Breathing Mercy

In today’s homily, I reflected on the tumultuous events of 2020, from the Sydney bushfires to the pandemic and the heart-wrenching passing of George Floyd. I spoke about the vital importance of breath and life, drawing parallels to the disciples in the upper room. I imagined Jesus stepping into their midst, offering each one peace and breathing into them new life, just as God breathed life into Adam and Ezekiel’s dry bones. This intimate encounter transformed the disciples, filling them with joy and wonder, marking the moment of Pentecost. I highlighted Thomas’s profound declaration of faith and invited everyone to experience this personal transformation through Jesus, to embrace God’s love and mercy.

RH (00:00:00) – Remember back in 2020? The year began with all of the bushfires that surrounded Sydney. They’d been burning for week after week, and the whole of the Sydney basin was shrouded in smoke. So all of that difficulty of being able to breathe. And then we had Covid and we had all of that initial struggle to find enough respirators so that patients that were in intensive care would be able to breathe. And then in the US, we had the awful situation of George Floyd, the police officers who held him down so that he cried out “I can’t breathe” – and yet he was still restrained. And it’s fascinating that all of those events in early 2020 were all about the inability to breathe. You know, we can go without food for a month or more. You will certainly be feeling hungry by the end of that period, but we can go without food for extended periods, without water for a few days. But we can only go a few minutes without breathing. Breathing is such an essential quality for our lives, you know, it’s so fundamental, so essential.

(00:01:23) – And so when we gather in the upper room with the disciples, just to enter into that experience, that situation. When you go to Jerusalem, they will take you to a couple of different places that claim to be the Cenacle, the upper room. And they’re fairly tight, intimate little spaces. You can fit maybe 50 or 60 people in these rooms. And that sense of them all huddled together. John doesn’t say it’s just the 12. He simply calls them the disciples. Men and women, all kinds of different ages and backgrounds and situations and experiences. It’s just a bit like the church. They’re all there – sharing simply the confusion, the shame of having run away, their inability to stay firm to the end, the grief that the one that they had loved, the one that they had put their hope in as the disciples on the road to Emmaus had said that we thought that he was going to be the Messiah, the one to overthrow the Romans. And instead, what do we have? A defeated Messiah.

(00:02:37) – And they’re all there, just comforting, consoling each other. The doors are locked because they don’t want the same thing to happen. They don’t want the authority to find them and to come and to dismiss them, to punish them, to brutally execute them as well. And suddenly, suddenly, in the midst of all of this doubt, this confusion, this, this awful experience, there is Jesus walking in their midst. And the text doesn’t exactly indicate how this kind of interaction transpires. But whenever I pray into this gospel, whenever I try and put myself there, I imagine that Jesus is going to go around to each and every disciple there. He’s not just going to content himself with saying, peace be with you over the whole community. Just as in the Gospels, we see that whenever he needs to forgive someone’s sins: it’s a very intimate and personal encounter. He never forgives the crowd. It’s always one on one. He never heals the crowd. It’s always again, one on one.

(00:03:54) – We need that solo time with the Lord. We need to receive that intimacy of God’s life for us. And he’s making himself available personally for us. And so God is there. As Jesus walks around that room looking into each person’s eyes, he knows what they’ve done. He knows the depth of grief that they are experiencing, what they’re feeling, what are they going through? And one by one, I imagine perhaps he embraces some, puts his hand on the shoulder of others as he looks them in the eyes, and he says, peace be with you. And he breathes the life of God upon them. I mean, how transformative would that be? That powerful sense of the God who is bringing new life into each person there? The word that John uses there for that word, breathe, is actually unique to the New Testament. It’s a word we’ve heard from science. It’s a word – emphysao, we get the disease (emphysema), that inability to breathe. It’s very closely related

(00:05:13) – back in the second account of creation that we find in Genesis 2, when the Lord God fashioned from the clay that the dirt of the earth, that the human being, but it was still lifeless until the Lord breathed that life into that clay, for it to become a living being. It’s also carefully linked to the prophecy that we hear of the valley of the dry Bones in Ezekiel 37, when the Ezekiel received that vision, you know the people were lost in their grief, in their exile. They lost everything. They lost all hope. And they’re this valley of clattering, dry bones. And slowly the Lord begins to fashion the bones together. He begins to put sinew between the bones. He begins to clothe them in flesh. But it’s still without life until the Lord breathes upon them the pneuma, the spirit of the Lord is being breathed upon them. And they receive the emphysao, that gift of the wonder of God’s life and love, and God is always creative.

(00:06:28) – God is always in that intimacy of life, wanting to breathe that life upon us. And when you read the account of the Last Supper in the Gospel of John in chapters 13 to 17, there are three promises that Jesus makes there about what would happen when all of these things would be fulfilled. He said that you will receive a joy that no one else is able to experience, that you will encounter a peace that the world cannot provide. And I will pour out the gift of my Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, upon the church. And John is very clear that all three gifts are coming to birth in this single moment, as the Lord, one by one, goes around and breathes the peace and the breath of the Holy Spirit upon each person, and we’re told in the community are transformed from that fear and shame and guilt to this place, of this place of joy and wonder, that now they are able to experience it. And this is the moment of Pentecost for John. This is the moment when we experience all that God has prepared and planned for us.

(00:07:41) – And in the year, a cycle of readings. We will hear this reading again on Pentecost Sunday, because it is the fulfilment of all of our desires, all of our dreams. This longing that God has, that we might experience the new life that only God is able to bring. We need this mercy. We need this healing regularly in Alyse, you know, we’re always getting things wrong. We’re always taking things back. We’re always just looking for the next dopamine hit, rather than actually embedding ourselves more deeply in that peace that establishes the very core of who we are. And so for us over these days, you know, it’s not that the doubt that makes Thomas interesting, it’s the fact that at the end of this story, he’s able to make that beautiful declaration about who Jesus is for him, my Lord and my God, that he gets the final word in the gospel. There’s the epilogue in chapter 21, but clearly this is the culmination of the gospel that when it was first written and that Thomas becomes this sign and this embodiment of all that we’re meant to be, that he’s invited into that personal encounter with Jesus.

(00:08:51) – And through that, he’s changed and transformed to make that declaration of faith. And how blessed are we who are able to believe without touching, without the necessity of seeing, that we’re invited into that same experience, that we might know that Jesus is Messiah, and that in believing this, that we might have life through his name. You know that a second reading today gives us the commandment simply to love, to love the Lord. And we’re told that’s all that we need to do. All that we need to do is to believe that Jesus is the Christ, and then we are adopted as his children. The Lord doesn’t make it hard for us. He doesn’t make it difficult. There’s not a whole series of benchmarks and key performance indicators that we have to meet in order to be worthy of the kingdom. All the US is. Will you believe? Will you let me breathe my breath into your lungs? Will you receive the peace that the world cannot give? Will you let me pull my love and my mercy into you and let that change you? And let that transform you.

(00:10:01) – And if we do? Then everything begins to flow from then.