Second Sunday of Easter - C April 11, 2010

Acts 5: 12-16 Revelation 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19 John 20-19-31

I particularly enjoy watch television programs that are travelogues. The host presenting the program visits a distant place and describes the experience and often presents various hints on how to enjoy traveling to a given location. I recently watched a program about a place that I had the opportunity to visit in the past. It was about a church built and decorated in the 6^th century - San Vitale church in Ravenna, Italy. The walls of this church are covered in mosaics. The host pointed out an interesting feature about these mosaics which I had not realized. In two different portrayals of the person of Jesus Christ, one showed his as clean-shaven whereas the other showed him as being bearded. It suggested that the church was decorated at a time of transition in the Roman Empire. When Rome was the center of the empire, the preferred style for men was to be clean-shaven. When Byzantium, or Constantinople, located in the East, became the center of the empire, the strong Greek influence showed a preference for men to be bearded.

This insight or observation guided my thoughts about what we are told in the message of God found in today’s Scriptures. The artistic representation of Christ, a portrayal of how he may have looked, is not important. Rather, what is important is how Jesus Christ is represented, experienced at a given time. The mosaic portraits showed him according to the style of earlier or later times in the period of the Roman Empire. What is most important now is how the person of Jesus Christ is represented now, in our time; not in the art of our time, but in us.

This thought guided my understanding of the story told to us by Saint John about the experience of the Apostle Thomas. John wants us to understand certain things. He wants us to know that the appearance, the experience of Jesus after the Resurrection was not a figment of the imagination, a result of a type of mass hysteria in his followers. It was a different experience, but it was very real. It was a presence that could be felt, touched.

It was also a limited experience. It was not the intent of Christ, of God, that everyone would experience the Risen Lord in the same fashion as his followers, or Thomas, did. Rather, his followers were to take his gift of peace, to embrace his gift of peace, to live his gift of peace. It was a gift of peace of mind, heart and spirit that would come from genuine forgiveness. It was peace that would come from living a relationship with God that was experienced with the Risen Lord. It was a peace that would be derived from an appreciation of what is most important in life and living by living and acting in a way that was guided by, affected by an experience of the Lord who had overcome even death itself through the Resurrection.

The followers of Jesus grew through what they had experienced. The reality of what was happening to them became more and more evident to them. As a result, they were living and acting in a different way as is clear from the incident we heard about in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Others were fascinated and drawn to them. They wanted to join them. They experienced through them a restoration of life, a real wholeness of what they could be.

This new way of living, however, would not always be acceptable to others. It was a challenge to the status quo. As a result, this new community of believers experienced opposition and even persecution from those who did not understand, or did not want to understand or accept what the followers of Jesus represented and attempted to live. So we heard the beginnings of the writing of the author John, and the Book of Revelation. What he wrote was not a list of predictions of what will happen in the centuries and the millenia to come, but a message in the coded and mysterious style of the time. A writing meant to encourage those making the effort to grow in their way of living. Informed by God’s message in Revelation, in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, John sought to encourage believers then and now to change what needs to be changed and to remain committed, firm, in their beliefs, despite ridicule or rejection.

In the way that Jesus Christ is represented or portrayed in the world, it is not important if he is bearded or clean-shaven, looks “Western” or “Eastern,” is light-skinned or dark-skinned. What matters is how we - individually and, more important, together, as the Body of Christ in the world now, make known, illustrate and reflect the experience and the appreciation of the goodness of our loving God.