Jesus risen among monks

Luke 24.36b-48

36While the eleven and their companions were talking about what they had heard, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ 37They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 38He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ 40And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. 41While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ 42They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43and he took it and ate in their presence.

44Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you - that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ 45Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46and he said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48You are witnesses of these things.’

Church Times Homily

I MADE a pilgrimage to the Benedictine abbey at Solesmes, in France, several years ago during Eastertide. The impressive, fortress-like monastery was thronged with people from all over Europe, many of them students. Why were we there?

Perhaps part of the answer is the astonishing beauty of the Gregorian plainchant for which that community is famous. We were also in search of an encounter with the risen Jesus, and we sensed that Solesmes would help us, in the words of today’s Gospel, to “open our minds to understand the scriptures” in their witness to him.

Our journey to Solesmes fitted with the gospel accounts of response to the empty tomb. We had within ourselves a mixture of desire for reflection on the momentous experience of Holy Week, and disturbance by the exuberant energy of the life of the new creation that emerges from the empty tomb. Journeying to be with other Christians was a natural reaction.  

Monastic life is a very distinctive form of Christian discipleship, in which some aspects of what should be true for all of us find a particular, radical emphasis. At the heart of the Benedictine life is the call to conversion that demands abandonment of home, family, and possessions. Not every Christian can be called to that form of abandonment, obviously, but a lifelong process of conversion must be characteristic of every baptised disciple.

In a similar way, the worshipping life of the monastery accentuates certain things that should be true of the worship of the whole Church. The first thing is stated simply at the opening of today’s Gospel: “Jesus himself stood among them.”
Within the Church, we have a variety of ways to articulate this profound sense of our teacher and our Lord with us in worship, but universally we are one in the belief that where two or three are gathered in his name, he is there.

In the Eastertide worship at Solesmes, I was struck by the recurrence of the text from Psalm 118: “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” It suggested a fundamental immediacy between the work of redemption, Easter as the eighth day, the day of revealing the new creation, and our Easter praises as a response to the person in whom that work is revealed, the risen Christ.

Symbolic identification of Jesus, common in many churches, such as the paschal candle and the altar, emphasised for the monks an awareness that Jesus was in their midst, his presence signifying peace with God.

The second element of worship at Solesmes was the centrality of the scriptures. Between the ranks of stalls for the monks stands a huge lectern on which the word of God sits. The scriptures that Jesus identifies and explains to his disciples, “the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms”, are woven into a rich texture of monastic song from which the leitmotif of resurrection is drawn out repeatedly.

In order to be authentic witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of sin that he offers, we need to be people who have encountered him personally. He is fundamentally our brother, our friend, and our God. We also need to be people who know how the distinctively Christian scriptures are illuminated by the earlier words from God that prepared the human race for the decisive moment of redemption at Calvary.

Bible study is not simply something we do in groups or at home; it is also at the heart of worship. The liturgy of the Church illuminates the meaning of these texts and enables them to reveal their meaning through the worship of the risen Christ present among us.

Third, the monks at Solesmes sing their Easter praises looking at each other. Yes, Jesus is in their midst, but in praising him they are drawn into an awareness of the extent to which he relates all his disciples to each other. As in any family, living with your neighbour is not always easy. This is no different for religious communities.

The person next to you in your choir stall, where you spend a great deal of your time, might well be there for the rest of your life. If you do not get on, there is no escape; forgiveness, and the task of learning to love is the tricky path to conversion and the peace of resurrection life.

It is for this reason that mealtimes in a monastery are also so important. They are almost an extension of the liturgy of praise and thanksgiving in church. This might be a lesson that disturbs our lives as Christians in the world. A shared mealtime that commits us to a bond of companionship is perhaps an important Christian discipline.

The meal table can be where we learn to hammer out the unreconciled aspects of life in order to become more authentic witnesses to peace as a symptom of Christian discipleship. This is not a remote or theoretical proposition. Whether at the meal-table or the altar-table, it is the way we grow and are nurtured.