What does it feel like to be alive?

‘What does it feel like to be alive? Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed.

Can you breathe here? Here where the force is greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face? Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this’ (Annie Dillard, The Abundance (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016), 83).

In The Abundance, a series of meditations on the natural world, Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, meditates on what it feels like to be alive. Standing under a high waterfall, feeling the force of nature upon your skin, Dillard reflects on this acute sense of being alive. It is exhilarating, precarious and free. It’s an image to conjure with, especially as we reflect on our gospel reading today, which begins with a group of people locked away in that upper room.

In St John’s gospel, the story of the resurrection is followed by a sequence of stories about the meaning of the resurrection. We are familiar with John’s account of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Lord. Mary Magdalene weeps – and no one can doubt her personal sorrow. ‘They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him’. There is the disorientation of grief, the sense of her world having been turned upside down. There is confusion, questioning, bargaining…. The sorrow overwhelms her. She can barely bring herself to think about anything else.

The story today begins with a group of people locked away behind a bolted door. Few of us can fail to appreciate the echo of our own experiences these last two years. Many of us have had to get used to extended periods of isolation. The doors of churches and other public buildings bolted and locked shut. As the virus tore through communities and households, common fear gripped each and every one of us. We have learned something of the experience of fear described in the gospel today. No one can doubt for a moment how debilitating the power of fear can be. The disciples hide themselves away in the shadows. They are overwhelmed. They are frightened. This is not the outcome that they had anticipated when they cast their minds back to that moment of triumphal entry into the city of Jerusalem. Their Lord, their Messiah, has been crucified like a common criminal. So they hide away behind locked doors, barely able to breathe….   

And then we come to Thomas the Twin, Doubting Thomas as he is so often described. We know that Thomas is filled with doubt, but it is worth considering the character of this doubt. His doubts are not simply about the withholding of intellectual assent. John does not present Thomas as one wrestling with an epistemological conundrum. His doubts are about trust. Thomas refuses to believe what all the other announce unanimously: ‘We have seen the Lord!’ He rejects their testimony. He does not trust them. They are deluded.

And this is perhaps one of the reasons why we find talking about doubt so difficult in the life of the church. Doubt alerts us to the quality of trust which governs our life together. It helps us to see the character of our relationships. When trust is destroyed, the bonds of community can so easily feel threatened. Thomas’ criticism sets him apart. And yet before he is marginalised and swept aside by the rest of the crowd or dismissed as a heretic, the Lord appears and says: ‘Peace be with you’. Jesus meets and accepts Thomas just as he is. In that moment, there is peace, there is reconciliation, there is a recognition of the divine presence. My Lord and my God – one of the most profound expressions of faith in the entire Gospel.

The incidents which follow John’s account of the resurrection describe personal sorrow, common fear and individual doubt. And when John speaks of the grief of Mary Magdalene, the fear of the disciples, and the doubt of Thomas, he is making the point that the resurrection challenges us. It transforms every aspect of our lives, including our sorrows, our fears and our doubts.

And that is not to say that the resurrection offers us a perspective which enables us to look at the horror and torture of the cross through rose-tinted spectacles. The life of faith does not gloss over the cross. Faith faces the tragedy of the cross and the challenges of our lives. And faith helps us to make sense of them. This is the reason why John is at pains to tell us that when Jesus appears to his disciples and to Thomas, he shows them his hands and his side. The wounds are still there.

And as they gaze on those wounds, what do the disciples see? I think they see the mystery of love, a love which is not defeated or overwhelmed or destroyed in the face of suffering and pain and disaster. They see a love which is overwhelming and precarious, extravagant and glorious, that envelops and surrounds us just like that waterfall, the image with which I began.

In one of her essays, Annie Dillard reflects on the experience of coming to church Sunday by Sunday. When we consider the new life which is proclaimed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Dillard says this:

‘On the whole, I do not find Christians outside of the catacombs sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Stewards should issue life-preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense or the waking God may draw us out to whence we can never return’ (Annie Dillard, The Abundance (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016), 257).

That is the power of the risen Christ – the discovery of what it feels like to be alive. Beyond the experience of sorrow, fear and doubt, and all the challenges of the last two years and the many challenges we face today, pray that we may believe in that light, pray that we might learn to breathe again, that our hearts may be filled with joy at the good news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.