve emphasised before, looking hard at what
we presently do to see whether it contributes towards a missionary end or
whether it just makes us feel good. Our call is not to be in the church but to
be the church in the world, for that is the purpose to which the risen Christ
commissions us.

4. Power
This stuff is all very well – peace to overcome the fear that paralyses
mission, joy to deal with crippling despair, purpose instead of aimlessness or
an inward-looking death – but we still may feel unable to rise to the
challenge. For that problem, Jesus has another word:

When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ (verse 22)

You can have all the arguments you like about this verse,
especially about how it relates to Pentecost that came seven weeks later, but
maybe John is just telescoping into the end of his Gospel a summary of
important things he wasn’t going to cover in detail. What we know for sure is
that Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to his disciples for the missionary task. If
our purpose is to continue the mission of the Father for which Jesus was
incarnated, then we do mission in the Jesus way. And Jesus, for all his divine
status as the Son of God, also functioned (in the words of Jack Deere) as ‘a
man in the power of the Spirit’.

And that surely means we need to make the journey from
Easter to Pentecost, as the Easter season itself does. I have a theory that for
many Christians Easter Day is our favourite. It gets us over the misery and
violence of Good Friday, but we never make the journey to Pentecost, because we’re
afraid of all that emotional Holy Spirit stuff. But the Holy Spirit is the
missionary Spirit, and to be a missionary people requires the Spirit just as
Jesus needed did at his baptism. If we are troubled, then one worthwhile
question is this: does Jesus ever give bad gifts?

5. Authority
If there’s one thing the disciples in the locked upper room don’t feel they
have it’s authority. They are weak and vulnerable, waiting for the secret
police to break down the doors and take them away for questioning, torture and
execution. But for mission Jesus bestows authority upon them:

‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if
you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ (verse 23)

Again, we have a difficult verse
here – and I suggest it doesn’t mean a priestly power to forgive sins or
otherwise at formal confession, because that is God’s prerogative (cf. Mark
2:7, Acts 8:22) – but at heart I think this too is one to give us missionary
shape. This is about the Gospel message.

And I believe it’s about the
Gospel message in both word and deed. It’s Gospel word in the power of the
Cross, where people find release through the death of Christ. It’s the Gospel
deed as we practise forgiveness. It’s no accident I just spoke of people
finding ‘release’ at the Cross, because that is what forgiveness is: we release
people, that is, we set them free from all obligations to us.  We don’t ‘hold’ them under obligation to us because
of their sinful acts against us. Forgiveness is missionary: it proclaims and
demonstrates the Gospel.

6. Patience
What a mistake we make in singling out ‘doubting Thomas’ from the other
disciples – as if they had been full of faith before meeting the risen Christ!
At least Thomas is honest when his friends tell him, ‘We have seen the Lord,’
and he replies, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my
finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe’
(verse 25). But there is no record of him being berated.

And Jesus seems to bide his
time, too. He waits for that next time when Thomas is with the disciples, and
at that point meets with him and leads him to his confession of faith: ‘My Lord
and my God!’ (verse 28).

The missionary endeavour is as
much about process as about crisis; it’s about patience as well as about crunch
decisions. People take time to become followers of Jesus Christ. We may fail to
notice that, because the experience of previous generations was of a shorter
apparent gap between first contact with the Gospel and a commitment to Christ. But
those experiences came from times when people had a greater familiarity with
Christianity and the Bible than today. Now we need to be in for the long haul
with people. There will be patience in the building of relationships, and
indeed we won’t simply be making relationships just to make ‘God fodder’ of
people. No longer can we entertain the idea that we’ll muster up the courage to
bring people to one church meeting or evangelistic event and if it doesn’t
click into place spiritually for them there it’s curtains. Patience is a gift
for mission today.

7. Inclusiveness
A little detail I’ve overlooked before – I’ve never seen the significance of
this until now:

‘A week later his disciples were again in the house, and
Thomas was with them.’ (verse 26a)

Thomas was with them. The doubting man was not excluded
because he had questions tinged with blunt honesty. He was still included. Perhaps
it was because the others were still conscious of how they had felt only a week
earlier. They remembered their own doubts. Such remembering enabled them to
continue to include Thomas.

In a way, this links with what I have just said about
patience. For Thomas, the group of disciples was clearly a safe space where he
could air his questions and doubts. It has become increasingly important in
missionary approaches in recent years to create these safe spaces. So whatever
you think of the Alpha Course, one of its undoubted strengths is that people in
the small discussion groups are allowed freedom to say whatever they think of
the week’s topic, and the group leaders are under orders not just to shut them
down with a standard Christian response. The approach of the cell church movement
has been to introduce people to the Christian community via the small group,
where – amongst other things – there is open discussion.

Conclusion
Thomas, allegedly the great doubter, but I think the great questioner, ends up
with a personal audience with the risen Christ, and a much greater blessing
than he might have expected. Yet Jesus promises a larger blessing than that to those
who come afterwards:

‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are
those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ (verse 29)

What blessings might be in the offing if we allow the risen
Christ to shape the way we share in the Father’s mission with him? What if his
peace enables us to break free of fear? If he gives us joy that conquers
despair? If his resurrection fills us with the purpose of sharing in that
mission? If he gives us Holy Spirit power to be his witnesses? If the authority
the risen Christ gives us is not the type that lords it over people but brings
forgiveness in word and deed? If we share his patience with doubters and
include them while they are on the journey to Christ, sharing our journey at
the same time? What if

Technorati Tags: resurrection, Jesus, mission, peace, fear, joy, despair, TrinityCollegeBristol, BishopOfTheArctic, Inuit, AlanRoxburgh, purpose, HolySpirit, authority, forgiveness, patience, Thomas, doubt, inclusiveness

Tomorrow’s Gospel passage has meant a lot to me for a long time. So much so that I found myself with a lot of small, scattered thoughts about how the Resurrection has key themes for mission. So much seemed relevant to the more ‘missional’ approach. So not three developed points but seven bullet points this week!

John 20:19-31

Introduction
in the house where I grew up there was a very small toilet next to a tiny
bathroom. The time came when Dad decided to knock them into one. I was about
thirteen and in bed with the ‘flu. My seven-year-old sister took great delight
in wielding a hammer alongside Dad as they brought down the wall and made one
room of more reasonable size.

It’s Resurrection evening, the disciples are behind locked
doors in fear, and the risen Jesus appears. He is recognisable but his body has
acquired new powers. He doesn’t need to break down the walls to get in, but this
story is about breaking down walls in other ways. In particular, it’s about
breaking down walls to release his followers in mission. What walls does he
break down? What does he bring in their place so that frightened and
unbelieving disciples might share in his Father’s mission?

1. Peace
The disciples are imprisoned behind a wall of fear. Their trouble-making
teacher has been executed and now the authorities are surely going to round
them up. Despite the women going to the tomb that morning, followed by Peter
and John, fear still holds them prisoner. To them, Jesus appears and says, ‘Peace
be with you’ (verse 19).

The risen Christ brings peace to fearful followers, because
if he is alive then what can ultimately defeat them? Opponents may come with
dire threats and even take blood, but if the disciples of Jesus believe in the
Resurrection then whatever happens to them, death is defeated and fellowship
with Christ is permanent and eternal.

Is it not common for fear to choke our participation in mission?
We fear what friends will say if we talk about our faith. We fear trying
something in case it fails. But the risen Christ says, ‘Peace be with you’ to
us, too. Granted, it can take a long time for his truth to calm our racing
pulse and lower our blood pressure, but he says it nevertheless. It is possible we shall be ridiculed for
speaking about God and Jesus and it may be that we try some community action
that doesn’t come off, but human mockery and failure are met by the peace of
Christ. And in any case, we may not fail! Or we might be part of a sowing
process. The wall of fear is there to stop us taking missionary risks, but the
risen Christ says, ‘Peace be with you – so go on, take some chances in faith!’

2. Joy
The second wall after fear is despair: the disciples’ dreams of the last three
years have been violently dashed. But Jesus shows them his hands and his side –
yes, it is him! ‘Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord’ (verse
20).

I can never hear that verse without thinking of a favourite
story. While I was a student at Trinity
College, Bristol we had a visit one week from the Bishop of the Arctic. He would come to
the college every few years, apparently to recruit missionaries. The first
Christian missionaries to the Arctic had come from our college.

He told a story in his sermon about those first
missionaries. They were translating the New Testament into the Inuit tongue
when they came to this verse. But the language had no word for ‘joy’. One day a
missionary went out with one of the Inuit hunters and his dogs. Upon their return,
the dogs were given some meat to eat and the missionary thought, ‘Now there’s a
picture of joy. I’ll ask what the word is to describe the dogs.’ As a result,
that first Inuit New Testament translated John 20:20 as, ‘Then the disciples
wagged their tails when they saw the Lord’!

And the risen Christ replaces our despair with a wagging of
our tails – with joy! The despair of death can envelope us. Church decline takes
its toll on us. Recent forecasts suggest the extinction of the Methodist Church by 2030. But suppose
that’s not quite how things should be seen in the light of the Resurrection? Maybe
it’s more like a Canada-based thinker on the contemporary scene called Alan Roxburgh has recently
put it:

Those who say the church
is dying in the West are mistaking the phenomenon of transition for death.
They’re not the same! We may say the church we have known and experienced for
the last 150 years or so no longer has legitimacy as the sign, witness,
instrument and foretaste of the kingdom. But that’s very different from saying
the church is dying. We shouldn’t confuse the two. The church in the West isn’t
dying and it won’t because God keeps turning up in all these places we so
easily give up on because we see them as hopelessly out of tune with the times
or just not getting what needs to take place. The stories emerging in these
places are harbingers of God’s emerging life in old churches.

Maybe the risen Christ
wants to meet us so that we can make the transition from the old dying ways of
church to new expressions of his resurrection life that defy society’s
expectations of us. Maybe if we lay down our obsession with institutions, programmes
and all the things that are church as we have known her for most of our lives
and set out instead to meet our risen Lord then surely we shall be bearers of
his life for the world.

3. Purpose
Next,

Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father
has sent me, so I send you.’ (verse 21)

A culture of death, dominated by fear and despair, is one
that makes you wonder whether there is anything worth doing. What purpose is there,
for which we might live or die? But the risen Christ gives his disciples a
purpose: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ Here is purpose: it is to
continue the Father’s mission that Jesus began. They don’t have to invent
anything from scratch; they are simply to do what Jesus did.

And yes, I know that sounds a lot easier to say than to do. But
the template is there, in the life and ministry of Jesus. We don’t have to
worry about techniques, we don’t have to invent new programmes, we merely have
to take Jesus as our lodestar for mission. Look at what he said and did. Then put
that into operation. Bring good news to the poor, grace to sinners, healing to
those in pain. And that means, as I’ve emphasised before, looking hard at what
we presently do to see whether it contributes towards a missionary end or
whether it just makes us feel good. Our call is not to be in the church but to
be the church in the world, for that is the purpose to which the risen Christ
commissions us.

4. Power
This stuff is all very well – peace to overcome the fear that paralyses
mission, joy to deal with crippling despair, purpose instead of aimlessness or
an inward-looking death – but we still may feel unable to rise to the
challenge. For that problem, Jesus has another word:

When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ (verse 22)

You can have all the arguments you like about this verse,
especially about how it relates to Pentecost that came seven weeks later, but
maybe John is just telescoping into the end of his Gospel a summary of
important things he wasn’t going to cover in detail. What we know for sure is
that Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to his disciples for the missionary task. If
our purpose is to continue the mission of the Father for which Jesus was
incarnated, then we do mission in the Jesus way. And Jesus, for all his divine
status as the Son of God, also functioned (in the words of Jack Deere) as ‘a
man in the power of the Spirit’.

And that surely means we need to make the journey from
Easter to Pentecost, as the Easter season itself does. I have a theory that for
many Christians Easter Day is our favourite. It gets us over the misery and
violence of Good Friday, but we never make the journey to Pentecost, because we’re
afraid of all that emotional Holy Spirit stuff. But the Holy Spirit is the
missionary Spirit, and to be a missionary people requires the Spirit just as
Jesus needed did at his baptism. If we are troubled, then one worthwhile
question is this: does Jesus ever give bad gifts?

5. Authority
If there’s one thing the disciples in the locked upper room don’t feel they
have it’s authority. They are weak and vulnerable, waiting for the secret
police to break down the doors and take them away for questioning, torture and
execution. But for mission Jesus bestows authority upon them:

‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if
you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ (verse 23)

Again, we have a difficult verse
here – and I suggest it doesn’t mean a priestly power to forgive sins or
otherwise at formal confession, because that is God’s prerogative (cf. Mark
2:7, Acts 8:22) – but at heart I think this too is one to give us missionary
shape. This is about the Gospel message.

And I believe it’s about the
Gospel message in both word and deed. It’s Gospel word in the power of the
Cross, where people find release through the death of Christ. It’s the Gospel
deed as we practise forgiveness. It’s no accident I just spoke of people
finding ‘release’ at the Cross, because that is what forgiveness is: we release
people, that is, we set them free from all obligations to us.  We don’t ‘hold’ them under obligation to us because
of their sinful acts against us. Forgiveness is missionary: it proclaims and
demonstrates the Gospel.

6. Patience
What a mistake we make in singling out ‘doubting Thomas’ from the other
disciples – as if they had been full of faith before meeting the risen Christ!
At least Thomas is honest when his friends tell him, ‘We have seen the Lord,’
and he replies, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my
finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe’
(verse 25). But there is no record of him being berated.

And Jesus seems to bide his
time, too. He waits for that next time when Thomas is with the disciples, and
at that point meets with him and leads him to his confession of faith: ‘My Lord
and my God!’ (verse 28).

The missionary endeavour is as
much about process as about crisis; it’s about patience as well as about crunch
decisions. People take time to become followers of Jesus Christ. We may fail to
notice that, because the experience of previous generations was of a shorter
apparent gap between first contact with the Gospel and a commitment to Christ. But
those experiences came from times when people had a greater familiarity with
Christianity and the Bible than today. Now we need to be in for the long haul
with people. There will be patience in the building of relationships, and
indeed we won’t simply be making relationships just to make ‘God fodder’ of
people. No longer can we entertain the idea that we’ll muster up the courage to
bring people to one church meeting or evangelistic event and if it doesn’t
click into place spiritually for them there it’s curtains. Patience is a gift
for mission today.

7. Inclusiveness
A little detail I’ve overlooked before – I’ve never seen the significance of
this until now:

‘A week later his disciples were again in the house, and
Thomas was with them.’ (verse 26a)

Thomas was with them. The doubting man was not excluded
because he had questions tinged with blunt honesty. He was still included. Perhaps
it was because the others were still conscious of how they had felt only a week
earlier. They remembered their own doubts. Such remembering enabled them to
continue to include Thomas.

In a way, this links with what I have just said about
patience. For Thomas, the group of disciples was clearly a safe space where he
could air his questions and doubts. It has become increasingly important in
missionary approaches in recent years to create these safe spaces. So whatever
you think of the Alpha Course, one of its undoubted strengths is that people in
the small discussion groups are allowed freedom to say whatever they think of
the week’s topic, and the group leaders are under orders not just to shut them
down with a standard Christian response. The approach of the cell church movement
has been to introduce people to the Christian community via the small group,
where – amongst other things – there is open discussion.

Conclusion
Thomas, allegedly the great doubter, but I think the great questioner, ends up
with a personal audience with the risen Christ, and a much greater blessing
than he might have expected. Yet Jesus promises a larger blessing than that to those
who come afterwards:

‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are
those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ (verse 29)

What blessings might be in the offing if we allow the risen
Christ to shape the way we share in the Father’s mission with him? What if his
peace enables us to break free of fear? If he gives us joy that conquers
despair? If his resurrection fills us with the purpose of sharing in that
mission? If he gives us Holy Spirit power to be his witnesses? If the authority
the risen Christ gives us is not the type that lords it over people but brings
forgiveness in word and deed? If we share his patience with doubters and
include them while they are on the journey to Christ, sharing our journey at
the same time? What if

Technorati Tags: resurrection, Jesus, mission, peace, fear, joy, despair, TrinityCollegeBristol, BishopOfTheArctic, Inuit, AlanRoxburgh, purpose, HolySpirit, authority, forgiveness, patience, Thomas, doubt, inclusiveness

Excellent and highly encouraging new article this week by Alan Roxburgh in his Roxburgh Journal: real support for those of us who want to see creative missional life in established denominations. Just take this paragraph as a taster:

It’s not only possible for all kinds of existing churches to innovate missional
life but it’s at the heart of what God does. There are stories out there of the
Spirit calling into being emerging missional local churches in congregations
some of us would have given up on a few years ago. This is the nature of the God
we worship and praise. Our Lord just keeps turning up in the most God-forsaken
places. How else do you make sense of the Incarnation and the perduring life of
both Israel and the church? These convictions are not based upon new theories of
change, complexity and emergence but are a confession about the way God is
revealed in Jesus. Those who say the church is dying in the West are mistaking
the phenomenon of transition for death. They’re not the same! We may say the
church we have known and experienced for the last 150 years or so no longer has
legitimacy as the sign, witness, instrument and foretaste of the kingdom. But
that’s very different from saying the church is dying. We shouldn’t confuse the
two. The church in the West isn’t dying and it wont because God keeps turning up
in all these places we so easily give up on because we see them as hopelessly
out of tune with the times or just not getting what needs to take place. The
stories emerging in these places are harbingers of God’s emerging life in old
churches. Emergence theory tells us that when lots of little stories start to
percolate you can be sure some strange attractors will start doing
uncharacteristic and unexpected things. I believe lots of existing congregations
are pregnant with strange attractors ready to do uncharacteristic things. That’s
always the way of the Spirit. What a great time to be alive!

Technorati Tags: AlanRoxburgh, Allelon, mission, missional, church, ministry