In that first reading we heard from the Acts of the Apostles, we heard that the early church community in Jerusalem did something amazing. They shared all their property as if it were all common property, the idea being that if anyone needed anything, they would be taken care of without even worrying about who owned what.
The question is, where did they get this idea? It’s not as if Jesus told them that private property had been abolished, or really said anything at all about how his followers were supposed to organize themselves, or even if they were going to be very organized at all. But apparently the resurrection changed everything. The resurrection proved that what Jesus said about a new Kingdom of God emerging from his death was true, and life going forward couldn’t possibly be the same as it had been in the past. If Jesus was alive, then the whole world looked different, and what mattered was that there was now a new order in the world, even if the rest of the world didn’t see it yet. How could you live the way everyone else lived, or the way you used to live? Jesus told people over and over that there was going to be a kingdom where people lived differently, where the rules of the world about who was important and who wasn’t were upside down, and these ancestors of ours thought that what that meant first of all was that if there were people who needed the necessities of life then everyone pulled together and fixed that. In the world after the resurrection, a radical equality took over their view of the world. It was going to be like the parable of the workers in the vineyard, where they all got a living wage no matter how much time they had put in.
Now you might notice that this moment in the life of the early church, you know, selling everything and sharing it all in common, you might notice this has not caught on, with Christians or really with anyone else. We don’t pool our possessions and divide them up to make sure no one around here, much less anywhere in the larger world, is in need. We could all debate for hours why exactly this didn’t work, or would never work. Certainly it’s something that doesn’t seem to come naturally to humans, we all tend to think that what we do with our property is a personal decision, some of us are very generous, some of us are sort of generous. And yet, in these days and weeks after the resurrection, our ancestors in the faith didn’t think that was nearly enough. They wanted the world the way it should be.
Why do we hear this reading a week after Easter Sunday? I think from all these readings from the Acts of the Apostles we’re going to hear in the next few weeks, we’re supposed to get a sense of the energy and the joy that was released when people realized the resurrection was real. People weren’t sure about exactly what to do, but they knew that everything was supposed to be different now. The worst wounds in the world did not destroy Christ, in fact, in the gospel today we find out those wounds are how we know he is real, he is glorified but we can still see the signs of his humanity. He is still wounded, as we all have our wounds, but he is very much himself, the one who would do anything for us out of love coming back to the apostles with nothing but forgiveness. And so in return, what can we do out of love to respond to what we have been given?
We should remember that the story we hear today begins in a locked room. The disciples, all of them, even the doubters, needed to get out of that room, and begin their work, to see the power of his Spirit. They had heard good news they weren’t sure they believed a story that didn’t make sense to them. But Jesus got past the barriers they put in his way, and changed them into living disciples, even the real doubter. He told them that the Holy Spirit would be even better and more powerful than his physical presence. The Spirit inspires people to see that the world can be made new. And that Spirit is still out there, and according to our church, it is very much here in this place, too, if we open our eyes.
This gospel tells us that we will always have times in our lives when the risen Christ seems frustratingly absent from this world. But ultimately, even those of us who doubt, we have been set free to serve the living Christ. Leaving the locked room, and living as if a completely new kingdom has been established where everyone matters equally, where justice needs to be done, that is our assignment, and it is an assignment for everyone, doubters and believers. If you doubt the risen Christ, start doing his work, and you will find him. You may not need to sell everything so that everyone has enough, but you need to find the task that is yours. Because with Christ risen everything is different now. we can be inspired to try almost anything.