Paradigm Shift
Delivered at Madison
Chapel, Madison, MS
The Second Sunday of
Easter
Our Lectionary passages today offer a grab bag of images. We
see from the Acts passage a courtroom drama like that of Law and Order – Peter
and the Apostles versus Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. Then there is the image of
Jesus appearing suddenly amongst the frightened disciples and subsequently
confronting Thomas. We see the exiled John of Patmos beginning his transcendent
vision of the Coming of the Lamb by greeting the scattered believers in the
name of the Alpha and Omega – an introduction that summons, at least in my mind, anxieties about the images and
meanings of the book called Revelation.
What a
hodge-podge of imagery! In the weeks leading to Easter we had predictable
narratives of Jesus’ ministry and words. We scratched our heads with the
disciples as they tried to discern just what type of Messiah Jesus was; we
waved branches at his Triumphal yet ill-fated Entry into Jerusalem; we cringed
at his broken body hanging on the cross; we rejoiced when we heard the news yet
again that Jesus had been raised from the tomb, no longer among the dead but
dwelling with the living.
Now,
though, it seems that the whole of the Scriptures has been opened to us. Now
the Gospel seems to find fertile soil in every book of Scripture – from joyous
exaltations in the Psalms to the inspiring defense of the preaching of the
Gospel before the powers and principalities of the world.
The plan of
the lectionary tells the same story as the gospel itself: after the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ everything has changed, even our readings. I’d
like to call that a “paradigm shift,” one that we live into each year and must
meet with fresh understanding.
The phrase
“paradigm shift” comes to us from the world of science, specifically from the
mind of physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn. He defines the term as a “change
in the basic assumptions, or paradigms, within [a] ruling theory of science.”[1] A
scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter
anomalies that cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within
which scientific progress has thereto been made. It is a shift in the worldview
of the members of a specific scientific community that alters everything that
comes after that shift. An example of this type of intellectual revolution
would be the Copernican revolution when the idea that the earth was flat and
the center of the universe was thoroughly debunked.
These
transitions are anything but comfortable. Even in the face of profoundly
compelling evidence those who are entrenched in the former way of thinking can
violently resist the truth. After all, Galileo died under suspicion of heresy,
Jon Hus was burned at the stake, and Charles Darwin is often listed with Judas
and Hitler in terms of global evil. Yet the truth, once understood by those who
discover it, is compelling enough that they will endure careers and public
lives of torment in the name of that which they know.
It is this
tension of transition that is at the heart of our passages today, and, I
believe, at the heart of every believer in Jesus Christ. Paul testifies that
he, even he, struggles with the life lived in the middle of his former ways and
the ways of life he is called to embrace in Christ Jesus.[2]
The very nature of the antagonism between the Pharisees and Jesus in the
Gospels bears witness to the struggle for a new understanding of God and God’s
Kingdom to be born. So profound is the new reality of God’s redemptive activity
that Jesus likens it to being born again – everything old passes away and
something entirely new comes to take its place.[3]
How strongly do we interpret “new”
and “born again?” It seems that we are more inclined to build our understanding
of God in Jesus Christ upon those things that we have known before, to
integrate salvation into the categories of life that we are most familiar with.
But doesn’t “all things” mean “ALL THINGS?”
When we find the disciples huddled
together “for fear of the Jews” in their enclave they are defeated and lost.
They were living under the assumption that Jesus was dead, their movement was
defeated, and now they would surely die in shame. They had “left everything” to
follow their master, a master now gone from them. It was no small thing that
the Master was in absentia; in the
ancient world, to be a disciple meant to physically follow a teacher around.
Without the physical presence of Jesus to teach, preach, and heal, the
disciples had no identity. They had no reason to be together, to break bread,
to preach the Good News. Their understanding of Jesus’ identity and mission,
limited as that understanding proved to be, led them to be lost and adrift –
exiled from their synagogue for following an executed blasphemer, cut off from
the families they had left behind, and certainly afraid for their lives at the
hands of people like Saul.
When Jesus appears to the
disciples, something profound happens. His post-resurrection body bore the
evidence of his crucifixion, surely, yet we certainly cannot say that his
resurrected form was entirely “human.” He passes through locked doors, can
appear and disappear at will, and can “open” the minds of others to the meaning
of the Scriptures. He was something new, something different. He had become
something reborn; he is even called the “firstborn of the dead,” evidence that
he has a new kind of life about which we can only speculate.
His appearances to the disciples,
and eventually to Thomas, are important transitional encounters in the changing
of the “old” into the “new.” He is the first Master to have defeated death so
that he could continue to be with his disciples. He is the first one to
straddle the chasm between the things that were and the things that are to be.
He is, after all, the Alpha and the Omega, the one who stands at the beginning
and at the end. He is the one who can help the disciples see that there is a
new way of being a follower, a way that doesn’t require the presence of a
Master.
The key for us is that Jesus
imparts the Holy Spirit to his disciples. So quickly we jump from the
appearance of Jesus to his conversation with “doubting” Thomas that we forget
this profound hinge of the narrative. It is in this brief two verses that sit
in the middle of the passage that something new and profound happens. Jesus
breathes on the disciples the Holy Spirit and commissions them to act in
accordance with the Spirit’s work, that is, to forgive the sins of the world.
It is this activity in concert with the leading of the Spirit that enables the
disciples to still exist as disciples. It is in this pre-Pentecost endowment of
the Spirit of God that we find the power of the Gospel message.
After the encounter with Thomas we
read that John wraps up his profound Gospel, saying that these things were
written that we may believe. Jesus has just announced that a paradigm shift has
occurred: Thomas has seen the risen Master and has believed in him, but blessed
are those who believe without seeing. The clear invitation to the reader is to
believe even though we have never seen the risen Lord. What could make such a
profound shift in the Master/Disciple relationship that John would conclude his
gospel with such an invitation? Follow the thought – Jesus defeats death,
appears to the disciples, breathes on them the Holy Spirit, pronounces
blessings on anyone who believes without seeing. The only way we, the reader,
could believe without seeing is by the leading of the Holy Spirit. The only way
for us to claim Jesus as Master, as Lord, as God is if the Holy Spirit stirs
within us, confirming the truth of Jesus’ identity.
But this is not the way we do
things. We need evidence. We need proof. We, like Thomas, can’t help but ask
for a sign that Jesus is who he says he is. I don’t care about how Thomas is
treated by preachers around the world today; this lesson is about the Holy
Spirit. The presence of God’s Spirit in the lives of believers is that
motivating, convicting, leading force that enables our rebirth into the new
humanity exemplified by Jesus. The resurrection testified that a new paradigm
was in effect, that the old ways of thinking and working were passé, that God
was doing something new, something beyond our tradition and even beyond our
hopes.
Gone was the need for ritual
sacrifice to please God. Gone was the need for a high priest to mediate the
will of God to the people. Now everything was new; the world was beginning to
be reborn through the coming of the Spirit.
But this paradigm shift, just like
all the rest, brought discomfort. The disciples, emboldened by the Spirit,
disregard the orders of their religious superiors and testify again and again
about the new Life they have experienced in Jesus. They are not preaching a new
way of being Jewish – they are not building upon prior knowledge or developing
new interpretations of Torah. They are preaching that God has done something so
new and different that it transcends everything that has come before, demanding
a new worldview and new life.
The new life that was demonstrated
to the disciples in the resurrected Jesus was a hint, a foretaste of what the
renewed Creation would be like when God’s Kingdom is made fully real. It was
that moment, that revelation that changed the disciples’ cowardice into
courage. As soon as the Holy Spirit is breathed on the believers their behavior
changes from hiding in a locked room to being willing to be punished for
preaching in Jesus’ name.
It is the presence of the Holy
Spirit that must be the deciding and motivating factor in our ministry and
mission. Without the leading of that Spirit, this project we’re working on,
this congregation we’re growing, this Waystation we’re establishing, all of it
is merely academic. Only through the presence of God’s Holy Spirit can this or
any other church actually lead transformative change in the embrace and
forgiveness of the world.
It is that self-same Spirit that
invigorates our lives and leads us to confess with boldness that something is
different now. Something has changed about the world and we’re caught up in the
middle of it. It is the Spirit that enables and leads us to pronounce that our
lives are evidence of a paradigm shift in humanity. All evidence may speak to
the contrary, that is, evidence based upon and supported by our traditions, our
old expectations, our former way of thinking. But in this new creation, this
“new” that has replaced the “old,” we ourselves must testify that nothing, not
even death, is the same.
It is this Spirit that leads the
apostles to testify to their own elders, their own leaders, their own people
that nothing can ever be the same again. Against the objections and threats of
their own communities, against the best advise of the lawyers and scribes, and
against the pleas even of their own families, the believers can do nothing
else. They have been caught up in the newness, the resurrected reality of Jesus
promised humanity – they can’t help but testify to the new Birth.
I’m reminded in this Acts passage
of another courtroom scene. When Martin Luther was called before the collected
princes and religious leaders of his era in Germany, he, too, was threatened to
stop teaching or else. Yet he, caught up in a vision of the New Birth and the
life promised by Jesus in his resurrected form, uttered those powerful words
that I hope one day I have the courage to say: “here I stand; I can do no
other.” May our lives be so transformed by the reality of the new Birth in the
Spirit that we ourselves cannot go back to the old ways, the “before” ways, the
ways where death still wins the day. May we be so bold, so convinced, so
changed. Here we are – we can do nothing else. Amen.
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