Here we are! A week after Easter and here we are. The special flowers are gone, extra musicians are gone, and the crowds of Easter are gone. We have lived this week through the dying of Terri Schiavo, the Pope and the abduction and recovery of a three-month-old baby from Virginia Beach. What difference has Easter made in our lives one week after the fact?
Our Gospel lesson begins just hours after the resurrection. The meaning of the resurrection was still being sifted by the disciples as they gathered in fear behind locked doors in that room together. They huddled in fear on that night because they were not sure if the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus was just the beginning of a purge that would eventually lead to their arrest and crucifixion as well. Rumors were flying around. Some suggested that the body of Jesus had been stolen, not resurrected. Doubts and questions began to set in as the disciples and others tried to keep up with the fast breaking news of the day. There was no television or radio or even cell phones to broadly disseminate the latest sightings or to have a commentator from the Temple speculate on a news show what would happen next.
This morning we focus on one of the disciples, Thomas. He missed the meeting on the night of Resurrection Day. And when others told him that the Resurrected Lord appeared to them behind locked doors and showed them his wounds, Thomas refused to believe. Perhaps some of us carry those same doubts with us this morning. His grief over the death of Jesus refused to allow rumors of a resurrection to cause his heart further hurt and disappointment. So he proclaims, ‘ I will not believe, unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands, put my fingers in the marks of the nails and my hand in his side.’
Who among us would be so bold? Who among us does not question? Through Thomas the door was opened for others in the faith community to doubt and to question as a part of their faith journey. Doubting is to faith as denial is to grief. It is a piece of the process for many as they come to terms with a new reality that stretches beyond their experience. It is a reality that was part of the story of Easter as the disciples began to struggle with what this resurrection meant for their lives and now for our lives.
Thomas’ bold proclamation fits with who he was within the community of faith. It was Thomas, you recall, who just a few verses earlier in John said to Jesus that he would go with him to Lazarus, when news of Lazarus dying came, despite the death threats that the disciples feared would meet them there. What he feared would happen when they came with Jesus to Jerusalem did happen. Jesus was arrested and crucified. But Thomas will not now believe in a false hope, he is saying. This proclamation by Thomas about Jesus’ post resurrection appearance is a witness to the deep hurt caused by his loss of Jesus.
When have you felt that you know the facts about something and refuse to believe otherwise. But then were later surprised to find that the facts are different. We like to think in our rational state that we can observe an event and then report the facts of that event accurately. I know sometimes that I read or see news reports of events that I have participated in or witnessed and wonder if I was really at the same event. TV instant replays have added a whole new dimension to the world of reporting including most recently a 3-point shot that sent a basketball game into overtime. Too bad instant reply was not available for the resurrection. Can you imagine how such an event would be covered today!
Let’s review the facts of that first Easter as captured in the Gospel of John. In Chapter 20 beginning with the 1st verse, we are told that it is in the early hours of the morning when the women came and discovered the tomb is empty. Peter and John then ran to the tomb after receiving the news from the women to check out the report for themselves. What they saw was the position of the cloths that had wrapped the body of Jesus. The linen cloth was positioned in such a way that John ‘saw and believed.’ Then there was the encounter between Mary and the Risen Christ where he calls her by name.
Many of you may remember, Leslie D. Weatherhead, who served as pastor to City Temple in London, England from 1936-1960. He is known best from his book entitled, “The Will of God,” which has become a classic, and he wrote several other books while serving that church. It was after his retirement that he wrote another book that I have found very helpful in dealing with questions of faith…in the fashion of Thomas…this book is entitled, “The Christian Agnostic.”
He defines a Christian Agnostic as “a person who is immensely attracted by Christ and who seeks to show his spirit, to meet the challenges, hardships and sorrows of life in light of that spirit, but who, though he is sure of many Christian truths, feels that he cannot honestly and conscientiously sign on the dotted line that he believes certain theological ideas about which some branches of the church dogmatize, churches from which he feels excluded because he cannot ‘believe.’ His intellectual integrity makes him say about many things, “ It may be so, I do not know.” Or it echoes the voice we know from Scripture, I believe; help Thou my unbelief.
This is the Christian Agnostic according to Weatherhead. One who believes in God, but believes that there is much of God that we cannot know. Can you relate to this position? It is the Thomas’ position of the first night of Easter.
Weatherhead goes on to say that “he believes that Christianity is a way of life, not a theological system with which one must be in intellectual agreement.” He writes, “I feel that Christ would admit into discipleship anyone who sincerely desired to follow him, and allow that disciple to make (their) creed out of (their) experience; to listen, to consider, to pray, to follow and ultimately to believe only those convictions about which the experience of fellowship made (them) sure.” Weatherhead likens the process of coming to faith to being very much like the process by which one falls in love. In other words, hard to control and to make happen in certain ways or by a certain formula. Now that is too unwieldy for many, but it is very freeing for others who find structure and creedal approaches to faith development stifling.
I think that he has just described the walk of faith that many of us are having today. We are always bouncing what we read in Scripture and what we learn in worship and bible study against what we experience in life. How do we connect our experience with the historical faith experience?
I think that Thomas represents such disciples on the quest to know the truth and thence, to believe. Truth is a reality that transcends our subjective interpretation, but it is something that we can experience on many levels and come to some sense of knowing. This is, in fact, the historical effort of the church as it attempts to write creeds that capture ‘the faith’ and ‘the experience’. The problem is that the words and the experience are always time bound.
Robert Browning expresses it this way…
From outward things, whatev’er you may believe.
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in;
This perfect, clear perception…which is Truth.
This resonates with Christ’s comment to the Pharisees on Palm Sunday about quieting his disciples. Jesus said, if they were quiet, the stones themselves would shout it out. The truth of who Jesus and God are is revealed in the life and person of Jesus in a special way. Jesus is somehow divine and human. John’s prologue attempts to capture this reality in these words, ‘Christ is the Word of God made flesh.’
Then we come to week 2 of Easter. It is the same room as the week before, the doors are locked again, the same gathering of disciples, except this time Thomas is present. Into their midst comes the Resurrected Jesus. Jesus comes to Thomas and confronts him with the truth of the resurrection as witnessed by his still visible wounds in his hands and side and he invites Thomas to see and to touch.
Now what do you picture happening as Jesus stands before Thomas. Does Thomas, in fact, reach out and touch? I think that I read this passage this way for years. But the text does not say if he does or not. It only records his affirmation, “My Lord and My God.” It is a moment for Thomas of recognition and surrender to the truth that stands before him. I like the way Natalie Sleeth captures this moment for us in words, “In our doubting, there is believing.”
In that moment the writer of John’s Gospel conveyed the reason that Jesus’ wounds were yet visible. Here is the truth of Easter that the crucified one is risen. To this reality the disciples and Thomas became witnesses. To this reality the disciples witness to others. In this reality is born the mission and practice of the community of faithful over the ensuing days and years even to today. In Weatherhead’s words, ‘Christianity is a way of life.’ We, who are called to be the church, witness to the reality of the Risen Christ by our worship, service and day-to-day living. In our worship we come to this table and we celebrate the presence of the Living Resurrected Christ and the gift of forgiveness that this special meal conveys to all who come. We believe that the Cup and the Bread become through our prayers of invocation and words of institution that the ‘Real Presence’ of the Living Christ-with-us. We hear his words of forgiveness and peace as they speak to us this day. It is a peace that we are called to witness to in our living day to day with others. Our living this belief with integrity makes it visible to others with whom we interact and with whom we share experiences of living day to day.
Could the living of what we say that we believe be what Jesus meant as he breathed God’s Spirit upon the disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins, they are retained.”??? Is Jesus calling the church…his disciples…to action to live forth the ministry of forgiveness to an estranged world? In his life and teaching, death and resurrection, Jesus has revealed the power of forgiveness and love. We are charged now to live that forgiveness in our relations with others as Easter people on a personal, institutional and systemic level. In forgiveness we discover a power that is more transforming than any bomb or jail that we can build. The challenge for the church is that if we do not live it authentically, then the world will doubt that this gift is a reality. In Christ the church is called to be a different humanity.
Peter Storey tells of a time at the end of WWII in Russia, when the defeated German Army was to be marched through the streets of Moscow on their way out of the country. The streets were lined that day mostly with women who came to see this humanity that had caused such pain in their lives with the loss of husbands and sons. As the German soldiers were marched through the streets, the jeering crowd that lined the streets became strangely quiet. For what they saw was not powerful arrogant soldiers as they had envisioned in the midst of the fighting, but rather young boys, some with barely any boots left on their feet, uniforms tattered and torn, faces showing the fatigue of battle and eyes that spoke of their own inward pain. As these soldiers marched and as the sound of shuffling feet became more and more audible, suddenly one of the Russian women broke through the ranks of the crowd, and held out a piece of black Russian bread to one of the passing soldiers. As his dirty shaking hand reached for the bread, his face looked into her eyes as she offered some compassion to this boy. Soon women from all sections of the crowd began to come forward with offerings of bread, a sign of life in the midst of defeat, of light in the darkness of the moment. In this act, we see the church at its best, bringing forth forgiveness in the hope that it will transform the lives that it touches.
Ours as the church is the task of sharing the forgiveness wherever we can and to leave the rest to God.
Fear not, Peace be with you.
So we gather around this table and we hear the words from a familiar hymn:
As Christ breaks bread and bids us share, each proud division ends
The love that made us made us one, and strangers now are friends.
Together met, together bound, we’ll go our different ways, and as his people
In the world, we’ll live and speak his praise. (Hymn 617,v.3 &5)
Amen.