“BEHIND LOCKED DOORS”

Scripture Lesson: John 20: 19-31

Dr. Matthew Brown

April 3, 2005

I have to admit that I felt a bit of prideful pleasure as a child when I would hear a friend’s mother scold her recalcitrant progeny with the words, “Why can’t you act more like Matt?” O the privilege and responsibility of being the standard bearer for ethical conduct.

Truth be told, though, my youthful propensity to walk within the lines of acceptable behavior had nothing to do with purity of soul and everything to do with fear of heart. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be good, it was that I was afraid of getting in trouble. You see, I was the child of a school teacher, so there was a pipeline daily pumping forth information to my mother about my deportment in the classroom. Very early on I learned that most basic of physics lessons: For every action there is a reaction. If I caused chaos in the classroom you could guarantee that I’d discover the wrath of God when I got home.

So my sterling witness of moral pulchritude as a child was not so much a pursuit of righteousness as it was an evasion of punishment.

Fear can be a most powerful motivating force in life. It can keep a teacher’s kid from caving in to the tantalizing triple dog dares of the class clown. Fear can lead you to avoid the friendly skies and leave the driving to Greyhound. Fear can even prompt you to jump off that cliff like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because the fast approaching threat is that much greater.

But fear can also lead you to close the windows and lock the doors not only of your house but also of your mind, shutting you off from the world around you, allowing the irrational to seem real, allowing fear to turn into prejudice which then becomes hate. Those who would be our neighbors become our enemies. These days we are having to learn the hard lesson that when fear rules, hate festers.

It was a typical Friday afternoon in the Kiryet Hayovel neighborhood of southern Jerusalem. (Newsweek) At the Supersol market, the Sabbath rush was underway; shoppers pushed their carts past shelves stripped bare of bread and matzos for the weeklong Passover holiday. A line had formed at the delicatessen counter in the back, where Sivan Peretz wrapped chicken breasts and salmon steaks and made small talk with his customers. A middle-aged security guard stood poised inside the supermarket entrance, carefully searching bags.

At 1:49 p.m., 17-year-old Rachel Levy - petite, with flowing hair and a girlish gap between her teeth - stepped off the bus from her nearby apartment block and strolled toward the market on a quick trip to buy red pepper and herbs for a fish dinner with her mother and two brothers.

At the same moment, another girl - strikingly attractive, with intense hazel eyes - walked toward the store’s glass double doors. The teenagers met at the entrance, brushing past each other as the guard reached out to grab the hazel-eyed girl, whose outfit may have aroused suspicion. “Wait!” the guard cried. A split second later, a powerful explosion tore through the supermarket, gutting shelves and sending bodies flying. When the smoke cleared and the screaming stopped, the two teenage girls and the guard lay dead, three more victims of the madness of martyrdom.

Ayat al-Akhras and Rachel Levy never knew each other, but they grew up less than four miles apart. And yet they lived with hearts and minds locked in separate worlds where fear had been transformed into hate. Reflecting on the tragedy, President Bush said, “When an 18-year-old Palestinian girl is induced to blow herself up, and in the process kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, the future itself is dying.”

For fear we so often close ourselves off from those around us and in that locked prison we begin to perceive that the whole world around us is a threat to us, everyone out there is the source of our problems. And when that happens, I guess you could say the future is dying because what we’re doing sure isn’t living. But the risen Christ is not content to just stand outside and knock. Today’s lesson tells us that locked doors and closed minds will not hold him back.

For fear, John tells us, the disciples hid behind closed doors on that first Easter evening. You certainly can’t blame them. It had been a harrowing few days. The arrest in the garden. The angry emotion enveloping Jerusalem. A mockery of a trial. Feelings of guilt as they fled the scene. A dark-death filled Friday afternoon. And now, a couple of days later, an empty tomb and Mary’s confusing impassioned message of a Jesus sighting. Given the circumstances, I wouldn’t only close the door. I’d hide under a blanket in the darkened corner of a bolted closet inside the locked room.

What were they discussing among themselves? Were they rationalizing their failure to be faithful in the end? Were they blaming one another? Were all their mixed emotions being dumped into a common pot where they were stewing and brewing, all those emotions becoming the ingredients in a recipe of hate to be directed against all of Jesus’ accusers?

Well, Jesus interrupted their pity party with the words, “Peace be with you.” Frederich Buechner writes that “Peace has come to mean the time when there aren’t any wars or even when there aren’t any major wars. Beggars can’t be choosers; we’d most of us settle for that. But in Hebrew peace, shalom, means fullness, means having everything you need to be wholly and happily yourself.” He goes on to say that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle but the presence of love.

“Peace be with you.” With all the emotions festering in that locked room, can you imagine what those words meant to disciples at that moment coming from that person? “Peace be with you.” These words coming from the one they had abandoned. This wish coming from the innocent one crucified for their sins. And his first words to them express not resentment, judgment, or even hurt feelings, but a desire for peace, for wholeness. “Peace be with you.” They are powerful words of reconciliation and he says them not once, but twice, and then again when he greets them a week later to answer Thomas’ wish to see him in the flesh. Though he may have used harsh words at other times, words of woe and comments about a faithless generation, in this moment he speaks powerful words of reconciliation that mean everything to those disciples so burdened with fear and guilt.

“Peace be with you.” Not only does Jesus offer this wish/this prayer to the disciples, but he also grants them the tools to make reconciliation possible through the power of the Holy Spirit: he gives to them the ministry of forgiveness. O what peace we experience when we forgive and when we are forgiven, and O how troubled our spirits remain when we retain or cannot bring ourselves to forgive the sins of those around us. But Christ gives us the tools of reconciliation that we cannot acquire for ourselves.

“Peace be with you.” It is so much more than a greeting. It is the very character of Christ. In the liturgy of the church, the passing of the peace, with which served as our greeting today, is offered as a sign of the reconciliation we know in Christ and the ministry of reconciliation to which Christ has called us.

Called away from fear. Called to a ministry of reconciliation. “The peace of Christ be with you.” “And also with you.” It is the wish of Christ for those who would follow him.

I cherish the story Barbara Brown Taylor relates about attending her nephew Will’s first birthday party.

She says, “He was as round and bald as a Buddha at that point, still hovering on the verge of speech. Never out of his parents’ sight, he was a typical only child - used to being the center of attention -only he was not spoiled yet, because he had not yet learned how to manipulate love for his own ends. He just thought everyone was loved the way he was, and he gave it away as fast as he got it.

There were only a handful of us there that day – Will’s parents, aunts, and grandparents, plus his godparents and their seven-year-old son, Jason. After the cake and the singing and the presents were all over, Will let us know how pleased he was by doing his new dance for us - a shy twirling in place that he had invented several days before with lots of fancy arm work.

We were all circled around him admiring his dance when Jason simply could not stand it anymore. He charged through the circle, put both of his hands on Will’s chest, and shoved. Will fell hard. His rear end hit first, then his head, with a crack. He looked utterly surprised at first. No one had ever hurt him before, and he did not know what to make of it. Then he opened up his mouth and howled, but not for long. His mother hugged him and helped him to his feet and the first thing Will did was to totter over to Jason. He knew Jason was at the bottom of this thing, only since no one had ever been mean to him before he did not know what the thing was. So he did what he had always done. He put his arms around Jason and lay his head against that mean little boy’s body, and at that moment all my Christian conviction went right out the door.

I will buy him a BB gun for his next birthday, I thought, Iron knuckles. A karate video for toddlers. It just about killed me, to think how that sweet child would have to learn to defend himself, but it was either that or eat dust on the playground the rest of his life, with some bully’s foot on the back of his head.”

Only if you look at the action and words of Christ on that first Easter evening or if you read Paul’s letter to the Romans, Taylor says, Will was right and I was wrong. . . What Will did to Jason put an end to the meanness in that room. What I wanted to do to Jason would only have multiplied it. Paul’s advice is idealistic, impractical, and dangerous to one’s health, but there it is: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Jesus’ first words to those who abandoned and denied him were, “Peace be with you.”

Taylor says Paul seemed to understand that the real enemy is not whoever pushes us down in the middle of our dance but whatever it is inside of us that wants to leap up and push back. . . When everyone has his or her dukes in the air and there is a loaded gun in every household, then the enemy will have won, because the whole point is to recruit the good guys by making them believe they are stopping the bad guys.”

But isn’t it interesting that even such a proponent of deceit and cunning as Machiavelli said that it was better to be loved than feared.

Behind locked doors the disciples hid in fear and guilt. Behind locked doors, that mix of emotions could fester and stew producing blame and prejudice and hatred. But Jesus’ love broke through with the message and challenge of reconciliation. The import of that message has not diminished. And so as we daily hear the effects of the weary world and its many wars; as we struggle with the temptation to blame everyone else for our lot in life, may the witness of Christ live on. When pushed down in the middle of our life’s dance may we, pushing past our fears, have the courage to say, “May the peace of Christ be with you.”

Amen.