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The Second Sunday of Easter, 3 April 2005 |
John 20:19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." 24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." 26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." 27 Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." 28 Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" 29 Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." 30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. (NRSV) Seeing is believing I have to admit that Thomas has a leg up on me in the Gospel lesson for today. He makes his bold statement that he must see in order to believe at a time when Jesus is still coming out for curtain calls after the wonder of his resurrection. Thomas can demand to see first because there is still some seeing to be done. And he gets his wish. Jesus returns a week later to the locked safe house where the disciples gather. He calls Thomas out of the group, almost playfully challenging him to keep his rash bargain and touch Jesus’ wounds and so believe in the resurrection. Thomas seems to have all the luck. Not so for the generations of us who follow, or for that matter the first generation of Christians who followed, the original readers of the Gospel of John. Neither they nor us expect Jesus to come again as he came to the disciples, and yet we must follow in faith, we must believe and entrust our lives to the risen Lord or the whole Christian enterprise will have been one giant flash in the pan. Surely it is not for Thomas that this episode is written Though scholars may be right that the tradition of Thomas among the proto-gnostics of the same period may account for how Thomas is treated throughout John’s Gospel. I will not say much more about the gnostic heresy here, except to note that John’s Gospel seems to answer challenges to orthodox Christian faith posed by gnostic writings such as the Gospel of Thomas. No wonder Thomas, in John’s Gospel, is clueless (See John 14:1-6, for example). No, this episode is written for the many faithful who will not see, and yet must believe. We are encouraged not to be like Thomas, not to doubt, but rather to trust. At least that is how it has always been presented to me. This story was used as a hammer to drive home the nail of faith to me and many a young Sunday School pupil. The point seemed to be that faith was good. Doubt was bad. And so, even though we don’t get to see Jesus as Thomas did, we must believe anyway. If not, then our doubt would call into question whether or not we would have eternal life. So we would boldly proclaim our faith and absence of doubt, hiding the shame that we were not only secret doubters, but also bald faced liars. Between doubt and faith The reality of most people in the world today, certainly the western world, is that we are people very much like Thomas. His language permeates our culture. “You have to see this to believe it.” Some evangelicals, like Lee Strobel have even returned to the lost art of “apologetics” to convince people of the evidence that supports their faith, not understanding that faith itself requires ultimately an act of trust before the evidence can even be processed. Take the case in point of the multi-millionaire who some years ago offered a large sum of money to any individual who could prove to him that the Nazis killed so many Jews during the 1930s and 40s. Several people came forward with eyewitness accounts, with photos and other evidence. The man simply dismissed it all. The eyewitnesses were hearsay, the photos were fakes. Not one bit of evidence was acceptable. The ability to accept any proof of something, anything, required an impartiality that this man did not possess. The reality is that none of us possess it either. We tend to live in a time when we do not even trust things that we see. It might be better to say that we see only those things that we want to see. Everything else is in question. And in our world, where we have learned that leaders and politicians, business CEOs and Corporations, even within families, the truth is sometimes far from the words that we hear or the things that we see. Those who do not carry healthy skepticism are betrayed by their political leaders, mislead in their investments by the corporate world, refuse to believe that their children could be a problem at school and blame the teachers for failing grades. Doubt is not all bad. But in the sphere of faith, where doubt is cast as the “enemy,” how do we then proceed? How do we make bold proclamation in the face of a world in which every truth is now relative? (Not that this is new. Witness Pilate’s question of Jesus in John 18:38.) What can we know? How can we be certain? Perhaps it is just this slavery to certainty that is our downfall, just as it was Thomas’ in our lesson for today. I have come to know that doubt and faith are not opposites. Some have suggested that the opposite of faith in God is not doubt, but faith in someone or something else. I have come to know, through the writings of James Fowler (Stages of Faith) and others that doubt often comes as a catalyst to deeper faith. Walt Wangerin Jr. suggests that faith is a verb (faithing, he calls it) and doubt is a part of the faithing process. What I do know is that times in my life that I have come to know God in a deeper way have always come through periods of questioning what I assumed I knew, which leads to an openness to new aspects of my relationship with God. Rather than resisting doubt, I have come to welcome it as a companion on my faith journey. A God of infinite possibilities What we begin to know, when we, like Thomas, have doubts or cling to what we think we know, is that our minds cannot begin to imagine all of the things that God is about. Certainly Thomas could not imagine the resurrection. Nor did any of the other disciples of Jesus before they met the Lord on Easter night. Nor, when left to my own, do I imagine that God could possibly love someone like me, let alone forgive me. I do not imagine that I have anything that God could use. I do not imagine that God would concern himself with me: a blip of humanity on a tiny speck of a planet in an immense and diverse universe. Martin Luther called these intense doubts his “anfechtung.” But even for him they were a part of the process of faith and of being a Christian. When we allow that even doubt can be a gift from God, then we begin to be open to faith at its deeper levels. Then the risen Lord comes to us. He opens our hearts and drives out the fear. He shows us that he at the same time both the one who died (note the wounds still visible to see and touch) and the risen one. He breathes into us the Holy Spirit and sends us into the world for ministry. These are things, really, that we cannot and do not think of on our own, huddled together for protection and from fear of what we think might harm us in the world. God knows that there is more for us to do “out there.” I’m afraid our God is a God who allows doubt and faith to coexist with us, perhaps most of all because it allows us to see the many paradoxes of God in Christ: human and divine, with us and transcendent, dead and risen, present in ordinary bread and wine. Our doubts would keep God safely tucked away in the places where we can understand and control what is going on. The Easter event, if nothing else shows us that no box, not even that of death can contain the wondrous love of our God. While it is certainly not possible that our finite beings will ever be able to fathom even a little bit of our infinite God, it is possible for us to begin to move out of the even smaller boxes we put God in. The Easter season helps us to participate in the imagining of a whole new world of possibilities that the resurrection give us. God has creatively imagined our whole world from the beginning of time. What happens in Easter is we are confronted with the surprising news that the creative imagination of God is still loose in the world. What happens for Thomas and the disciples is that they become participants in the imagination of God, and certainly their ministry following Pentecost day confirms this. Abundant life What John seems to suggest in our lesson for today is that God is not finished with humanity! The 12 disciples were not alone in being captured by God’s living presence. Many future generations have come and gone, each to be captive in its own way to the one who died and rose and lives triumphantly, creatively, in our midst. Through us God continues to imagine new possibilities for the future of the world, set in opposition to those who would only imagine death and decay. John’s way of speaking about this was abundant life. God’s intention for all of creation is to have this life. Too often Christians have assumed that abundant life was something reserved for the future, after we die. But I have come to understand more and more that it is something that God gives us in the here and now. My Father talks frequently about cheating when he reads a mystery novel. He reads the end first, so as to know the outcome of the mystery, then goes back and reads the rest of the novel. In that way, he becomes more acutely aware of clues and important information the author has left along the way for the reader to discover. He knows how important each piece of information is and can appreciate the creative genius of the author all the more. Our faith in Christ, and his resurrection allows us to live in much the same way. We discover the richness and diversity of the Author of all life as we see his signature all around us. We more clearly how God is acting now, because we know where creation is heading (the new creation that is already present in our risen Lord). And, perhaps most important of all, we can see our Lord present in the midst of things. We don’t end up seeing in order to have faith, as Thomas did, but rather our faith helps us to see clearly the risen Lord present and active where others cannot see. And seeing, we have life abundant! Rev. Dr. Luke Bouman
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