Drop the Rock (Proper 9A)

  

Drop the Rock

Proper 9 Year A

5 July 2026 9 a.m. Sung Holy Eucharist

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford Oregon

Zechariah 9:9-12; Psalm 145: 8 - 15; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30            

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

When I was in discernment for holy orders, I had a vivid dream:  I am standing on a pier, with one foot on the ground and one foot on a boat ready for departure.  The distance between the boat deck and the pier grows and grows, until I am stretched between the two.  I know I have to jump one way or the other, the boat or the shore.  But I want both:  I want to be on shore, with its restaurants, familiar friends, and the comforts of home.  I want to be on the boat, traveling to a far off and new land.  I want both, but cannot have both.  I’ll end up in the drink if I don’t jump soon.  And yet I hesitate.  Just as fall into the water and begin to sink, I wake up.

 

In my life, I have often had that feeling: torn between two goods, knowing I cannot have both. Sometimes I’ve been torn between a good and a not-so-good thing, that I wanted all the same.  One foot here, one foot there.  Indecisive, or decisive and rapidly changing my opinion.   I felt this when as a teenager I first came to faith.  I felt it when I married Elena and we started our family.  I felt it when I chose to pursue Biblical Studies at the Catholic University of America instead of Classics at Urbana-Champaign. I felt it when I joined the Foreign Service, and when Elena and I became Episcopalians.  I felt it when I was in discernment for holy orders.  I felt it when Elena died and I retired from full-time ministry.  I felt it when I came out of the closet and started dating men, and when Will and I fell in love and decided to get married here at Sat. Mark’s.  Sometimes, I felt this being of two minds as a “temptation” or test of my will when there seemed to be a moral dimension to the decision, when the choice was not between two good things, but between a good and an evil. But the structure underlying the feeling was always the same:  conflicting and unformed desires at war with each other. 

 

C.S. Lewis once made a profound comment about those who have difficulty with faith because they can’t get God to answer their questions or grant their petitions in prayer.  In his retelling of the myth of Psyche and Eros, the main character says bitterly near the end of the story that the gods cannot speak to us openly, nor answer us, until we ourselves find the ability to express the real desire of our hearts. Most of us, most of the time, desire what we know not, or want things that in and of themselves preclude other things we want:  profligate spending versus building up a hefty savings, health vs. the habits or vices that destroy it, a life of unrestrained pleasure vs. a happy family life--of any shape of family--built on trust and faithfulness, top professional success vs. high quality family life. The problem is that we often do not even have a clue what our real desire is, or are sadly mistaken about it.  Lewis writes, “[God] cannot meet us face to face until we have faces.”

 

This division within our minds and wills, this fuzziness of what we want, the contradictions between our competing desires are often put into metaphorical form by that image we know from the cartoons: a little angel sitting on one of our shoulders arguing with a little devil sitting on the other one, both of them looking like us, but one with halo, wings, and harp, and the other with horns, tail, and a pitchfork.  The image, as laughable as it is, comes a very real experience in our hearts. Sometimes our competing desires are so acutely at odds with each other and we are so conflicted that it feels like we are actually in the middle of an argument apart from us, that we are being enticed by different personalities rather than simply arguing with ourselves or being indecisive.  This feeling, I believe, is where the ancient tradition of personifying a tempter, a devil, or a Satan, actually came from. 

 

In today’s reading in Romans, St. Paul describes the problem somewhat differently:  I don’t really know who I am or what I really want.  I decide to do some good thing, and then fail to do it.  I make a resolve to avoid some bad thing, and then find myself in the act.  The fact that I cannot really make up my mind, or that I change my mind, shows how important it is to have objective standards, a written Law: “If do the very thing I do not want to do, I by that fact agree that the Law is good!”  Paul goes on to describe his inner inconsistency and experience of obsession or compulsion almost as if he is divided or split: a Law of Sin in his members at war with a Law of God in his mind.   A little more abstract, perhaps, but basically: a little devil Paul on one shoulder and a little angel Paul on the other.   

 

This passage is often misread.  St. Augustine and then later Martin Luther took it in light of their own personal sense of guilt in struggles with sin, and thought Paul was talking about same guilt-ridden introspective conscience through which they saw the world.  Thus the great division between Law and Grace in Protestant theology arose.  But Paul elsewhere shows that he is perfectly happy in saying that he is “blameless” in keeping the Law, and “righteous” in the works it requires.  Paul is no lust-haunted Augustine or guilt-ridden Luther.  He simply is describing how hard it is to know who we are and what we want given how changeable and double-minded we are.   And he sees this as an intolerable burden, because it not only separates us from God, but alienates us from others and from our very selves.  This struggle, what he calls “this body of death,” makes it hard even to know who we really are.  Who will deliver us from it, he asks. Jesus Christ is his answer.

 

People in the thrall of addiction, whether to drugs or alcohol or bad relationships, or whatever, find themselves bound by obsession and compulsion.  Paul’s words “the evil that I do not want, that I find myself doing” rings truer to addicts than for most of us.  Most modern recovery programs aim at breaking the cycle of addiction by requiring a psychological reorientation, a spiritual change, a radical redirection of one’s attitudes, relations, and whole life.  That’s what the Twelve Steps seek to bring about in a person.  If you want what they have, they say, “You only have to not drink today, come to meetings, and change everything in your life.” 

 

An extremely influential keynote address at an AA national convention several years ago tells of us walking about in life with a burden:  one’s bad habits, attitudes, fears, hopes and desires, however messy and conflicting.  It’s like you are carrying a great rock.  But, we all say, “No.  You can’t take that away! It’s MY rock! It’s who I AM!  I gathered this together over the YEARS. Sure, it’s heavy, but it’s MINE.”  Like me at the end of that dream so many years ago, or Saint Paul with his "body of death," the addict finds herself drowning, helpless and hopeless, unable, like Paul, to follow through on the most solemn of resolves.   The people in the AA or NA or Al-anon rooms are on the shore, calling to the drowning person to try to save her.  And what is it they are calling?  “Drop the  rock!” 

 

Photograph (c) Charlotte Piho 

The Gospel today also speaks of conflicting desires.  The same critics had condemned both John the Baptist and Jesus:  John for being too conservative and austere and Jesus for being too welcoming and liberal.  Jesus rebukes these critics.   He quotes a popular proverb and compares them to naughty children in the marketplace who cannot be satisfied with anything because of their conflicting desires.  They taunt each other: little girls tease the boys who want to dance and play music which men used in wedding celebrations; little boys tease the girls because they want to practice the mourning songs and ululations women sing at funerals.  You can’t have it both ways, says Jesus. “Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds,” he concludes, that is, “doing the right thing is what shows whether you are wise, that is, whether you are integrated and have truly find yourselves.”   Then Matthew adds that saying that sounds so much more like the Gospel of John than it does any synoptic: the Father has given all things to the Son.  The point is that in Jesus, there are no self-contradictions, no competing desires, no alienation from God, others, or one’s self.  So Jesus ends the passage by telling us, basically, to “drop the rock.”  He offers to take on our burdens for us if we work alongside of him and learn from him.   The Message, a modern paraphrase translation of the Bible, puts it this way: 

 

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

 

“Get away with me and you’ll recover your life, you’ll find what your true desires are.”  The blessing I give to those who come to the altar rail asking for a blessing instead of taking communion is this:  May God bless and keep you, and give you your heart’s true desire.” 

 

We are a sorry lot, whether we have active addictions recognized by others or not.  We all are subject to obsession and compulsion at times, and all carry heavy burdens created from all our conflicting desires, hopes, and fears.   And God cannot really talk to us face to face until we begin to develop faces that are truly our own, hearts that hold our real desires.  It is by taking on Jesus’ yoke, taking on his task of announcing the kingdom in word and deed and healing the broken world, walking with him and working with him, that we begin to learn from him who we each really are and what we truly desire.   It is not something forced, regimented, or produced by a technique.  It is not the result of willing it, or submitting to some standard.  We let go, and let God.  Our new self distills like the dew in the morning.  We gain a true vision of ourselves and others.  Losing our false desires is like taking off a blindfold, like finally removing the pebble from our shoe.  It is like, in the middle of the summer heat, taking off a heavy winter coat.  It is wonderful.  Come with me to Jesus, and let’s let him show us how. 

 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Trust Beyond Understanding (Proper 8A)

  

 

Detail of a mosaic from Beit Aleph, a 6th-century CE synagogue in Isra'el, 

showing the Akedah Yitzach, the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac 

 

  

Trust beyond Understanding

Proper 8 Year A

28 June 2026

9 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford, Oregon

Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

  

Several years ago, I had a conversation with one of my Hebrew teachers, an Israeli Jew, about faith.  He explained that he experienced the holy through identity, being a Jew living in the land his tradition tells him God promised to his people, and through, as he put it, “going through the motions” of being a Jew, saying the prayers, going to Synagogue, keeping, “within reason” as he said, the distinctive practices of his people. 

 

I told him that the heart of my faith was experiencing a sense of forgiveness of my sins and failings because of what Jesus did for me, suffering and dying on the cross.  Trying to link my faith to something more familiar, perhaps, for him, I said that my sense of relief of having Jesus’ sufferings substitute for the punishment I thought I deserved was like the story of Abraham binding Isaac in Genesis 22.  There, Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son, and at the last minute an angel stops Abraham’s knife by saying that “God himself will provide a ram for the sacrifice,” and lets Isaac off.  My friend’s response stunned me:  “No, no, no. You’re getting it backward, aren’t you?  In Genesis, Abraham is going to sacrifice his child and God tells him not to.   But you think that God moves from animal sacrifice and sacrifices his child?  And this is a good thing?  You Christians seem to be going in the wrong direction on this one.”

 

I have since come to understand that the doctrine of atonement as substituted punishment is non-Biblical, and an outright slur against God and Jesus.  I have also come to understand that this story in Genesis 22 is a renegotiated understanding of a horrible practice of early bronze age Palestine, the killing of children to placate an angry deity who might kill your successive children if you didn’t put him first.  In the original story, Abraham probably actually kills Isaac.  But this is too horrible, so the story has been adapted to let Abraham, as well as God, off the hook.  

 

“God said, ‘Take your son Isaac, your only son, the one whom you love, ... and kill him … for me.’” This is a text of terror, a tale of horror.  It raises all sorts of questions, without a doubt one of the most troubling and disturbing stories of the Bible. 

 

Many commentators discuss it.  Eric Auerbach, in his great tour of Western literature, Mimesis, uses the story to show how Biblical narrative reaches out to the listener and demands acceptance or rejection, submission or revolt.   It demands that you react.  This narrative element is, I believe, why many universities are uncomfortable in teaching the Bible, even “as literature.”  The Bible, and this story most of all, does not want to be taken as mere literature.

 

Episcopalian writer Madeleine l’Engle retells the story with a twist: God puts Abraham to the test as in Genesis, but then expresses to the angels disappointment in how Abraham did.  God says that Abraham has failed the test that She has given him. 

 

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim understandings of the story have differed wildly, another indication of how uncomfortable the story makes us. 

 

A 4th cent CE mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna depicting the (near) sacrifice of Isaac.  

 

Christians traditionally have seen Abraham as a model of deep faith, who trusts God so much that he gives up all his hopes for the future.  We usually call the story “the sacrifice of Isaac,” and liturgically read it, as today, during ordinary time, when readings focus on day-to-day living and growing in the faith.  Christians often see in Isaac the beloved son as a prefiguring of Jesus as God’s beloved son. 

 

Jews call the story “the Binding (of Isaac)” and usually see it through his eyes.  They identify with Isaac, seeing themselves as the chosen but suffering nation, blessed and at times afflicted by a demanding Deity.  Like Isaac bound on the altar, they are miraculously saved, again and again, through God’s loving kindness.  They read the story on the Rosh ha-shanah, the first day of the Jewish year, and the beginning of the High Holiday season in the fall, which culminates in the Day of Atonement.   The high point of the service is the blowing of the shofar, a ram’s horn trumpet that brings to mind the ram caught in the thicket that serves as a substitute for Isaac at the end of the story. 

 

Muslims tell the story somewhat differently. The festival Eid ul-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, commemorates the story.   I lived in West Africa a few years ago.  I remember very vividly the days before Adha, called "Tabaski" in that part of the world, Muslim shepherds would drive large herds of sheep to the beach and then wash them in the sea before buyers would take them home, slaughter and roast them stuffed with rice, raisins, and dates, and them serve them as the main dish in their holiday meal.

 

The Quran says that when Ibrahim's only son reaches the age of adolescence, Ibrahim tells him that in a dream he has been commanded to sacrifice him (Surah as-Saffat 37.102-03).   The son, as devoted to Allah as his father, readily accepts. Ibrahim lays his son face down for the sacrificial slicing of the throat, but a voice calls out telling him that he has fulfilled the vision and passed the test.  Ibrahim is then rewarded with a large feast, in oral tradition said variously to have been a ram, a goat, or a sheep.  Though the Quran does not name the son, Muslims have always understood that it is not Ishaq or Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews, but rather his older half-brother Ismail or Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs. 

 

However this troubling story has made us all so uncomfortable over the centuries and produced such wildly different interpretations, we must remember one thing when we read it.  This story does not attempt to explain God to unbelievers or newcomers to faith.   No—it is for people already in a deep relationship with God.

 

Ellen Davis, Professor of Bible at Duke University, says this, 

 

“[T]he hard truth is that the world turns upside down for the faithful, more often than we like to admit. … The 22^nd chapter of Genesis is the place you go when you do not understand at all what God allows us to suffer and it seems asks us to bear – and the last thing you want is a reasonable explanation, because any reasonable explanation would be a mockery of your anguish. This story … is the place you go when you are out beyond anything you thought could or would happen, beyond anything you imagined God would ever ask of you, when the most sensible thing to do might be to deny that God exists at all, or deny that God cares at all, or deny that God has any power at all. That would be sensible, except you can’t do it, because you are so deep into relationship with God that to deny all that would be to deny your own heart and soul and mind. To deny God any meaningful place in your life would be to deny your own existence. And so you are stuck with your pain and your incomprehension, and the only way to move at all is to move toward God, to move more deeply into this relationship that we call faith. That is what Abraham does: without comprehension, nearly blinded by the horror of what he was told to do, Abraham follows God’s lead, for the simple and sufficient reason that it is God who is leading – to what end, Abraham has no idea.” 

 

Reading this story as if it’s about obedience and testing makes it an ugly story indeed.  Many rabbis in the Talmudic tradition note that Sarah dies in the next chapter, probably of a broken heart, and that this is the last time scripture says Abraham walked with God.  In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard says that an Abraham willingly obeying this wicked command is an Abraham whose hand is not stayed by the angel at the end.   No—this is not about obedience.  It is about trusting God and religion even when they demand horrible, inhuman things, and not accepting the horror as a permanent fixture of the universe or truly reflective of the heart of God.  That’s an important lesson for us, especially pertinent on this Pride Weekend here in Medford.   Just as God doesn’t demand human sacrifice, God does not ask us to loath, reject, and persecute people who love differently that we do.   

 

 

In the story, God commands something that is against everything God has promised.  God behaves in a way that is contrary to everything Abraham knows about God.   The child Abraham is called to sacrifice is the very child through whom God’s promised blessing to Abraham would come.

 

The great post-Holocaust Jewish theologian Eliezer Berkovits, in With God in Hell, explains that this trust beyond understanding is what kept Jewish faith alive despite the Nazi mass murders.   He imagines Abraham saying to this God during the heart-broken walk to Moriah: 

 

“In this situation I do not understand You. Your behavior violates our covenant; still, I trust You because it is You, because it is You and me, because it is us….

 

“Almighty God! What you are asking of me is terrible…. But I have known You, my God. You have loved me and I love You. My God, you are breaking Your word to me…. Yet, I trust You; I trust You.”   (Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps [New York and London: Sanhedrin, 1979], 124.

 

I had a spiritual director once who told me that love was risk.  “Love means putting your heart out there where the beloved can break it.   This is all the more the case when it comes to loving God. This is certain:  sooner or later, God will break your heart.  At least that’s how it will feel.”   That is just the nature of an intimate relationship.  When we go through hell, we go through hell with those we love, for good or for ill.   Abraham goes through this with the very God who he thinks is causing him the pain.  He does so because he loves him. 

 

Saying God here was testing Abraham merely expresses how things look to us when we are suffering. We feel that maybe God is putting us to the test, though we know that God has no need of such evidence, since he already know our hearts completely.  It is an insult to God to say that somehow God was actually checking to see whether Abraham would obey such a horrible command.  Again, this story is about the human heart, not the heart of God.

 

Loving the Living God, the God of Abraham and Jesus, is dangerous, fraught with risk.  Sometimes it will hurt like hell.  It will rob us of any meaning or sense.   Our heart will be broken by the one we love best. We will find ourselves, in the words of Dante, “midway in our life’s journey lost in a dark wood.”  We must descend into hell and come out the other side into joy. 

 

Only the stark cross stands before us.  But beyond the cross, is resurrection morning.  Hidden in the bush, there is a ram.  God’s angel stands where we cannot see, ready to keep us and save us though we have no idea how.   All we need to do is in bewilderment keep on putting one foot in front of the other as we climb Mount Moriah.  All we need is trust beyond our understanding. 

 

Amen.   

 

A Believing Heart (Easter 2A)

 

The Doubt of St. Thomas, James He Qi 

   

“A Believing Heart”
Second Sunday of Easter (Year A)
12 April 2026
Homily Delivered Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin, Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

10 am Sung Mass 
Acts 2:14a, 22-32 ; 1 Peter 1:3-9 ; John 20:19-31 ; Psalm 16

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

 take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

Moments of hopeless despair come to us occasionally.  One for me occurred in Lewes Delaware in the early 80s:  my wife Elena and I had taken our still growing family to the beach.  After a long, relaxed day, the sun was about to set. No one was left on the beach but us.  Elena was sheltering from cool evening wind under a blanket; I was reading.  We each thought the other was watching the children, playing in the sand beside us. Elena suddenly said with terror in her voice, “Where’s Lonnie?”  We looked up and down the beach as far as we could see.   Our four-year old was nowhere to be seen.  Panicking, I began to run along the beach in the direction we had last seen him, trying to spot him on the beach in the lowering mists and scanning the water: that vast Atlantic Ocean only feet from us, its rising treacherous surf just high enough to sweep our little boy off of his feet.  The last people we had seen on the beach, maybe 15 minutes before, looked sketchy at best.  Now, in our imaginations, they seemed like monstrous threats to children.   The growing twilight focused our fear into one spot of sharp despair in our hearts. Holding hands, Elena and I prayed against hope, “God please help us find Lonnie.  Please keep him safe.”   Then Elena said, “It’s a distance to the changing room, but maybe he went to the bathroom without telling anyone. You know how private he is.”  So I ran back toward the barrier dunes. Just as I got to the boardwalk, there was Lonnie, walking calming and quietly back from the rest room.    I hugged him hard. He seemed puzzled at all the sudden attention from Mom and Dad.

 

Elena and I were very thankful.  Lonnie was safe as we had prayed.  Thinking about it afterward, we wondered, had God answered our prayer?   Or had we just misunderstood things and gotten very frightened needlessly?  No one had bothered Lonnie in the restroom, and he had not lost his way.  And he most certainly had not drowned.  From his point of view, nothing remarkable had happened at all.  From ours, the world itself had changed, and we were very thankful. 

 

It’s like that a lot with answers to prayers and miracles in our lives:  though from inside they seem to be overwhelming evidence of God’s care and love, perhaps even providence or supernatural intervention, from the outside they can be explained as misunderstandings, the resolution of groundless fears, the normal working of nature, or, perhaps mere coincidence. 

 

When I was a boy, I was taught that God heard and answered prayers, and that miracles just like those in the Bible could happen to us, if we were righteous enough.   But then I grew up.   We live in an age of science and of sophistication.  Growing up means absorbing that. 

I admit it: Doubt is a good thing, something that helps keep us safe from hucksters, grifters, and con-men, and from misunderstanding the varied and puzzling sense perceptions that pour in.   God placed doubt in our hearts, and made it a part of growing up, to help keep us safe.  It is part of our survival instinct. 

 

But we are diminished if we let doubt rob us of our sense of gratitude and wonder.   A subtle, niggling voice in the back of my head now is almost always there, ready to chime in at moments of joy and thankfulness and say, “An answered prayer?  A miracle? Maybe not so much.”  It discourages me from praying, or at least actually asking God for what I desire in my heart.  I am afraid of having my heart broken:  asking what I desire deeply, something good and right, and then getting that hope slapped down.  

 

I admit this by way of confession:  whatever change has happened in my heart, it is not entirely good.  I can confess it publicly today without much embarrassment because I think that most of us have suffered a similar loss as we became adults. 

 

In today’s Gospel, it is clear that Thomas has suffered such a loss of innocence: “I won’t believe Jesus has come back from the dead unless I see it with my own eyes touch it with my own hands!”  It’s really unfair to sum up this story and the whole of St. Thomas’ life by saying that he, Doubting Thomas, was the lone skeptic among the disciples.  In every one of the stories of the resurrection of Jesus, all the disciples—bar none—at various times expressed doubt or fear at what they were told or even what they saw. 

 

The heart’s disposition reflects who we are.  As the Proverbs say, “As a person thinks in their heart, so are they” (Prov 23:7).  And as we see in the story of the choice of David as king, “Human beings judge people on outward appearances, but Yahweh looks on their heart” (1 Sam 16:7).

 

So in today’s story, Jesus tells all of us, along with Thomas, “do not doubt, but believe.”  The Greek text is clearer than our translation here:  do not be apistos, but be pistos— do not be unfaithful but faithful, do not be untrusting but trusting, do not be untrustworthy but trustworthy. 

 

Be believing.  Be faithful.  Be trusting.  There are so many scriptures that play on this theme!  Jesus ends most of his parables with “let the one who has ears, hear!”  Without a trusting disposition of the heart, we are deaf to any voice that matters. 

 

Paul says, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7).  And because of this faith, he says, we are not afraid, either to live or to die.  Trust and love have replaced fear. 

 

Jesus in John’s Gospel says it is how we react to his words, in a trusting or a rejecting manner, that reveals who and what we are: “I came not to judge, but to save.  It is my word that has already created a judgment of sorts—how you react to it tells who you are” (John 12).  

 

I suspect that most of the stories of miracles and deeds of wonder in scripture tell things in such a way that this implicit judgment is evident in the telling of the story:  how could the Egyptians, the backsliding Israelites, or the Pharisees not be wicked when they persist in fighting God and Jesus in the face of such clear evidence of the miracles as narrated?

 

But I think that events in real human lives lying behind such stories probably were for the people there a bit more ambiguous.   For whatever reason, God seems to have made the world in such a way that we are never forced by evidence to believe in him.   God wants willing trust, not coerced obedience.   I suspect this is because forced trust is not really trust; compelled love, not really love.    To be sure, moments occur that seem overwhelmingly convincing.  But usually this is at the end of a series of small steps in the ambiguous dark.  We draw close to God in faith by little steps, and God responds once in a great while with a giant step toward us.  But then the moment is gone, and we are left with our memory.  And memory itself is very ambiguous.  Faith often consists in persisting in our trust and love from those high moments even in the dark, dry periods that follow. 

 

Whether you believe in God, or the Bible, or religion, is not the issue.  But having a trusting, believing heart is at the core of being a happy and balanced person.  It is at the heart of being a Christian.  Having a trusting heart is at the core of being trustworthy: honesty breeds honesty. A believing heart wisely lets the niggling voice raise its doubts, but does not let it rob us of our thanks, trust, and hope.  A believing heart persists in openness to the strange, the unprecedented, and the as yet unseen.  It does not belittle the faith of others, even when it seems strange or silly.  A believing heart continues to pray, and to act and serve as if all the good stories are true, even when doubt comes.  A believing heart is a great bulwark against fear.  It senses intuitively that there is no problem so big, no disaster too awful, no corner so dark that God cannot help us through it.  While a believing heart is not belief in magical control of things to suit ourselves, it cultivates and honors a sense of wonder and magic at the heart of everything.  It recognizes the love that is beneath and behind all things. 

 

Trusting God through the dark, expressing thanks through the ambiguity, praying and asking for help despite our niggling interior voice, and trying to be honest with God and ourselves through all of this leads us through the doubt and finally brings us to that light where there is no room for anything but thanks, just like for Thomas in today’s reading. 

 

John Bell and the Iona Community set words about this story to the traditional Scots Gaelic tune Leis an Lurghainn, and called it Tom’s Song:  

 

Where they were, I’d have been;

What they saw, I’d have seen;

What they felt, I’d have shown,

If I knew what they’d known.

 

Refrain

“Peace be with you,” he said,

“Take my hand, see my side.

Stop your doubting, believe

And God’s spirit receive.” 

 

So I made my demand

That unless, at first hand,

I could prove what they said,

I’d presume he was dead. 

 

All their tales I called lies

Till his gaze met my eyes;

And the words I’d rehearsed

Lost their force and dispersed.

 

When I stammered “My Lord!”

He replied with the word,

“Those who live in God’s light

Walk by faith, not by sight.” 

 

Some, like me, ask for proof,

Sit and sneer, stand aloof.

But belief which is blessed

Rests on God, not a test. 

 

Refrain

“Peace be with you,” he said,

“Take my hand, see my side.

Stop your doubting, believe

And God’s spirit receive.” 

 

Tom's Song  

 

As we go forth into our ambiguous world, marked with beauty and joy but also with terror and despair, a world that demands doubt from us as a self-defense mechanism but also gives us a hope for miracles, let us take faith and trust and belief to heart, and with hope transcending this world’s threats and fears, including death itself, come joyfully to that locked away upper room and with blessed Thomas take hold of our risen Lord’s hand. 

Thanks be to God, Amen

 

From Proclamation to Stories of Faith (Easter A)

  

From Proclamation to Stories of Faith
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D.

Easter A
5 April 2026 9 a.m. Sung Eucharist

St. Luke Episcopal Church, Grants Pass (Oregon)

Acts 10:34-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

May the light of Christ, rising in glory,
banish all darkness from our hearts and minds.   Amen.

 

The story of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the heart of our Christian faith.   But we live in a secular time, and I have gotten used to hearing the question about this time of year, from believers and unbelievers alike, But Tony, do you really believe it?

 

It just seems too fantastic, as some kind of wish fulfillment fantasy.  It goes against what our universal experience as human beings is:  Dead people just don’t come back to life. 

 

Occasionally some add, “How can you believe it? If you compare all of the stories about it in the gospels, it’s clear they are late, contradict each other, and grew in the telling.”

 

But though these stories were in fact written decades after the events they recount, and though they show up all the marks of having grown in the telling, the earliest form of this tradition that has survived is not found in the stories in the Gospels at all.  It is not even a story.  It is a fragment of apostolic preaching found in St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians.  Writing barely a decade and a half after Jesus’s death, Paul tells us of what he was taught after his experience on the Road to Damascus:

 

 “For I passed on to you the tradition that I also received: that Christ died for our sins …, that he was buried, that he rose the third day, … and that he appeared, first to Cephas [Peter] and the Twelve, then to over 500 Christians at once (some of whom … are still alive), then to James [the brother of Jesus] and the apostles. … and last of all … to me” (1 Cor 15:3-8).

 

It is from this early citation of the preaching of Jesus’ comrades that grow the later gospel stories.  And the direction of evolution is clear. 

 

The earliest story as such that has survived is the Gospel of Mark, written about 40 years after Jesus’ death.  In it, the women return to the tomb early on the morning after the Sabbath with spices to properly anoint the body of Jesus, which had been dumped in the tomb in haste just before the Sabbath started.  They see the stone has been rolled back, and a young man (an angel) in a white robe tells them that “Jesus … has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him” (Mark 16:6).  You see, the words of the early apostolic proclamation “he rose,” have been placed onto the lips of a character in the story, the angel: “He is risen.”  Then the angel adds, “Go tell the disciples … that he is going to Galilee.  There you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:7).  Here again, the early apostolic proclamation “he appeared” is placed onto the angel’s lips in this narrative, but now in the future: he will appear.  Mark does not narrate the resurrection of Jesus as such, but tells of an empty tomb and lets his audience’s imaginations do the rest. In the original form of Mark, the story ends abruptly with the women fleeing from the tomb in terror and saying nothing to others because of their fear (Mark 16:8).   

 

The next Gospels to be written, Matthew and Luke, about 15-30 years later, take Mark’s story and develop it. Matthew adds a lot of narrative detail. He develops the story about the guards and the stone, and brings in an earthquake that opens graves throughout the city, marking this event as part of the resurrection of the martyred righteous on the last day in Jewish apocalyptic literature.  This is how Matthew fleshes out the apostolic preaching’s “he was raised.” The women run excitedly to report to the disciples. As the women are running to tell the disciples, Jesus actually appears to them (Matt. 28:9) and the early apostolic preaching’s “and he appeared” becomes part of a narrative rather than simply the apostolic affirmation quoted in Paul or a report of the angel as in Mark.

 

In Luke, the women tell the disciples what they have seen, but they don’t believe them, thinking that they are just women’s “idle tales” (Luke 24:11).  But Peter runs to the tomb, and looks in—there he sees “the linen clothes by themselves” (Luke 24:12).  This added detail seems to be an effort to explain the actual raising of Jesus proper, suggesting that somehow the corpse of Jesus had simply evaporated when he rose, leaving the burial clothes lying there. This element of the story in Luke is later taken up in exquisite detail in John.  

 

Luke then adds the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Easter evening (Luke 24:13-35). Jesus incognito appears to them, talks to them, and finally they recognize him as he explains the scriptures (in the early apostolic preaching, Jesus died and was raised “according to the [Hebrew] scriptures.”    In looking back on it, they say they recognized him in the breaking of the bread, suggesting that the eucharist was one of the ways Jesus appeared. This story in Luke was circulating among early Christians, for it shows up in extremely abbreviated form in some manuscript copies of Mark where scribes added later, longer endings using these traditions found in Luke to help bring that originally truncated Gospel into harmony with the others (Mark 16:12-13). 

 

Luke then has the two disciples return to Jerusalem to tell the news.  All of this is on Easter evening.  When they tell their story, the disciples reply that Jesus has appeared to Peter (Luke 24:35).  Again, the apostolic proclamation is placed on the lips of characters in the story.  But Luke narrates Jesus appearing to the disciples as well (Luke 24:36-43).  There is great detail—“See my hands and my feet—it really is me!” he says, “I am no ghost, look I have flesh and bones!”  Then to prove it, he eats some broiled fish they give him. 

 

Today’s Gospel in John, written another 30 years later than Matthew and Luke, tells the story about Mary mistaking the risen Jesus for the gardener, the competition between John and Peter to run to get to the tomb first, and greater elaboration on the strangely placed burial clothes.  A form of Luke’s story of Jesus appearing to the disciples the evening of Easter is taken up by John.  It is the familiar story where Thomas is not present to witness Jesus reappearing bodily on  the evening of Easter, but then is there a week later to see a later appearance.   Interesting, for John, the sending of the Spirit occurred not 50 days after Easter on the Day of Pentecost, but on the evening of Easter Sunday, when Jesus “breathes” it into his disciples (John 20:19-29). 

 

Other snippets of differing stories show up in addendums to the four Gospels, with Jesus appearing also in Galilee, whether on a mountain or on the lakeshore. 

 

If we move another few decades ahead, we start seeing in Gospels that were not included in the canon actually recounting in narrative the resurrection itself.  In the Gospel of Peter, the two soldiers see it all:  the heavens open, two angels descend in a great flash of light, the stone rolls away by itself, and then angels come out of the tomb, supporting a third person walking with difficulty, apparently Jesus still wounded from the cross.  There follows a glowing floating cross.  A voice comes from heaven “You have preached to the dead,” and the cross, which also is apparently a talking cross, replies, “Yes.” 

 

It is clear that over time, greater and greater details were added.  It is also clear that reflection on Hebrew Scripture, especially the Psalter, informs each retelling.  But those of us who pray the Psalms daily know that this collection of poems and hymns is above all a book about emotion—the whole range of human emotion, from love, and adoration, to joy, to sorrow, to homicidal rage.  It is understandable why such a book would have exerted such a central role in the process of the formation of memory and the retelling of such emotion-laden stories.   Memory, after all, is a matter of emotion, not stenographic recording.  And all memory morphs over time. 

 

But that does not mean that all the details in the canonical Gospels are simple artifacts of story-telling, with no grounding in events.  Remember—the earliest reports, even before the story-tellers’ art began to spin these tales—was this: “Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared.”  

 

As a historian, I find a purely mythological reading of the resurrection stories to be unconvincing. The early disciples were no fools.  They knew the difference between wishful thinking and personal experience.  The idea that the stories of Jesus’ being was raised were merely a figment of the imagination of Jesus’ disciples mourning him in grief groups is to my mind hardly likely.  There is just too quick a shift—from utter demoralization and despair at Jesus’ death to bull-headed and joyful optimism and willingness to suffer martyrdom for Jesus’ sake—at the origin of Christianity. 

 

For me, it is a much more probable to say that something shocking and unusual, something unique, happened on Easter morning than to argue that the early apostolic proclamation arose simply as the result of a group of Jesus’ followers sitting shiva and proof-texting the Hebrew scriptures.  The problem, of course, is whether we allow for the possibility of such a thing.  It was the experience of witnessing this unique thing, the bodily reappearance of a living Christ who had been dead, that led the disciples to reconsider everything they had seen in his life, and reaffirm their faith that he was indeed the hoped for Messiah, despite the fact that he didn’t conform to all the triumphant connotations that figure held in many Hebrew scriptures. It led them to relabel his miserable sufferings and death as the embodiment of the suffering servant songs of Second Isaiah as well as the psalms talking about suffering and persecution.    

 

I really do believe that Jesus of Nazareth, dead and buried after being brutalized by the Roman Imperium, was somehow raised from death into a new and more vital form of life, and came to his friends more alive than they had ever seen him before.  It was so unusual, in fact, that in some of the stories, the disciples don’t even recognize Jesus. But they all eventually recognize the one standing before them as the same person as their friend who had died on a cross days earlier.

 

Siblings in Christ:  Christ died for our sake.  He was buried.  One and a half days later, he came forth again, and he appeared to his disciples. He appeared in such a way that they knew he was no resuscitated corpse, no ghost, no dream, no wish-fulfillment.  It was wholly unprecedented and the disciples clearly had problems finding adequate language to express what they had seen, felt, and experienced.  They finally settled on an obscure mythological image from the Book of Daniel to describe what they had seen and experienced.  There, the deep injustice of the death by torture of righteous Jews by the Seleucid Greek Syrians before the Maccabean revolt was seen as rectified by the idea that in the last day, the dead martyrs would come to life again, be reconstituted with their bodies, only “shining like the stars in heaven” (Dan12:2-3).Thus the historical experience of Jesus’ bodily reappearance seen in the apostolic preaching was interpreted and explained as “resurrection from the dead,” an eschatological act of God.  Many of the details in the stories as they evolved reflect this mythological understanding of that unique historical event.    

 

Christ’s victory over death, hell, and evil is a victory over fear. meaninglessness, bitterness, and remorse.   It is God’s great joke on the world, and must silence all hopeless irony that says “don’t you believe it!”  No.  Rather, “BELIEVE IT!” We are not doomed to failure and despair.  We are not destined for permanent oblivion after sickness, diminishment, inevitable decline and dignity-destroying death.   We are invited to share in his life. 

 

Jesus’ coming forth as life itself means that death does not have the final word.  Fear does not have the final word.  Law and judgment do not have the final word.  Vengeance does not have the final word.  Oppression will cease.  We are not doomed to regret and pain.  War does not have the final word, nor does violence. 

 

Alleluia!  Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!