Recognizing the Lord Our God | Rev. Malcolm G. Smith

How do we recognize the Lord, and how do we recognize Him for who He truly is — our God and Savior who rose from the dead? In the gospels we see that some people recognize the Lord and some do not; and we see that some take longer than others to recognize Him. All of these stories have something to teach us about how we can grow in our recognition, understanding, and trust of the Lord our God.

Readings: John 20:11-16, 24-29; 21:1-7; True Christianity 457:2

Minister: Rev. Malcolm G. Smith 

Delivered April 5th, 2026 at the Bryn Athyn Cathedral in Bryn Athyn, PA.

The Bryn Athyn Church is a congregation of the General Church of the New Jerusalem, located in Bryn Athyn, PA. We are committed to helping each other draw closer to the Lord God Jesus Christ through lives of love and useful service, guided by the Old and New Testaments and the Heavenly Doctrine for the New Church (contained in the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg). Please join us for worship on Sunday mornings; services and times can be found at brynathynchurch.org.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

For our lessons today, we have three stories from the end of the Gospel of John about people not recognizing the Lord and then recognizing him. And you can see if you can figure out what is it that makes them recognize them in each story. Mary stood at the tomb weeping outside. Then, as she wept, she stooped down to the tomb and sees two angels in white, the one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say to her, Woman, why are you weeping? She says to them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have put him. And saying these things she turned back and saw Jesus standing, and she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus says to her, Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? She, thinking that he was the gardener, says to him, Lord, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will take him away. Jesus says to her, Mary, she, turning, says to him, Raboni, which is to say, teacher. But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. Therefore the other disciples said to him, We have seen the Lord. But he said to them, Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and thrust my fingers into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were inside, and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be to you. Then he says to Thomas, Bring your finger here, and see my hands, and bring your hand, and thrust it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believing. And Thomas answered and said to him, My Lord and my God. Jesus said to him, Because you have seen me, Thomas, you have believed. Happy are they who have not seen and have believed. After these things Jesus showed himself again to his disciples at the Sea of Tiberias, and in this way he showed himself. There were together Simon Peter and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathaniel of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Simon Peter says to them, I am going out to fish. They say to him, We also are coming with you. They went out and straightway went up into the ship, and in that night they caught nothing. But when the morning had already come, Jesus stood on the shore. However, the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Then Jesus says to them, Little children, do you have something to eat? They answered him, No. And he said to them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and you will find some. They cast their four, and after that they did not have the strength to draw it in for the multitude of fish. Then that disciple whom Jesus loved says to Peter, It is the Lord. Amen. And our final lesson is taken from the teachings for the new church. With all of us, God flows into our concepts of Him and brings us acknowledgement of Him. He also flows into us and brings us His love for people. If we accept only the first inflow, but not the second, we receive that inflow with our intellect, but not with our will. We keep the concepts of God that we have without arriving at an inward acknowledgement of God. Our state is then like a garden in winter. If we accept both types of inflow, however, we receive the inflow with our will and then our intellect, that is, with our whole mind. We then develop an inner acknowledgement of God that brings our concepts of God to life. Our state is then like a garden in spring. Amen. Happy are those who hear the word of God and keep it. Don't you love these stories of people seeing the Lord and then recognizing him? They thought that Jesus was gone forever, and then they see him again but don't recognize him, and something happens, and then there's this flood of joy, relief, and love. And there's also a different kind of recognition that happens where they realize if he died on the cross, which they saw and then came back to life, he must be not a regular person, but someone special. So today we're going to talk about three stories from the Lord's Word, the ones we read in our lessons, about people recognizing the Lord, and think about how we can come to recognize the Lord our God. In the first story, Mary Magdalene is at the tomb weeping. The Lord died on the cross, and now his body's even gone, so she can't even care for his body. And as she's weeping, she stoops down and looks into the tomb again, and she sees two angels. But because she's so sad, she doesn't even realize she's seeing an amazing thing. She's talking to angels, but she's just sad. And the angels ask her, Why are you weeping? And you might think, Why do they ask this question? They know why she's weeping. They're angels, and it's pretty obvious. But if we think about it from the angel's perspective, they're in the tomb looking at Mary, and Mary's about to turn around and see the Lord. So the angels see Mary weeping, saying, He's gone forever. And there behind her is the Lord. And it's useful to think about that, because we have times when we're like that too. We're in a state where we're just absorbed with how hard things are and it's bad. And maybe the Lord's right behind us if we can figure out how to turn and see him. Now Mary does turn to see him, but she doesn't recognize him right away. She assumed that he was the gardener, and she's still so focused on this task of find his body and care for it, that she doesn't realize she's talking to Jesus. And so she asks this man who's here, Did you take the body away? And it was only when Jesus said her name, Mary, that she recognized him. Now, in just a minute, I'm gonna ask you to do something simple, and I want you to wait for all the instructions, and then I'll say, go, and you'll do it. Because I want you to have the experience of remembering what it's like for someone who knows you and loves you to say your name. If you came by yourself today, or there's no one around you who knows you, you can just think about someone who you love who knows you and what it feels like when they say your name. Or if you're joining us from your home online and you're by yourself, similarly, you can think about someone in this world or someone who's in the spiritual world and how they would say your name and how it would feel. But if you're with people you love and who know you, then I want you to just quietly say a couple of their names and have them say your name. Okay? Got the instructions? Just say each other's names a little bit in the pews. Go. Alright, thank you. Now, maybe that felt a little bit silly, uh, but I hope it also felt good. Because it can feel good to have someone who knows us say our name. And maybe that can help us to have a little bit of picture of what it would feel like to have the Lord, who knows us better than anyone else, have him say our name. And we can have that experience of feeling like the Lord's saying our name when we read his word. Because have you ever had that experience where someone who knows you says something about you that you didn't realize yourself? And we might feel a little shy that it's a thing about us, but we didn't notice it, and maybe we smile a little bit because they're right about that thing. We can have that experience when we read the Lord's word. When we read certain stories or read certain teachings, because they oh, the person who wrote this knows me deeply. They really get what's going on for me, and they know how to help me. That's the Lord calling us by name. So, how can we recognize the Lord? For each story, we're gonna have a hand motion. And so this one is when the Lord calls us by our name and we feel that he knows us. So you can do that with me? When the Lord calls us by our name and we feel like he knows us. That's one way we can recognize the Lord. Story number two. In this story, there's the disciple Thomas, and the other disciples had gotten to see the Lord risen. They'd even gotten to put their fingers into the scars in his hand from when he was crucified, put their fingers into the side where his spear pierced him. But Thomas wasn't with them. And the disciples told him, We've seen the Lord, but Thomas says, No. If I don't get to see him with my eyes and feel him with my fingers, I'm not gonna believe. Now, Thomas did get to see the Lord with his physical eyes and touch him with his physical fingers, and we don't get to do that. But the Lord interestingly said, That's better that way. It's better. We can be happy, the Lord said, and blessed if we don't see with our physical eyes and yet still believe. So, how can we do that? Well, to picture Thomas's experience, I want you to look at your hands and feel the palms of your hands. And imagine there were a scar there. Do you have any scars on your body? Because a scar often is a sign that we've gone through something hard. We've gotten injured or we've gotten sick and had to have surgery. It might be that your mama has a scar on her tummy from when she gave birth to you or one of your siblings. And often, like a mama, people have scars or marks on their body from the work they did to love other people. Maybe the mama doesn't have a scar, but she has some stretch marks, or her veins on her legs look different. We have markings from the work of love that we do. And this is definitely the case with the marks on the Lord's body. So as we think about our hands, we think about the hard things we've gone through, the scars that we can see, and the scars that no one else can see. We think about other people too, and the th the scars that they have, the things that they've gone through, especially the stuff they've gone through to help us, to love us, to care for us. And they have scars, and they have ones we can't see. And all the more so about the Lord and the stuff he went through, the stuff we're aware of and the stuff we're not aware of, all the stuff he went through, and how he helped us get through hard things. With all that stuff in mind, this is another way we can come to recognize the Lord as our Lord and our God. Like Thomas said, when he put his fingers in his holes, he said, My Lord and my God, and we can do the same. So, how can we recognize the Lord? Two hands. When we remember how the Lord helped us get through our hard things, and we think of all the hard things the Lord went through for himself. So let's try that with your hands. So, all the hard things that we went through, the Lord helped us with, and all the hard things the Lord went through for us. That's a way we can recognize the Lord. Alright, last story: the fishing story. Some of the disciples decided to go fishing. And they go out in a boat, and all night they catch nothing. Not a single fish. They're supposed to be professional fishermen, but they caught not a single fish. In the morning, the Lord was standing on the shore, presumably a little bit far away, and he calls out to them and asks them if they have any food, and they have this conversation, and they don't realize who it is. And he tells them to cast their net on the right side of the boat. And as soon as they do, then they catch so many large fish in their net that they don't have the strength to pull it into the boat. And when that happened, the disciple John, who's also called the disciple whom Jesus loved, he says, It is the Lord. And the thing that made John realize that it was the Lord was that they were working on something, trying to be useful, and it wasn't going well, and then someone got involved, and suddenly it went very well. Then he knew it must be the Lord. Because this had happened before. There was a time when they went fishing and they caught nothing, and then the Lord got involved and they caught a whole bunch. Or a time when there were thousands of people who were hungry. Maybe like right now, maybe you're hungry, wishing you could have more Easter eggs. And the Lord gave these few bits of bread and fish to his disciples to take to all the people, and somehow all the thousands of people had as much as they wanted, and there was more left over. So John could see this and say, Oh, this must be the Lord. Only the Lord can do this to make something that's not going very well suddenly go very well. As an example, sometimes we have conversations where we feel like we're fishing all night and catching nothing. We're trying to figure something out with one other person or a couple of people, and it feels like we're getting nowhere. No good ideas, no progress, and maybe some grumpy feelings, some mean things said. So maybe we take a break. We breathe, we pray, we realize the ways we've been unkind or a little bit unfair in what we said, and we come back to the conversation with more love for the other people, more compassion, more patience. And then we say, I'm sorry for how I spoke, can I try again? And then the conversation changes. Then there are lots of useful insights. Then there's lots of good ideas for what to try. We have a net full of large fish. In those kinds of moments, we can learn to say, Oh, it is the Lord. And this connects to our lesson from the Teachings for the New Church, which said that for us to be able to recognize and acknowledge God on the inside and to have our ideas of God come to life, we have to be willing to receive the Lord's love for other people. Not just know things about Him, but connect with His love and act on it for other people. Then our minds go from being like a garden in wintertime, like our gardens looked a month ago or even a couple weeks ago, to change into a garden in springtime, like we see in the church and outside the church. That's what things look like when we accept the Lord's love and try to share it with other people. So, how can we recognize the Lord? You can do these hand motions with me. When we the Lord calls us by name and we feel known by him, when we remember how the Lord's helped us go through hard things and all the hard things he went through for himself, and this is the last one, when we try to do loving things and the Lord makes it go so well. Like we're holding all the good blessings he's given us. When the Lord we're trying to do something good and the Lord makes it go so much better. Those are just three ways of so many ways we can come to recognize the Lord. And when we do have that experience, we'll experience the same joy, relief, love, and awe that Mary had, that Thomas had, that John had, and so many other people have had. And we will say, using the words of the prophet Isaiah, this is our God. We have waited for him, and he will save us. This is Jehovah. We have waited for him, we will be glad and rejoice in his salvation. Amen.