From the Pastor

Easter begins in joy but Eastertide ends with a hint of sadness. Just as Good Friday is the day of great sorrow, which makes way for the joy of Easter, so the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord can bring a different sort of sadness, which makes way for the joy of Pentecost. The hint of sadness on the feat of Ascension is something like the first or last day in school, a change of job. The difference between the departure of Christ is that we are called not just to grow as people; we are to grow in Christ himself. We take the past with us, remembering with love the people and the places God gave us to live with and in. even if we have a terrible past, we can still have some hope that out of the evils of the past, God will prepare a greater good.

Faith tells us that all is prepared. There are many days when we don’t know what is to happen or what we are to do. We feel that, like the disciples on the day of Ascension, we are still standing on the road looking up at the sky where Christ has ascended. We forget that Christ is the way. So prayer is not just a way of receiving instructions about what to do next. Prayer lets us go further down the road, without needing to know where it leads. The priestly prayer of Christ, as it is called, of which we hear part in today’s Gospel, is a conversation with the Father where Jesus explains that His leaving us behind is an act of love. It is love because perfect love always means trusting the person we love.

The parable told to His disciples by Jesus in today’s Gospel obviously tends towards the positive end of the symbolic spectrum. As usual we look to the end of the story to see what point is being made. Jesus is warning His followers about being led astray by those who are not preachers of the truth. A sheep recognize the voice of their shepherd, His followers too need to recognize His voice and follow Him. Jesus offers the idea that He is the gate of the sheepfold. It is through Him that the sheep go safely in and out. Thomas objects that they do not know where He is going, so how can they know the way? To which comes the famous reply that Jesus himself is “the Way, the Truth and the Life”. It is very much a theme that recurs in John’s Gospel, this centering of our belief on the person of Jesus. It is believing in Him, recognizing His voice, clinging to Him that we receive the gift of eternal life.

Do we see gates as the threshold to freedom or insurmountable barriers? In his epic poem Divine Comedy, the 14th century writer Dante imagined the gates of hell had “Abandon hope all you who enter here” written above them. When cities were walled their gates were often the only way of entering and so were guarded carefully and closed at night. We now lock our doors much more than we did in the past, and even church doors are often kept locked for security reasons. These fears and habits inevitably make it much more difficult for us to understand or live by the practices offered by Jesus. Perhaps we prefer to keep His instructions to a highly spiritual level, which allows us in our minds to open our doors to Him while closing them to everyone else. Do we keep open house, do we welcome the stranger, do we make hospitality our special care? Do we enable people to enter through the gate of Jesus the good shepherd, and to find a home in Him?

And this is where we find two disciples on the road to Emmaus today. They are disappointed and afraid. They have witnessed the public humiliation and execution of their friend and leader, Jesus of Nazareth. Their hopes have been crushed and they are returning home to safety and to pick up the pieces of their lives. They have heard stories that Jesus is alive, but they don’t believe them. They should have expected that the Christ would suffer and so enter into His glory. However, their doubts are not resolved until the stranger blesses and breaks the bread as He shares a meal with them. Then their eyes are opened and they recognize the Lord, only to find that He has disappeared from their sight. Now they have faith, they no longer need to see Him. They know that He continues to be present with them as they returns to Jerusalem to share the good news.

So many people in the world today think of the Bible as merely a book of stories for children. They say stories of our origins cannot be true as they do not correspond with modern scientific knowledge. Creation of the world in seven days? Nonsense. Human generation from a single couple Adam and Eve? Rubbish. Miracles? Impossible. The people of our generation have very largely lost the wisdom and ability of our ancestors to discern the truth of our purpose as human beings as this is revealed through the texts of sacred scripture. However, we are people of faith in the midst of such an unbelieving society. We constantly hear things that deny and even ridicule what we hold most dear: our values, our moral standards, the fundamental building blocks from which, we believe, a human society can be built. Sunday, after Sunday, as the scriptures are proclaimed and explained in the community of faith, our hearts begin to burn again. Our hope are raised. We try to do what Jesus commanded us to do: to love one another as He has loved us; to keep His word so that He and the Father will come to us and make their home with us. Jesus, our risen Lord, shows himself to us. We don’t see Him, but we believe. He opens our eyes to see His wounds in the wounds of our brothers and sisters all around the world, and He sends us. We are empowered to be a believing people in an unbelieving world. This is no mere story for children. It is the promise of eternal life. But it is only those who have a childlike attitude who will be capable of understanding and be able to enter the kingdom of God.

It is curious that Jesus waited until He knew Lazarus was dead before going to Bethany. Jesus himself is quite clear that this whole situation will lead to God’s glory and the glory of the Son. He says reportedly throughout this story that this great sign will lead people to faith – as it does for His disciples, for Martha and Mary, and for the people standing round the tomb. Jesus explains to Martha that faith in Him is the way to resurrection and life. Raising the dead to life is a sure sign of the presence and action of God. These Sundays Gospels have presented us with various images of what coming to faith in Christ is like: having a spring of water inside us, welling up into eternal life (the woman of Samaria); moving from blindness to sight, from darkness to light (the blind man); and today, in the story of Lazarus, it is described as being a movement from lying down to being lifted up, from being bound to being free, from death to life.

Tradition tells us that Lazarus relocated to Larnaca in Cyprus after the resurrection of Jesus. The church in Larnaca claims to be the site of Lazarus’ second tomb – where they buried him when he finally did die. It is a place of peace. Jesus had already brought him back to life once. He knew that was just a sign of an even greater miracle: that Jesus would bring him to eternal life, bring him to the kingdom of His promise. Faith in Jesus Christ empowers us to live in true freedom: freedom from fear, freedom from the power of death, freedom to live by the Spirit which God has placed is us – the Spirit of the risen Christ.

We see process of coming to faith dramatized in today’s Gospel. Jesus is in Jerusalem for the feast of Tabernacles. Today the Gospel begins with a healing of a blind man. Jesus puts a mud paste on his eyes and tells him to wash it off in the Pool of Siloam. The man is given the physical sight he never had. This creates a stir. The man is interrogated about the miracle. But the miracle divided the Pharisees. Some recognize God’s hand in the healing but others see Jesus as a sinner for breaking the sabbath. The man is put under pressure, and under pressure begins to assert himself and recognizes that Jesus must be a prophet. Finally Jesus returns to the scene and challenges the man, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” When the man wants to know if Jesus is the Messaih, Jesus tells him that he can see Him now. But it is not just physical sight; he now has the spiritual insight to acknowledge Jesus in faith: “Lord, I believe,” he says, and he worships Him.

This Gospel reading is especially appropriate in Lent because, traditionally, many Christians are baptized at Easdter and are now preparing. They will receive the light of Christ. We notice in today’s Gospel, how the blind man only comes to faith gradually and in the face of persecution and abuse. But at the same time the light of Christ shows up the darkness of unbelief. Some of the Pharisees cannot open their eyes to a new revelation. The parents of the blind man sit on the fence and are unwilling to speak. Lent, and this time of stress, is the time to examine our faith. We may be like parents who want to keep quiet. Or we may be like the unbelieving Pharisees who turn from the light. Lent leads to Easter which offers us the opportunity to go beyond our physical sight and to see the world with the eyes of faith and, like the blind man, recognize Jesus as the light of the world.