Being Breathed by Jesus
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.
One of the most powerful images from our Gospel for this morning comes in that opening sentence where we hear that the disciples are huddled for “fear of the Jews,” behind the locked door of the house. It’s understandable, of course, why they might be fearful. The authorities have just executed Jesus on Golgotha, and they rightly think that they might face a similar fate through their association with Jesus. No wonder Peter, warming his hands over the charcoal fire denies he knows Jesus and tries to mask his Galilean accent.
But I think there are other dimensions to the disciples being locked away behind closed doors. I think they are feeling great shame at their collective betrayal. I think they are feeling great sadness at the loss of their teacher and friend. They are lost, lonely, and isolated. The locked doors and the suffocating closeness of the room are symbolic of an entire psychological disposition, a way of seeing and being in the world that’s stuck in fear, shame, guilt, scarcity, lack, and death. This is a world where hope has died and the way things are, or appear to be, is how they’ll always be.
It’s into that locked and stuffy room of self-enclosure where possibility and new creation are unthinkable, that Jesus comes as uncontainable effervescence, as life beyond the horizon of death. He comes and stands in their midst and breathes peace on the very ones who abandoned him in his hour of need. He comes and stands in their midst and gives the gift of the Holy Spirit to the ones who chose warming their hands over standing with their friend and teacher. He comes and stands in their midst and breathes peace to the ones who chose going along with the crowd and protecting their public image instead of speaking up against the scapegoating madness that had gone viral and infected the community. It’s not just COVID-19 that spreads through personal contact. Scapegoating violence works the same way. It’s a story as old as time, as old as Cain and Able.
That’s what is so amazing about the Jesus who is revealed in these post-resurrection appearances. Rather than castigate his friends, or at least drop a little barb about their fair-weather friendship, rather than come back with a bone to pick, or a subtle hint that he’ll never trust them again, Jesus breathes fear-loosening peace. Remember, this is the first day of the week and Jesus’ breath upon the disciples is a conscious echoing of the breath that moved over the deep in Genesis. It’s a conscious echoing of the breath that’s breathed into Adam in the creation story. We might even hear those words from Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones to the exiled nation of Israel far from home and living under the authoritarian fist of a foreign power: “Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” This is a moment where the world is remade in and through the person of the Risen Christ.
On Good Friday, we spoke about the new community that’s founded at the foot of the cross with the Beloved Disciple and Jesus’ soul-pierced mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. It’s a community founded not on observance of the law, on tribe, or bloodline, or inheritance, or hierarchy, but on self-offering love, and mercy. It’s the beloved community born with the words, “Woman behold your son,” and “Son behold your mother.” And now, we start to see what shape this family might take--it’s a family of forgiving love, rooted and grounded in the peace that passes all understanding, the peace that’s available no matter our outward circumstances, the inexhaustible well of goodness and peace that gives us the freedom to choose how we can respond with compassionate action, rather than react out of fear-driven, unconscious habit. Peter’s words for this peace are that it is an, “inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.” The presence and the potential for healing, transformative encounter with Christ is always available, “even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials.” Sound familiar?
The disciples expect something like a vengeful ghost, a revenant from beyond the grave bent on revenge, but instead they are given the gift of peace. Jesus breathes on them and they take that breath into their bodies. Think how intimate that is! How close do you have to be to feel a person’s breath on our face, to breathe the air they breathe? That’s how close we are called to be to Jesus. Jesus’ peace, his breath, oxygenates the cramped quarters of our hearts and helps us see beyond our fear, our shame.
More than that, however, being given the gift of the Spirit reminds them of their identity as a sent people. No sooner do they receive the Holy Spirit than Jesus says to them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Peace is not some individual affair meant for private enjoyment— the trap of so much New Age spirituality. Being breathed by Jesus sends us out to be and breathe that peace for others. “Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands around you will be saved,” as St Seraphim of Sarov writes. Being breathed by Jesus means we go, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to those locked rooms where you can cut the fear with a knife as Jesus’ peace, as builders of the beloved community.
But old habits die hard. It’s amusing that after this first encounter, we find the disciples a week later still shut up in the house, this time with Thomas. It seems that that first encounter did little to shake them of their fear. So Jesus comes back and stands again in their midst and breathes his peace upon them. God in the person of Jesus Christ will stop at nothing to crash down the barriers between ourselves and God so that we might be that very same forgiving love, that very same peace to others. There’s a reason why we have fifty days between Easter and Pentecost--it takes time for us to allow those old stories of fear, lack, shame, guilt, to gently fall apart and learn to live from the uncontrollable power of the Spirit that blows we know not where.
One of the great lessons of this time is that making contact with the person of Jesus--through daily prayer, reading scripture, weekly worship, serving others in the spirit of sacrificial love, and advocating for peace and justice--makes a difference for when we “suffer various trials.” Holy habits take time to engrain and they become the hook on which we can hang our suffering when the going gets tough.Times of trial are always opportunities to go deeper, to breathe Jesus’ “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading” peace more deeply into ourselves and to be breathed out by Jesus for others.
I always think that that is what Thomas putting his hands in Jesus’ side is actually about--the regular, daily, hourly contact with the living presence of Jesus, reaching out in relationship with him, consenting to transformative encounter with him with the little mustard seed of our yes--"Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" as Peter says at the Last Supper. Maybe we’ve been locked away in fear. Maybe we’ve been so busy tackling the logistics of this new unrecognizable reality that we’ve not made time to go apart. Maybe we’ve spent so much time drinking from the well of the 24 hour news cycle that we’ve forgotten who and whose we are, the Good News of the God who has made his home in us--free, unmerited, and undeserved.
So we reach out in faith, towards encounter with the one who is always coming to us through our human-erected walls and locked doors to breathe on us, to liberate us from our fear, to draw us more deeply into union and communion with the one who has already made his home in us. And in the process, Jesus reaches out to touch our wounds as well. It’s a two-way street. We reach out to him and he reaches out to us.
He touches our anxiety, our panic, our fear, our isolation, our loneliness, our sadness, our grief, and in that touch shows us that these experiences don’t have to define who and how we are in the world. These realities no longer have to have such a stranglehold on us. We get a little taste of what Paul calls the “new creation”--the boldness, the giftedness, the generosity, and the gratitude of what it means to live from the freedom of the resurrected Christ in whom there is no darkness at all. The one who in early in the morning on the first day of the week, unhorizoned what we took as the ultimate horizon--death. The one who breaks down the door of our fear, the barricade of our scarcity and lack and breathes us back into the people God made us to be.