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A Week Later Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 19, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Corinthians 15:50-58 John 20:19-31
A week later and among this more manageable crowd, the question before us, according to John’s gospel, is a question of believing without seeing. We have no risen body: only words that bear witness to a body both recognizable and unrecognizable, both material (in that he eats) and ethereal (in that he wafts through closed doors). We who crave certitude are given the human words of an eyewitness named John telling us things that we are incapable of proving or disproving. Yet John has taken pity on us, I believe, in the person of Thomas who appears last in the second half of what most believe was originally the end of John’s gospel. Why Thomas was walking the streets of Jerusalem on Easter evening as the rest were fearfully huddled in the dark behind a bolted door, John does not say. After reporting Jesus’ evening appearance to the disciples and his gift of the Holy Spirit (never mind Luke’s forty day waiting period for Pentecost), John tells us that Thomas was not with them. I would add with some agitation, “Thomas of all people was not with them!” But given the purpose of John’s gospel—that we may believe—the exclamation instead must be, “Of course Thomas was the one who was not with them.” Of Thomas, we know this: when the other disciples tried to discourage Jesus from going to raise Lazarus in Judea because they were afraid for his life, Thomas did not hesitate, saying to the others, “Let us also go that we may die with him.” “…it falls to Thomas” writes New Testament scholar N.T. Wright “to say the words which, under certain circumstances, express the very core of the Christian faith: ‘Let us go with him so that we may die with him.’” “Those words,” Wright goes on, “though they seem gloomy and almost shoulder-shrugging are words we can imagine being spoken by Dietrich Bonhoeffer…or Oscar Romero” or Martin Luther King. Reading with hindsight, I imagine in Thomas a man able to grasp the concrete demands of discipleship. I imagine, two thousand years later, you and me. But then in response to Jesus’ assurance before his death that he would come again and take them to the place he has prepared for them (“You know the way to the place where I am going”), Thomas pipes up, presuming to speak for the twelve, and protests, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Again, listening with hindsight, I hear in Thomas’s question the worldview of one who can deal with the physical but checks out when the conversation turns to the metaphysical, the speculative, the abstract, the incorporeal. I hear, two thousand years later, you and me. Never mind that John Calvin labels Thomas (and by implication many of us) as Jesus’ “loyal but dull disciple”! For our poor sakes, then, Thomas of course must be the one who is missing on that first night, Thomas whose need for certitude mirrors our own and requires something other than the report of friends, something more tangible in order to believe. Hence there could be no trying to find a crack in the disciple’s concrete thinking where an incorporeal ghost of a god might be fit. We ourselves have tried as much, tried to substitute a philosophical belief in the immortality of the soul for the resurrection of the body. Yet a disembodied spirit comports neither with the story of Christ’s rising nor with Paul’s theological wrestling nor with the church’s later confession. John rather knew as early as 90 A.D. that he had to do business head on—by way of Thomas’ doubt--with the confounding reality of the resurrection of the body. Returning to our text, notice immediately the detail of a door not only closed but also bolted. John says this was because the disciples were afraid of the religious authorities; but given Thomas’ doubt concerning the tangible reality of Jesus’ resurrection, surely the bolted door had more to do with the sort of body Jesus had been given: it was a body that could go through closed doors, a detail that gave Thomas all the more reason to make his belief contingent on touching as well as seeing Jesus’ body. Thomas finally arrives late on the evening of the first day of the week to the uncontained and uncritical amazement of the ten. They cry in echoes of Mary Magdalene’s earlier witness, “We have seen the Lord.” In response Thomas throws down the gauntlet. Three concrete conditions must be met if he is to believe what they have told him: seeing the mark of the nails in Jesus’ hand; putting his finger in the mark of the nails; and putting his hand in Jesus’ side. One can only imagine the conversations that ensued over the next seven days. A week later, on Sunday night, the doors again being shut, Jesus comes to Thomas and says, clean contrary to what Mary Magdalene had been told, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Then without so much as sentence written to let us to catch our breath, Thomas exclaims “My Lord and my God!” This is not dogma but doxology; this is not proof but unbridled praise. Thomas’ certainty no longer in what he could find out but in the one who had found him out in all of his doubt: in the risen Christ. Henceforth the confession of the disciple known for his doubt became the church’s central affirmation of faith: my Lord and my God, meaning that God was in Christ. You get the sense that Thomas’ faith amazes even John. He who has intended that we be drawn into the story by Thomas’ doubt and desire for certainty, now addresses us directly with the hope that we will be enabled through the astonished momentum of Thomas’ changed mind to make our own confession. Still as he tells us that he has written these things so that we may come to believe, it is clear John cannot help but wonder if he has said enough, dared enough, put enough flesh on the savior of our lives to elicit belief in all who will never see Jesus save through the words he is writing down. Near at hand he has in mind the nascent congregation of Christians living in Jerusalem in the last decade of the first century; at an unbelievable distance, he writes with you and me in mind. But his final words lead me to think something else: to think that John has included the story of Thomas not only for our sake but for his. Just as Thomas took the possibility of believing into his own hand, likewise John has taken the possibility of our believing in Jesus as Lord and God into his hand, his pen, his powers of suasion. It is what ministers think when they mount the pulpit, what parents worry about as they wrestle children out of bed on a Sunday morning and into a pew, what conservative Christians presume as they accost unsuspecting pedestrians about to cross the street concerning their eternal salvation. It is what all of us who struggle in our minds with the faith think as we practice believing for an hour on Sunday morning: think that the certainty we seek resides in us, think that if we try hard enough and search long enough, who knows? One morning we might wake to believe six impossible things before breakfast! Paul knew better. Last of all and to one untimely born, Jesus appeared to Paul who was looking for anything but Jesus. “By the grace of God,” Paul wrote, “I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” Theologian Paul Tillich takes the apostle’s words to mean that clearly “it is not self—certainty” that is at stake when it comes to believing God was in Christ. “The truth of the gospel Paul has preached,” Tillich goes on, “is not dependent upon Paul. The certainty he has is not dependent on the changes in his personal experience. …He is not sure of himself and he is not even sure of angelic visions. But he is sure of the gospel…. For, [Paul] continues, the gospel I preach is not a human affair; no mortal put it into my head: I, yet not I; my gospel and yet not my gospel; my certainty and yet not my certainty. This,” says Tillich “is…our situation before God which runs through the whole Bible and the confessions of all the great Christian witnesses. It is our certainty, but it is lost the moment we begin to regard it as our certainty.” Writing to a generation only once removed from the empty tomb but as equidistant from being eyewitnesses to the risen Christ as we are, Paul contends that “in fact Christ has been raised from the dead.” This fact, says Paul, is the fact with which we must begin: it all depends--everything in our life and our death depends--upon the resurrection and on the God who raised Jesus from the dead so that death in all its manifestations shall have no dominion. How are we, who have not seen, to believe this? Tillich repeats that if take certainty to be something at which we arrive, as something that depends upon our airtight reason, “we discover its weakness, its vulnerability to every critical thought; we discover the small amount of probability which our reasoning can give to the idea of God and to the reality of Christ.” Look to Christ, he counsels instead, and see that we do not have him as “an object of our knowledge, but that he has us as the subject of our existence.” Look to God in Christ whom we cannot finally escape as though he “were an object of skeptical arguments or of irresistible emotions.” Rather surrender to the fact that “we may not comprehend, but we are comprehended. We may not grasp anything in the depth of our uncertainty, but that we are grasped by something ultimate, which keeps us in its grasp and from which we may strive in vain to escape, remains absolutely certain.” A week later, even John had to lay down his pen, had to keep himself from saying that Thomas touched Jesus’ body, had to stop himself from playing into our need for certainty in ourselves, because for Thomas and for us and for John, this last scene could only be an account in which everything depended upon the God who raised Jesus from the dead, a story that revealed a truth which proved to be more reliable and real and redemptive than any mere human surmise. A week later, “The content of the Easter witness was that when they had lost Him through death they were sought and found by Him as the Resurrected,” says Karl Barth. He came to them. And though we do not see him, he comes to us still, addresses us still, loves us still as the One who was dead and, behold, he is alive forevermore! This I cannot prove, for if I could prove his resurrection we would again be in a realm that depends upon us. And though, said friend and theologian Sandy McKelway, “we may not always be able to hold to the facts surrounding Jesus’ resurrection…if we will just listen to them, [they] may…hold on to us.” Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. Alleluia! Amen. |