16 April 2023 Easter 2
Last week we all shouted ‘Christ is risen’. And these three words, one way or another, change everything. We confess that God in Christ has defeated death and reconciled the cosmos to himself. Jaroslav Pelikan, a Yale historian, wrote “If Christ is raised from the dead, nothing else matters. If he is not raised from the dead, nothing else matters.” And when Paul wrote about Jesus’ resurrection to the Corinthians, he wrote “This is what we preach, and this is what you believed,”.
But today, one week after the resurrection, we are talking about doubt, specifically Thomas’ doubt. But I wonder if, sometimes, we do Thomas a disservice in how we interpret his words and actions. And I say this because I find it interesting that, even though we refer to Thomas as the ‘doubter’, even though we look negatively at him, our text tells us the rest of the disciples were ‘boarded up’ in the room out of fear, yet Thomas was not there. Is that because he was not fearful? Was Thomas the only one who was ‘getting on with life’ after the death and resurrection of Jesus. John tells us, this is the evening of the day Mary found the empty tomb, and Peter and ‘the other disciple’ went to check it out. Mary has already told the disciples that she has seen Jesus. So, is it fair to put negativity on Thomas when he is the only one who is not ‘huddled in a locked room out of fear’.
Jesus comes to the disciples and ‘stills their fear’. He greets them by saying ‘peace be with you’, in fact he offers this peace twice. He then shows them his wounds, breathes the Spirit on them and commissions them for ministry. And as we know, Thomas misses this ‘pentecostal moment’, and he then has to wait a week before he too gets the chance to ‘see’ the risen Christ with his own eyes.
What would those 7 days have been like for him, and for the other disciples. Did he start to think, as I often do, that he has ‘missed the boat’, missed the opportunity to see what others have already seen. Was he anxious for this meeting with his teacher to come quickly. But maybe one of the important things to hear in this story, for me anyway, is the fact that Thomas was willing to admit his fears, willing to voice his desire for a ‘personal encounter’ with the risen Christ; and he was willing to admit it publicly. And the disciples allow him to voice these fears and desires. Even as they openly share their witness to the resurrected Christ, they ‘hold space’ for Thomas to have his own encounter. And when Jesus meets Thomas, he willingly gives him the witness he desires. He shows him his wounds, he invites Thomas to touch his wounds. And they are fresh wounds, they are not just ‘healed scars’ of a past injury, these are fresh, open, painful wounds, and Jesus exposes them to Thomas in the same way as he did a week earlier with the disciples.
John finishes this story by telling us the reason he has included it in his gospel. That we may believe that ‘Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’.
Not everyone who saw the risen Christ believed, and conversely; not everyone who believed, actually saw the resurrected Jesus. And as we heard in our second reading “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy”. Believing without seeing is the norm for the overwhelming majority of Christians. We believe because of the witness of the disciples, because of the witness of those we have read about, because of the witness of others and because of how our lives have been changed, been enriched, by our own experiences of Christ in our lives. Sometimes experience brings belief, sometimes belief brings experience. The important element is belief however it comes.
When Thomas encounters Jesus’ wounds, new life erupts, faith blossoms, and this disciple makes the most profound statement of faith we can find in our Scriptures – ‘my Lord and my God’. Thomas went from doubt to passionate witness, and by 52CE he had taken the ‘good news’, the gospel, to India, and today, in India and elsewhere in the world the ‘Thomas Christians’ trace their origins to this disciple of doubt.