See That It is I Myself - A Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter
A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday of Easter, April 14, 2024.
Jesus appears to the disciples directly after the road to Emmaus experience. “Peace be with you,” he greets them. This is the Jesus calling card: peace, peace to the frightened and huddled, and to the raging and vengeful alike. That’s a calling card we desperately need right now, isn’t it, as we hear of escalations of war in Israel and Iran, as people in Gaza starve and mourn for the tens of thousands who have been killed. Jesus’s peace is in solidarity with crucified people everywhere, and with the perpetrators, too. With those who have been bombed, and with those of us who look on in helpless complicity or look away as our country supplies the bombs.
Into all the locked rooms of our lives, into the locked rooms of our warring nations, Jesus breathes his peace on us. Peace be with you. And he invites his friends to come and see that it’s really him: “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see….” He even eats fish with them, to show them that he is no bitter ghost come to exact retribution on those who turned tail and ran when they saw him hanging on a cross but the same Jesus, the same flesh and blood person who had compassion on the hungry multitudes and fed them, blessing their insignificant offerings of a few fish and a few loaves and giving them back as abundance overflowing what they could ask or imagine, bread for the life of the world. Jesus wants them to see him as he is. “See that it is I myself.”
On the road to Emmaus, which takes place just before this passage in Luke, he walked with the two grief-stricken disciples and explained to them the words of scripture prophesying the Messiah would come not as a military hero but as God’s suffering servant, the king on a donkey, who would be killed and then raised. The disciples walk with Jesus for miles, never suspecting who he is, even as they look right at him. Only when they stop for the night, asking him to stay with them, and Jesus breaks bread for supper, do they recognize him in the breaking of bread.
Broiled fish, broken bread. “Did not our hearts burn within us?” they ask each other. Luke is pointing us to Jesus’s table fellowship as an essential marker of who he is. Jesus is the one who feeds us, who has endured all things for us and bears the nail marks of his faithfulness to us. “Look at my hands and feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see.” This seeing, today’s collect shows us, is seen with the eye of faith, opened by grace to behold the redeeming work of Christ.
About a month ago I saw the Wim Wenders film Perfect Days, filmed in Japan and Oscar-nominated for International Best Picture. Kōji Yakusho plays Hirayama, a gentle man of quiet routine who works as a cleaner of public toilets. And these are the most beautiful toilets you’ve ever seen. Apparently German director Wim Wenders was first approached by the Tokyo Toilet Project which has installed in downtown Tokyo the most stunning and fabulous public restrooms, each designed by a different prominent architect. They initially asked him to direct a series of documentary shorts about each toilet design, but Wenders was so enthused by the project that he instead set out to craft a feature-length masterful meditation on the life of one man who cleans these glistening commodes. You don’t think you want to watch a movie about someone who cleans toilets but I promise you do. Hirayama lives a life of dignity, enjoyment, and breathtaking attention. It’s not all toilets. Each day begins with the same pre-dawn wake-up call of a neighbor’s broom sweeping leaves in the street. Hirayama waters his plants and listens to rock-n-roll cassettes as he drives through the city. Amidst his real joys and palpable suffering, you get a sense of Hirayama’s contentment with his life as it is, and his tender attention to beauty in the ordinary is instructive. Setting aside his mop and stepping out of the way to cede the bathroom he is cleaning to a rather urgent morning commuter, Hirayama leans against the wall and in this still moment the camera captures his gaze drifting to gleaming steel where sunlight plays through glass on metal. The man has an eye for light and shadow. Each lunch break finds him on the bench beneath his favorite tree, a towering beauty whose leaves dapple the sunlight rustling through the park. Street lamps reflect and ripple in the black shadows on the river. I thought Perfect Days was just about a perfect film. I saw it with a newer friend of mine, who loved it as much as I did (delightfully cementing our friendship), and we immediately made plans to see it a second time.
After I saw Perfect Days, strange things started happening. Driving home from the movie, I noticed still-wintry pale sunlight gleaming off new construction on 300 South. It took my breath away. Walking to lunch: glass from one building reflecting onto the stone of another across State Street. Taking the dog for a trot: puddles rippling a perfect blue sky up from the gutter. Just yesterday: sunlight through leaves in the breeze, undeniably warm now, and hope springs eternal. Letting Wim Wenders who saw those toilets show me Koji Yakusho showing me how Hirayama sees the world has in a slight but very real way changed the way I see. I’m more attuned to the play of light and shadow. There is no landscape truly voided of beauty, always some patch of moving light to catch the eye.
“See that it is I myself,” Jesus says. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are,” the First Letter of John says. “See what love the Father has given us.” “Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.“ We groan with our suffering world in longing for the revelation of the children of God. At one and the same time, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We wait with patience for hope that we do not yet see. We ask God to open our eyes, to give us the faith to see in all things, even in death, the gate of eternal life. We take up the work given us to do, witnessing to peace and justice and offering up our cries of heartbreak as prayer. And in hope we purify ourselves, like Hirayama paused in his work, scrub-brush set aside, utterly attentive to the gleam of sunlight on metal. Purity reveals itself in us through attentive waiting on the One who is purity itself. Purity reveals itself in us through learning to abide in the always-abiding Presence. Purity reveals itself in us through trusting the Holy and Righteous One, the Author of Life who isn’t content to leave us in the hands of murderers but comes back to us stretching out his pierced hands, saying “Peace be with you.” “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.”
O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.