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Wells Cathedral, Sunday 15 April 2018, Third Sunday of Easter
9.45 Cathedral Eucharist
In this season of resurrection, renewal from the dead, the great towering truth about the triumph of Christianity is told not only in the stories of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples who knew he had died, but also in the stories of those disciples being transformed into living embodiments of Jesus’s words and actions. So, we see in the story from Acts read just now how Peter confidently communicates the good news about Jesus after he and John have cured a lame man. This is the reason why so many readings at services this season are taken from the Acts of the Apostles which was written expressly to depict the growing success of the movement started by Jesus.
It is entirely understandable that the Apostles should stand prominently in service readings at this time, just as it is understandable that figures of them stand in this and other churches as symbols of the sureness of faith. You have only to let your eye move along the line of great saintly figures below the enthroned Christ high on the west front to be assured that the people who knew the earthly Jesus and inherited his authority possessed confidence and certainty, unflinching in faith and undaunted against opposition, the kind of people not to meet in an argument: they would turn you into mental mincemeat.
But wait a minute. Theremust be something wrong here. Those beetle-browed Apostles, whose missionary zeal took them away from their homes in Galilee to the ends of the Mediterranean and the world had only a short time earlier shown anything but confidence and bravery. They had been anything but discerning and wise. How many times had they failed to understand something that Jesus had taught, or had done? How many times had they exasperated him by asking for explanations of his parables in words of one syllable, or by sending away sick people who wanted his touch, or refusing to let the little children come to him? Although he had chosen them himself, too often they seemed to misunderstand what he was about, squabbled over positions next to him, as in the case of James and John, made declarations whose very exaggeration exposed their hollowness, as in the case of Peter, or abandoned him in sly betrayal when he seemed to let them down, as in the case of Judas. These were the men who, at the first hint of danger, ran away from Christ in a confused and unseemly mob, and as for Peter the Rock, when he was confronted by the maid in the courtyard, he denied vehemently that he even knew the man.
These are the disciples in the Gospels and, to be honest, their record in the Acts of the Apostles is not much better. Although Peter demonstrates Christ’s powers of healing and speaking in stories such as the one in today’s first reading, he still shows unreformed prejudice in refusing to eat with unclean Gentiles until his dream about the sheet being lowered down. And he makes the most of his position as head of the Apostles, travelling in style with his wife and enjoying expenses-paid accommodation– not for him a B&B on the ring road when there is the Swan in the centre of town.This at least is what Paul reveals in the complaint he makes to the Christians in Corinth. As for Paul himself, burning with the Gospel he may have been, but he was nevertheless scorching towards anyone who crossed him. He couldn’t keep a friend, went on about his bodily ailments, and had no time for diplomacy in his writings – ‘You stupid Galatians!’ – he showed all the signs of a hypochondriac paranoid sociopath who was riddled with envy of the ‘real’ Apostles.
Even a casual reading of the New Testament reveals these men who followed Jesus, the leaders of the faith who have become patrons of the churches, as rather less and rather more than the figures carved in stone and moulded in plaster. They are revealed as truly fallible men of their day, and I imagine the women who accompanied them were little different. They have the foibles and fallibility, the weakness, small-mindedness and self-centredness of real men and women. And yet, according to the writer of Acts, who we can call Luke, it was through them that Christianity triumphed. For if in his Gospel, the first part of the work he wrote for Theophilus, Luke shows how the teachings of Jesus moved from the back of beyond that was Galilee to the regional capital Jerusalem, in the second part he shows how these teachings moved from the obscure backwater of Judea to the universal metropolis Rome. And there it triumphs, with Paul the protagonist at the end of the story living as a free man andpreaching about Jesus without hindrance.
What is Luke’s point in his portrayal of a resonant success emerging from so much resounding personal imperfection? He does not spell it out, though he must surely be saying that the earliest churchemerged from obscurity into the brightest light not because of the figures who led it, but almost despite them. The many cracks and dents in these figures, just like the ones on the stone Apostles on the west front, did not prevent them doing their best. They possessed numerous imperfections, but these did not debilitate them.
To you and me Luke could be saying something very similar: You have cracks and dents, you are by no means a plaster saint, but don’t let your blemishes mar your efforts. In other words, disregardyour personal needs and wants, and what you see as your shortcomings: keep on keeping on. Your part in the fuller story and your meaning within it may be hard for you to see. But rest content to be told that you, despite what you let get in the way, are as crucial and vital tothis story as any Apostle.