Second Sunday of Easter

I don’t know, exactly, how decorative trends develop. But they do. A few years ago, pineapples were very fashionable. They were strewn throughout the homeware section of Target. In the 1980s, white geese with blue bows around their necks were all the rage – a kind of farmhouse chic, long before Joanna Gaines came along with her shiplap siding. And then in the 70s, there was a decided trend towards mushrooms, in orange and green, plastered on kitchen canisters.

And this is all in the way of preamble to another decorative trend from the 1960s and 70s: butterflies. They were everywhere: posters, colorful patches on bell-bottomed jeans. And they were especially popular in churches. (I suspect that’s the era when that altar frontal showed up at St. John’s.) But they were more than just decorative. This was the era of “born again Christians,” and butterflies became a symbol of this born-again life. You might start out as a creepy little slug-like thing, but when you accept Jesus in your heart, you became this glorious butterfly. And as a child raised in that culture, I have to admit, that image of the butterfly meant a lot to me. It really did.

But it never crossed my mind to wonder how that transformation actually happens for the butterfly. Turns out, it’s really gross. Inside its chrysalis, the caterpillar basically digests itself, releasing enzymes that dissolve all its tissue – reducing itself to just this nasty sack of goo. But there are little groups of cells that survive. “Imaginal discs,” they’re called. And they were there all along, even before the caterpillar had hatched from its egg. These imaginal discs were already in place, waiting to grow into each of the adult body parts it would need as a mature butterfly… discs for its eyes, for its wings, its legs. It’s amazing!

Why does it need this two-step process? Why didn’t God design the butterfly simply to be born a butterfly in the first place? I don’t know. But what it gives us is an example (or pattern) of how a single creature can basically die, and then reemerge – still the same creature – but utterly different, utterly unrecognizable from what it had been.

And this is useful for me as I try to make sense of Jesus’ resurrection. In all the post-resurrection stories about Jesus, there’s this reoccurring motif that I don’t hear much about, but seems fairly noteworthy to me. And that is, although Jesus had been literally resurrected, clearly, some significant physical transformation had taken place.

In this story (for example) the door is locked, but – somehow – that doesn’t seem to be a problem for “Jesus 2.0.” Physical barriers are simply no longer physical barriers. This Jesus is able to pass through, effortlessly. Earlier in that same day, when he met Mary Magdalene outside the tomb, she doesn’t recognize him; she thinks he’s the gardener. On the Road to Emmaus, Jesus is walking for miles with two disciples (Cleopas, and maybe, his wife), and they have no idea who they’re walking with until they invite him in for dinner and he says the blessing over the bread. (And then he vanished from their sight!)

So in every case, it is still Jesus. But something – physically – in this resurrected Jesus is dramatically altered. As dramatic, you might say, as a butterfly is from a caterpillar.

And this is more than just some amusing curiosity for me, because it has a bearing on what we expect of our own resurrections. As we say in the Creed, “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”

I know that popular belief generally imagines our souls immediately transport to heaven upon death (and I’m not saying they don’t). But I am saying, that assumption doesn’t capture the fullness of our Christian hope. I don’t know how to reconcile the paradoxes of our eternal souls from our physical bodies, or what happens immediately at death from what is yet to be. But Christianity has always taught that Jesus is “the firstborn of the dead,” that as he was physically resurrected, so will we be physically resurrected at Christ’s return, at an event that is yet to be.

And what these stories of Jesus’ resurrection show, (as do the butterflies), is that we can hope for a life to come that is so much more than just some ethereal, misty, bodyless existence in some heavenly atmosphere. And that this “so-much-more-ness” could include a physical version of ourselves that is in continuity with this life we have lived, but of a radically transformed nature – something far more significant than merely getting our 25-year-old bodies and hair returned to us!

But here’s where it gets really interesting and takes us beyond the butterfly example: Notice how, in all of these stories, the continuity of Jesus’ pre-resurrected and post-resurrected identity is described:

• For Mary Magdalene, it’s his voice. But not merely the tone of his voice, because she talks to him for a while before realizing it’s him. It’s that moment when he calls her by name, “Mary.” And suddenly she knows. Something in that transaction made Jesus recognizable to her (John 20:16).

• For the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, it was when he broke the bread and said the blessing: suddenly “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (Luke 24:31).

• And in this story: he emerges in the room; he says, “Peace be with you,” but that’s not enough. It’s only when he showed them his hands and his side – that is, his wounds from the crucifixion – that they know it’s Jesus and begin to rejoice (John 20:20).

It’s all very strange and bewildering, I know. I suspect it’s because he’s now in this new form and they’re in the old form. He’s a butterfly and they’re still caterpillars. He is now transitioning into this new physical reality that is no longer quite in sync with the same boundaries of this world as we know it.

So it leaves me with the impression that in these particular moments, and by these particular actions, he’s choosing to pull apart the veil between this world and the next in order to make obvious the essential connections he wants the disciples to understand.

And what seems to be the common denominator in all these little break-throughs (these epiphanies, if you will), is that the resurrected Jesus is identifiable – no longer by his body – but through those things that most signify the substance of his relationship with the disciples. Which suggests the future, resurrected life is all about our inter-relationality.

• He knows Mary by name. She is his intimate friend and companion.

• He wants to be known by the breaking of the bread – that sacramental mystery that will become an essential mingling place for Jesus and countless generations of disciples to come.

• He wants to be known by the wounds he suffered on the cross – that he participated in the finality of this human experience we will all have to endure, a saving event so essential to his incarnation and mission, that they remain with him like some badge of honor: “Worthy is the lamb who was slain.”

These are the ways he chose to be recognizable to his disciples. And as heirs of this tradition, they also become the ways we later disciples continue to discover him: that we are his intimate friends who he knows and calls by name; that we also can encounter him in sacrament of communion; that he does suffer and die with us and for us, such that we are never abandoned, not even in the grave.

So like the butterfly, who retains its “imaginal discs” from one embodied form to the next, so with Jesus, his imaginal discs appear to be all those things that bind him together with us. That which lasts, that which endures, that which has ultimate meaning in God’s eternal kingdom, is our complete and peace-filled union, the shalom of God, in which all things are gathered together as one.

And so it is, when he meets the disciples in that upper room, he breathes on them and says, “Peace be with you. Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.”

Everything about this exchange is about the continuity of our oneness with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit and our ongoing participation with him in the reconciling work of grace. Our imaginal discs – that which was in us from the beginning and will continue to define us in this life and in the life to come – is the power to forgive, for that is what eliminates the barriers that divide us.

Just this week (and I say this with her blessing), a friend forgave me for a significant way I had legitimately hurt her and failed her. And I cannot tell you how important that forgiveness was, for both of us. The spirit in that room, and which buoyed me for the rest of the day, was this deeply perceived awareness of coming out of the tomb. It was that real – that alive, that releasing and empowering. I cannot overstate how fabulous it is to be able to forgive, and to be forgiven. It is the gospel. And there is nothing in this world that forgiveness cannot redeem.

If there is any one thing that should define us as Christians, and us as a church, it is this commitment to forgive broadly and joyfully. What an extraordinary dignity and empowerment we hold as stewards of God’s grace. We get to be part of God’s ultimate intention to love, forgive, and restore this entire cosmos.

“Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.”

I don’t know what the life to come will look like. But I believe it will be real; I believe it will be physical (like this one, but more so); and I believe that the imaginal discs – that substance we carry from one life to the next – will be our inter-relationality. It will be the union itself – of both us with God and us with one another (and who knows?) us with all of creation!

As God is one, so we shall be one, as it was in the beginning, when God first breathed God’s breath of life within us creatures of dust, so shall it be forever and ever, amen.

And it is with just such a hope that St. John’s is honored to welcome seventeen new members today. May we be such a community of love and forgiveness for them; may they be such a community for us; and may we – together – be such a community that seeks to bless this world in which we live.