Could there be anything in this life more glorious than a resurrection from the dead? The Reuters news agency carried the story, dateline: Managua, Nicaragua. Cesar Aguilera, 58 years old, was missing from his home in Tipitapa, east of the capital Managua. In fact, he had been missing for days. His wife and family were frantic. The authorities had no answers.
After a week with no sign of him, in desperation the family visited the Managua morgue. There amongst the cadavers they found the body—he'd been run over by a car.
With sorrow they arranged for it to be brought back to Tipitapa for burial. At the funeral the grieving family gathered beside the sobbing wife. The service began. Then without warning the door opened, and in walked Cesar! You can understand the place went berserk! And a child in the corner kept screaming, "Are you from this life or the other?" It was as if a resurrection had taken place!
Interviewed by a local television station the next day, Cesar Aguilera said he had simply been away for a week to care for some rural property, and had forgotten to tell his wife who was about to bury the wrong body (and perhaps was then tempted to bury Cesar himself!).
Can you imagine the moment? You're gathered to bury him and then he walks in! Just like a resurrection. Just like that Sunday night when the dead and buried Jesus walked through the doors of His own upper-room funeral. Who could forget it! And yet what we have too readily forgotten and too quickly overlooked is that John's account is really the story of two resurrections and it's the second resurrection our now third millennial church is still waiting for, isn't it?
"On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, 'Peace be with you!'" (John 20:19, NIV).* Who knows how many bars and padlocks the panicked disciples had slapped onto that upper-room door. Obviously they hadn't convened themselves for a Sunday evening worship service the record is too embarrassingly clear, the doors were locked "for fear of the Jews."
The 11 survivors of the slain preacher's rag tag band were utterly convinced that the same authorities who had brutally executed their Master on Friday were now on their trail with bloodhounds. Hence the locked doors. But of course the sublime truth of the Resurrection is that all the master locks in the world can't lock the Master out!
And so Jesus stands in their petrified midst with a smile and a "Shalom." And the place goes berserk. Fear. Shock. And perhaps a kid in the corner screaming, "Are you from this life or the other?" We aren't told how long it took for them to grasp the living and glorious Reality who stood before their gaping mouths. But what does become clear is that with His "Shalom" Jesus births the resurrection community that our own community of faith desperately needs to become:
"After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, 'Peace [Shalom] be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.' And with that he breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven'" (John 20:20-23).
Note it carefully: This is the portrait of a resurrection community. A community that resurrects and restores. A community that restores and forgives. Jesus says it of them: "If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven."
We seem afraid to accept Jesus' word about us as a Christian community Christ's inauguration of a new resurrection community. Certainly we don't like the idea of a formalized, humanly decided system of forgiveness. But in our fear of creating such a thing, and thus in our apologetic defensiveness, have we missed the high calling to us in these very words the calling of the Gospels' second resurrection?
For on that same dark weekend, there had been another death. Someone died. . .a thousand deaths, really. And if that fallen brother is not resurrected, there will never be a resurrection community. At all.
Remember the burly big fisher man who had been personally called by Jesus to fish for people the one who at his ordination swore his loyalty to Christ until death the one who became a leader appointed to the inner ministerial circle remem ber him the one who even when the chips were down at least trailed in the shadows behind his arrested Master the same one who much later in that same midnight hour turned the chilled night air blue with his obscenities of denial remember Peter the pastor? "
At that very moment, the last word hardly off his lips, a rooster crowed. Just then, the Master turned and looked at Peter. Peter remembered what the Master had said to him: 'Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.' He went out and cried and cried and cried" (Luke 22:60-62, The Message).
A thousand deaths in one ministerial fall. Requiem for a fallen brother.
Fallen in our midst
I have looked upon brothers (and sisters) who have fallen in our community and in our community of faith. The shame. The stigma. The sorrow, especially when it has become public.
I wrote a letter once to a brother who in humiliation fled our community practically under the cover of darkness. It was his birthday. It is my practice to send a personal birthday letter to every one of my parishioners. But I am ashamed to admit that on that day when I came to his letter, I hesitated.
What personal note should I inscribe on the bottom of his birth day letter to a now out-of-town address? Wouldn't it be easier to simply not scribble anything at all just a signature? Or maybe not even send the letter and let him think we'd simply forgotten? I'm embarrassed to confess my (un)pastoral conundrum.
Requiem for a fallen brother. Requiem is Latin for "rest." But is there any rest for a fallen brother or fallen sister in our community, our church?
What do we do with our fallen brothers? Strip them of their credentials? Burn their vestments, or at least revoke their ordination? Imprison them in their guilt by our collective or at least administrative silence, banishing their memory and their ministry forever from our midst? Requiem for a fallen brother. But is there any rest for the fallen in our midst? "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Gen. 4:9). How easy it is to dismiss him. But how hard it is to forgive.
Requiem for a fallen brother. And then there's the resurrection of Simon Peter.
One more resurrection
Because there is one more resurrection left in the Gospels, it is imperative that we move from the barred and shuttered upper room to the breathe-free, wind-swept shores of Galilee at night.
It's evening actually, when the story continues: "Simon Peter, Thomas (called Didymus), Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together. 'I'm going out to fish,' Simon Peter told them, and they said, 'We'll go with you'" (John 21:2, 3).
Remember that Simon Peter had fallen in as public a way as is humanly possible. He ground the name of Jesus like a cigarette butt beneath his cussing heel in front of the whole world that night.
Why, even Jesus heard his explosion of expletives! "I-do-not-know-that-blankety-blank-blank-man!" You can't fall any lower than publicly repudiating your Savior by your words, your life, your very lifestyle.
How long would a brother like Peter last in a community like ours? It is a shining testimony to the love of his brothers that Simon Peter did not have to go fishing all alone that night. "We will go with you," they said.
Would that we would do the same.
"So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing" (John 21:3). The moon is in its final quarter. It is a picture-perfect silvery night out on the waters of Galilee. Beautiful, but depressing. For Peter is not only morally fallen, he is now professionally failing fishing when he should be preaching.
As it so often happens, fast on the heels of a moral fall comes the professional failure. A double curse, a double indemnity, a double jeopardy for the fallen brother. No fish...all night.
But the night is about to end. And upon the first faint breeze of the dawn comes the hint of another resurrection.
"Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus. He called out to them, 'Friends, haven't you any fish?' 'No,' they answered. He said, 'Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.' When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish" (John 21:4-6).
In that instant young John recognized the Stranger on the shore and cried, "It's the Lord!"
And that was all the broken heart of his fallen brother needed to know. Grabbing his tunic, Peter plunged over the gunwales and splashed up the gray dawn shore to Jesus. Let the others bring in the catch, he must find the Savior. Such is the hunger of a fallen disciple's heart.
And after their early morning seashore breakfast with Jesus, the Gospel of John may as well have read, "When they had finished eating, it was time for a resurrection." For in front of all the rest, Jesus gazed through the campfire light, deep into the eyes and heart of their fallen brother.
"Three times, Peter, you swore to the world that you never even knew Me. And so three times I must ask you in front of these your brothers: Do you love Me? Do you love Me? Do you really love Me?"
And three times with the shame and weight of a thousand deaths upon his guilty heart, Peter, hardly able to look his Master in the eyes, in a humbled voice barely audible replied, "Yes. . . yes . . . yes." And three more times, the crucified and risen Savior of the world spoke the words of pastoral reinstatement, "Feed My lambs and My sheep." Such is the work of a shepherd. And in the Greek of John "shepherd" is interchangeable with "pastor." Which being interpreted means, the One who declared, "I am the good shepherd [or pastor]" (John 10:11) is the same One who less than 40 days after Peter's headlined moral failure and disgraceful public fall resurrected that fallen brother and reinstated him to his shepherding, pastoral ministry!
"Do you love me?" "Yes, you know I love you." "Feed my sheep." "Follow me" (John 21:15-19).
Requiem and resurrection for a fallen brother.
From fallen to risen
What does a fallen man have to go through, what does a failed woman have to do, in order to be resurrected and restored in a community like yours and mine? And how long do they remain fallen? By that I mean, how long does the adjective "fallen" remain attached to their memory? I'm not talking about God's record I'm wondering about ours.
And while we're at it, let us also ask ourselves: These fallen ones do they remain our brothers and our sisters in the meantime during their fallenness? You say, Well, that just depends on whether they really repent of their moral failure or not. Does it? Does there ever come a time when I am no longer my brother's keeper?
But what are you suggesting? you may retort. That it really doesn't mat ter whether they repent of their sinful and public fall or not? Actually, I'm not suggesting that at all in fact I'm not even thinking of their response right now. I'm wondering about ours. When does the adjective "fallen" get dropped from their memory meaning, our memory of them?
In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's wonderful little book on Christian community, Life Together, he makes a disturbing observation on why we have such a hard time breaking through to community:
"He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left in their loneliness. The final break through to fellowship [read community] does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the less devout, as sinners. The pious fellow ship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are sinners!"1
Could it be that the reason we're so hard on the fallen is because the fallen remind us of ourselves? And so we pre tend piety in ourselves. And we demand piety in others. As Bonhoeffer wrote, "The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner."
But tragically, it is by that very pre tending that we inadvertently choke off any possibility of genuine community. For how can I risk getting close to you in a small community or group? Because you might find out that I am a sinner. And knowing how hard I've been on sinners and how hard we are on the fallen, I cannot risk being vulnerable and transparent with you. You would reject me.
Thus we wear our masks of piety. And live the lie. And live alone. How did Bonhoeffer put it, "He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone." For there can be no community when we wear the masks of piety. And that is the tragic comedy. What we long for most, we prevent, when we pretend we are not what we really are sinners, all of us, in need of divine grace.
You see, a "graceless community" is an oxymoron. For it is no community at all. A "pious fellowship" perhaps. But it is not community, genuine community. For only grace can resurrect community. No grace. No resurrection.No community. For the truth about grace is that I will never extend it to you fallen as you are until I experi ence it in me fallen as I am.
The great truth is that you can't have Easter before Good Friday. The Cross must come first. I can't resurrect you, until grace has restored me. "Peter, do you love Me?" "Oh Lord, You know that I love You." "Good now go and love the fallen back to Me."
Once I grasp the truth that Calvary is God's pardon of every sinner who has ever lived and every sin that has ever been committed once I comprehend the magnitude of God's grace for fallen me there will not be a fall en brother and there is not a fallen sister I cannot love back to Him.
That is how grace works. With its doors thrown wide to all. And when grace works, community flourishes. For only grace can resurrect community.
Brennan Manning in his surprising book The Ragamuffin Gospel tells a story he wonders if we've heard:
"Four years ago in a large city in the far West, rumors spread that a certain Catholic woman was having visions of Jesus. The reports reached the archbishop. He decided to check her out. There is always a fine line between the authentic mystic and the lunatic fringe.
"'Is it true, ma'am, that you have visions of Jesus?' asked the cleric.
"'Yes,' the woman replied simply.
"'Well, the next time you have a vision, I want you to ask Jesus to tell you the sins that I confessed in my last confession.'
"The woman was stunned. 'Did I hear you right, bishop? You actually want me to ask Jesus to tell me the sins of your past?'
'Exactly. Please call me if any thing happens.'
"Ten days later the woman notified her spiritual leader of a recent apparition. 'Please come,' she said.
"Within the hour the archbishop arrived. He trusted eye-to-eye contact.
'You just told me on the telephone that you actually had a vision of Jesus. Did you do what I asked?' "
Yes, bishop, I asked Jesus to tell me the sins you confessed in your last confession.'
"The bishop leaned forward with anticipation. His eyes narrowed.
"'What did Jesus say?' "She took his hand and gazed deep into his eyes. 'Bishop,' she said, 'these are his exact words: "I can't remember."'"2
Apocryphal? Perhaps. Truth? Indeed. For a century ago these words were written: "If you give yourself to [Jesus], and accept Him as your Saviour, then, sinful as your life may have been, for His sake you are accounted righteous . . . and you are accepted before God just as if you had not sinned. "3
"'I am he who remembers your sins no more'" (Isa. 43:25).
"I can't remember."
The truth is, genuine community can only happen when men and women gather together in the name of the risen Christ whose forgiveness and grace declare, "I can't remember." It is when we say the same to each other that we resurrect our brother, we restore our sister and we revive our community. For only grace can resurrect community.
* Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture is from the New International Version.
1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (San Francisco: Harper, 1954), 110.
2 Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel (Multnomah Books, 1990), 116, 117.
3 Ellen White, Steps to Christ (Nampa, Idaho: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1892), 62, emphasis supplied.
