Appearance Of The Lord
A sermon by Rev. Grant R. Schnarr

The Lord had appeared before His disciples, most of them rejoiced that
they had seen Him again. But He was alive. All the times that He had
spoken of, rising on the third day, had come true. They remembered,
they believed Him.
And yet there was Thomas who was a very earthly kind of person,
known as “Doubting Thomas,” who said, “I won’t believe in the Lord
unless I can put my finger in the holes in His hands and put my hand in
His side.” What happens? Eight days later the Lord appears before
Thomas and says, “OK, Thomas. Reach your finger in my hands. Put
your hand in my side. Handle me and see that it is I.” Thomas didn’t
need to do that any more.

He said to Him, “My Lord, my God.”
And the Lord said to Thomas, “You have seen. That’s why you have
believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed
in Him.”

Why was it that the Lord appeared to His disciples after His crucifixion?
It might have been to show that He was alive, that He had conquered
death. That’s a great part of Christianity, that He is the resurrection and
the life. But even more than this, He appeared to His disciples so that
they would worship Him in His risen form, that they wouldn’t think back
on Him historically, think about His life in the world, but to see that, yes,
He is very much alive now. He has risen, He’s alive, He’s with them still.
“Lo, I am with you always even to the end of the age,” He said to them.
The Lord came on earth to make Himself visible to the human race, to
make Himself accessible to people so that they could know Him, so that
they could understand Him, so that they could, if they chose, be one
with their Creator through that understanding.

Before the Lord had come, what kind of God did they worship at that time?
The Writings for the New Church say that they worshipped an invisible God,
incomprehensible. After all, if God is love itself, life itself, reality itself, that’s pretty
incomprehensible for us finite beings. How can the finite comprehend the infinite?
It’s impossible. Beyond that, though, they had a perception of the Lord within.
They could think of His humanity, so to speak-His love and wisdom withinperceive
what it was. But there was no external form, no concrete image, to put
that into. Again, it was an invisible God, sort of perceiving who God was, but not
really being able to grasp Him in their imagination.

And then through the process of time, as people turned away from the
Lord, as the leaders of the church at that time, began to make up teachings,
began to lead the people to themselves rather than from God, that picture of the
Lord became very clouded. And so we can look at the Old Testament, and we
see their concept of God – an angry God, a punishing God, a God who can
repent, a God who wants vengeance. This is the way they saw Him because of
their infantile state, because of the dark state that they were in.
Where was the relationship with God and man? If you think of God as
being love itself and desiring nothing more than to be one with that which He had
created, that wasn’t taking place and the end of creation was in danger, so the
Lord came to her (?) “Jehovah bowed the heavens and came down,” the Psalms
say. He presented Himself to mankind so that could understand Him, so that they
could see Him, so that they could see the infinite God in human form as Jesus.
He could set up a new church that had the opportunity to worship Him in truth
and sincerity, had an opportunity to be joined with their Creator like never before.
So the Writings for the New Church say the following, “By means of the
Human, Jehovah God sent Himself into the world and made Himself seen before
the eyes of men, and thus accessible. The Lord made the natural man in Himself
Divine in order that He might be the first and the last, that He might thus enter
with men even into their natural. He was then able to conjoin Himself to man in
His natural, yea, in His sensual. And at the same time to His spirit or mind in His
rational, and thus to enlighten man’s natural light with heavenly light.

It’s not as if the Lord said goodbye, to His disciples and zoomed off a
million miles away, or into some other realm of existence. No, He was still right
there. He’s right here today. He hasn’t gone anywhere. In our natural lives we
cannot see Him, but God exists around us, within us, in a way that He didn’t
before His Advent. He came into the natural, He made that natural within Him
Divine so that He could be with us, not only from within, from our perceptions, but
also without, so that now we can grasp God in a form and understand Him. So
now we can have a personal relationship with our Maker.

So how do we have that personal relationship with the Lord? We have to
recognize His Humanity, not like many Christian churches have done today,
solely seeing His Humanity and sort of separating it from His Divinity and the
Divine Father appear in Jesus, my friend and buddy, my pal. If we do that, if we
separate it out, then we take away that Divinity of the Lord. And when we take
that away we take away some of the respect He had, the admiration, the love,
the responsibility that we have to the Lord. We can’t see Him as merely being
human, we’ve got to see Him as Divine, life itself, in the Human form.
The Writings say that we should look at God from essence to person, think
of His essence first, that God is life itself, that God is love itself, the very reality of
these two concepts of God. His essence though, shows itself in the human form
of Jesus Christ. And we can take all these unknowable things and put them down
in a form that can be grasped.

And we can see the Lord with His arms open, waiting to take us in. And
He will take us in and hold us as long as we want Him to, in our own freedom.
That’s how we should see the Lord.
So the Lord said, “He that has seen Me has seen the Father.” He that has
seen that Humanity has seen the Divine within. “I am the Way, the Truth and the
Life. No one comes to the Father, but by Me.” No one comes to that Divinity but
through the Human of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Divine Human.
You know, many of us who are receivers, wandered away from traditional
Christianity because of that very point, that it made Christ too human, that they’ve
made God more of a fable, made God a comic strip character, rather than
something real and living.

But we can go too far. We can make God a complete abstract concept in
our life. God is life itself. God is love itself. God is impersonal. God is a concept.
But what good does that do us in our relationship with Him to do that? We can’t
worship an It. We can’t be conjoined with an It. We can’t love life itself, the esse,
the first principle. Reality, what does it mean? We can’t talk to it. We can’t love it.
We can’t be one with it? Why should we obey what it says? What good is it going
to do us? That’s the whole reason the Lord came, so that we could see Him in
that Human form, see that Divinity, so that we could be one with Him and have a
personal relationship with Him, see that He is a very real God, very real person.
So, when He appeared before Thomas, that’s why Thomas said, “My Lord and
my God,” to that Divine Human.

One of the ways we form a relationship with the Lord is through turning to
His own Word. This book is unlike any other book that has ever been written. Not
only does it teach us about God, but it is a living book. If we read the New
Testament alone, think of the picture that we get there, seeing God in human
form. What a picture that is! What a beautiful picture of who God is, how He
presents Himself.
Look at the New Testament. Look at the Lord’s life and see how He
presents Himself to us, not with preconceived notions, but take a good, honest
look. We see the Lord joking around with His disciples. When He was talking to
Peter He said, “Peter, from now on your name will be the Rock.” He was saying.
Petra. “From now on I’m going to called you Petra.” That’s like saying, “Rick, from
now on I’m going to call you Rock.” Or saying, “Stanley, from now on you’re
Stonely.” It was a pun. It was comical. And yet it says something deeper.
How about when He appeared, when He was whipped in front of the
whole Sanhedrin who were judging Him. And Caiphus says, “Are you the Christ,
the Son of the Living God?”
He said basically, “You said it. It is as you say,” right back to them.
When Pilate said to Him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
“You said it.”

How many times have we heard in pulpits in different churches, “Are you
the king of the Jews?” “It is as you say. And they led Him away,” in a monotone
voice.
The Lord was human. “You said it. Yes, I am.”
We see Him laughing, the Scribes and the Pharisees, “You whited
sepulchers.” “You who strain at a gnat and yet swallow a camel.”
Human.
When He’s in the temple, clearing out the temple. “My house should be a
house of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves.”
And then we see another side of Him. As He’s trying to raise Lazarus from
the dead, and all these people don’t believe it. He’s been with them for three
years and no one really understood. There He is. He’s weeping. He’s weeping
because of their disbelief.

When He was in the Garden of Gethsemene, that Human was going
through such anguish, knowing what would happen, that it was said that He
sweated as if drops of blood.
Remember when He was even riding into Jerusalem, and all the people
were cheering, Luke tells us the Lord was weeping at that time. Why was He
weeping? Because God had come to the light into the darkness to save His
creation, and the darkness comprehended Him not. As John said, “He came to
His own and His own received Him not.”

A human God, someone we can relate to. He shows us all the different
aspects of humanity on purpose, so that we won’t see Him as a God afar off, so
that we won’t see Him as an abstract concept, but we can see Him as someone
who has gone through many of the things that we go through, and even worse.
We can relate to Him, that we can be with Him, that He understands us, that He’s
here and now. He’s not somewhere else.
Keep that in mind. The Lord is very real. If you picture the Lord as an old
man with a beard, holding a scepter, way off there somewhere, you’re missing
out on a lot. The Lord is very real. He’s here and now.
He’s there, ready to have a relationship with us, if we are willing to open
our minds and hearts to him.

We can see Him in the literal meaning of the New Testament so easily.
The Writings also say that there are deeper meanings to the Word, that the
whole Old Testament, for example, has a continuous internal sense, a
continuous inner symbolic meaning which deals with many different aspects of
our lives, which deals with the Lord. So that story of the Israelites coming out of
Egypt through the wilderness into the promised land, is also a story of the Lord’s
life on earth, how He came out of the slavery of that human hereditary evil and
worked toward the promised land, His glorification, making Himself Divine. And
the Writings lay out a lot of this for us in the Arcana Caelestia, 12 volumes. The
Psalms, for example, are not just prayers of David, but on a deeper level, a
symbolic level, are prayers of the Lord to the Father – that human part of Him –
praying to the Divine within, becoming one with it.

And when we read the Word in that sense, study it, and look for the
symbolism, the deeper meaning, all of a sudden the Word becomes alive. It’s a
living book. The Lord is there speaking to us. So, John says, “In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” That’s how
the Lord shows Himself to us, can talk to us in His Word. It’s alive. The Writings
say that the Word is the soul medium of conjunction between the Lord and man,
the sole medium of communion between the heavens and the human race, that
when we read the Word with simple minds and simple hearts that the angels of
heaven affect us. Whereas we understand the literal sense, they understand the
deeper internal sense. And when we read the Word we are affected by it. The
Lord can be with us in a special way to the degree that we can read the Word
with the willingness to be led, to understand.

Some people read the Word as if it’s a textbook and they are going to
have a test on it. They look for the facts. If you do that all you’re going to get are
the facts. If you look at the Word with pessimism as you read, all you are going to
get is pessimism. If you look at the Word with preconceived dogmatic notions
about what you’re looking for in certain doctrines, then all you are going to see
are certain doctrines. The Writings say, “Those who approach the Word with
preconceived doctrines, it’s as if they only read one page and flip it over, they
miss this page, they read the next one, they flip that over. They’re only reading
half the Word.” The approach is like that.

To approach the Word with open minds, open hearts, those who approach
the Word with a willingness to be led, simply to say, “Help me.” To read it, even if
you were reading something about David going off and doing this or that, or Saul,
or Solomon, you are going to get something from it. Sometimes you will be
amazed at the answers you get in the Word. When you ask a specific question
about your life, “How am I doing? How can I do better?” the Lord will answer you
in an incredible way, an astounding way. You’ll see this is a living truth. This is
alive. At other times it’s much more subtle. It was pointed out once that a lot of
the time it’s just a feeling you walk away with, a feeling that we’ve been
somewhere, a feeling that we’ve been with someone, that they are still with us in
a special way. And that someone is the Lord.
The Word is very important to read. But not only to read the Word, but to
do something with that.
There is also prayer, the whole realm of prayer, come to know our God, to
understand Him. The Lord’s prayer is a very special prayer. After all, the Lord
gave us that prayer. He says, “When you pray, say this..” He gave us that prayer.
The Writings of the New Church say two things about the Lord’s prayer. One, that
that prayer in its deeper, inmost sense, deals with all the different facets of our
relationship with God and man, and when we say that prayer we are saying a
general prayer to help us out in all fields. And if we can see that deeper, inner
sense we’d understand that it has all kinds of things to do with our life.

But beyond that, we’re told that when we say the Lord’s prayer, because
of the way it’s been written, that we can communicate, can have communion
with, all of the heavens, all the different societies of the heavens. So that prayer
has a special power, a power for good, an effect on our own lives and hearts.
There’s more than just reciting prayers. It’s funny, it’s amazing, many
churches haven’t picked up on this, especially some of our larger churches. The
Lord said, “Do not use vain repetition as the heathen do, for they think that they
will be heard for their many words. Therefore, do not be like them.” When we
pray, sometimes all we have to do is talk to the Lord. The Writings define prayer
as “speaking with the Lord.” It’s very simple. Talking to Him, “How am I doing
today? Help me out in this one. Help me to get through this. Thank you.” There’s
many things we can do, just to talk to Him. At first when we do that, when we are
not used to it, it may seem a little strange, talking to the Lord. You remember that
Paul Newman movie, Cool Hand Luke, after he had escaped for the third or
fourth time, in that church he was looking up and talking to God, he looked up
seeing if someone was listening to him. We’ll feel that way a little bit when we
first start. But what happens is, after a while when we do this, we begin to feel
the Lord’s presence in a very real way. And we begin to feel it’s more than what
we bargained for. It’s not as if we do this and ended up all of a sudden feel it,
there’s some kind of psychological reason for it. No. The Lord comes into our
presence, His presence comes into us even more than it would have at that time,
and we can feel Him and understand Him. We will be astounded.

Even more than this probably, the most important thing, we want to have a
relationship with the Lord. If we want to bring Him into our hearts and tell Him,
we’ve got to put ourselves in the order of His creation.
We’ve got to shun that evil and selfishness that we all know we have
within, that block out the Lord’s life, that block out His love. That’s why
He’s given us His teachings, so that we can use them to get our act together, to
put ourselves back in that order, to put ourselves on the right path, that He can
flow into us with His wisdom, He can come into us with His love. And with that
love comes joy and happiness. It could be sometimes, that we like God to be way
up there in an abstract concept because when we want to do what we want, He’s
not there to make us feel bad or make us feel guilty.

Think about that. How uncomfortable would you feel if you are doing
something that really was raunchy, and had that real awareness that the
Lord is right there with you, it would be a bad feeling. Sometimes we leave Him
way off in the distance. We keep Him close enough so that when we feel guilty
we have somebody to turn to, but for the most part in our lives, we keep Him way
off there. If we are going to do that, and we have a perfect right to do that, the
Lord lets us be free to do that, but if we do, let’s be honest with ourselves. We
are creating a hell in ourselves, and that after death that’s exactly where we will
go.

The Lord is not a God afar off. He is here with us. He has His arms open
to us ready to receive us into Himself. When we hold the key, we can open that
door and let Him into us. We do that by learning of Him in His Word which He
has given us, by turning to Him for help, by being aware of His existence, and by
following His teachings. When we do that, we open our eyes to Him. We can see
Him. More than that, He will be with us. And even more than those disciples, we
will know the Lord, who He is even more than Thomas, and we will be able to say
at this time with full hearts as we comprehend our God, “My Lord and my God.”
Amen.

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