24 Thomas, the one called Didymus,[a] one of the Twelve, wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” But he replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe.” 26 After eight days his disciples were again in a house and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus entered and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!” 28 Thomas responded to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus replied, “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” 30 Then Jesus did many other miraculous signs in his disciples’ presence, signs that aren’t recorded in this scroll. 31 But these things are written so that you will believe that Jesus is the Christ, God’s Son, and that believing, you will have life in his name. (CEB)
Reactions to the Resurrection: Our
Biblical Alter Egos, Week Four
Part
of being a pastor means you sometimes field some interesting questions. And by “interesting,” I mean “funny.” And by “funny,” I mean “sometimes haha-funny
and sometimes sad-clown-funny.” Now,
these questions typically include the basics, like, “Are you allowed to drink?”
and “Are you allowed to play cards?” and
“Are you allowed to dance?” (By the way,
the answers to all three, in order: yes, yes, and yes, but for the sake of others,
I have an abstinence-only policy. But
that category also includes astoundingly-coincidental funny, like when I was
once asked on consecutive days, by completely different people, how I felt
about the Bible story of Solomon offering to saw a freaking baby in half as a
sign of his divine wisdom. And I
guarantee you, every pastor has a story like that. My favorite comes from Rob Bell:
One time I was asked to speak to a group
of atheists and I went and I had a blast.
Afterward they invited me out for drinks and we were laughing and
telling stories and having all sorts of interesting conversation when a woman
pulled me aside to ask me a question.
She had a concerned look on her face and her brow was slightly furrowed
as she looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t believe in miracles, do you?”
As I listened, I couldn’t help but
smile, because not long before that evening I was approached by a churchgoing,
highly devout Christian woman, who’d asked me, with the exact same concerned
look on her face, complete with furrowed brow, “You believe in miracles, don’t
you?”
It’s as if the one woman was concerned
that I had lost my mind, while the other woman was concerned that I had lost my
faith. There’s a giant either/or
embedded in their questions, an either/or that reflects some of the great questions
of our era…(including) can a person believe in things that violate all the laws
of reason and logic and then claim to be reasonable and logical?
If
you find yourself in that exact same dilemma of needing things like evidence
and proof and reason and logic in face of the necessity of faith then guess
what? You’re a little like Thomas!
My
intent behind this new sermon series was to recall that traditionally, the
church held Easter to be not just a day, but a season—a 50-day long season that
culminates in the story of Pentecost, of the coming of the Holy Spirit as
depicted in Acts 2. And so for the
remainder of the season of Easter, we will be keeping the story of Easter alive
by looking at how different followers of Jesus reacted to the news on the day
of the Resurrection, and we began the series with the story of Mary Magdalene
and her reaction to the discovery of the empty tomb, as told by Mark. The following week, we turned to the
beginning of a very famous and well-loved story, the appearance of the
Resurrected Christ on the road to Emmaus to two followers: Cleopas, and
Cleopas’s anonymous companion. And last
week, we explored an equally well-known story: Jesus’ exhortation to Peter,
towards the very end of John’s Gospel, to “feed (His) sheep,” which is
traditionally taken hand-in-hand with Jesus commissioning Peter as the rock the
church is to be built upon. We conclude
this series, then, with another well-known story almost immediately preceding
Peter’s commission: the saga of “Doubting Thomas.”
And
this is one of those stories where the perspective we have been taught—the company
line, so to speak—has probably warped how we read this story today. Most notably, the adjective used to describe
Thomas in this story—apistos, in the
Greek of verse 27—does not mean “doubting,” but “unbelieving.” It’s not that he’s incapable of faith, it’s
that he prefers evidence.
And
okay, maybe you hear that and think, “Doubt, unbelief, you say potato…” Except that this matters. It matters because people have already come
to Jesus before, crying to Jesus the exact words, “Help me in my apistos—help me in my unbelief!” (Mark
9) Thomas is in this exact same mold of
saying, “Help me in my unbelieving,” and that should make him relatable. But what makes him unique is how he demands
to be helped in his unbelief—he needs to be able to not only see the Risen
Christ, but to touch Him as well, to place his hands in Jesus’ pierced side!
In
other words, despite being disciple for three years by Jesus, Thomas is still
having the exact same struggles with his belief and unbelief that random
passersby did in other Gospels!
Perhaps
we’re being a little too hard on Thomas here.
Thomas is one of those characters who clearly is meant to reflect a
universal part of ourselves—that part of ourselves that comes by our skepticism
honestly, because this world will beat up and break down an idealist in a New York
minute. There’s more to it, and that’s
Thomas’ predilection for realism bordering on pessimism.
Thomas
makes one other notable appearance in John’s Gospel—in chapter 11, at the
outset of the story of the raising of Lazarus.
Jesus tells His posse that Lazarus has bit the big one, but that it’s
okay, because Jesus is going to raise Him from the dead in order to demonstrate
the glory of God, and the disciples don’t want Jesus to do this because they’re
safely back in Galilee, and Jesus is a wanted man in Judea. And Thomas says, “Let us go so that we may
die with Him.”
What
a ray of freaking sunshine.
If
the disciples were Winnie the Pooh characters, Thomas would be Eeyore. If the disciples were Sesame Street
characters, Thomas would be Oscar the Grouch.
If the disciples were Barney characters, there would be no Thomas
because he’d get kicked off the show after refusing to sing along to the “I
love you, you love me” jingle. You get
the idea. Thomas is a bit of a crank.
And
that’s how unbelief different from simply having doubts. It’s different by a country mile. Doubt is like iron from the Biblical proverb—iron
sharpens iron, and doubt can sharpen faith. Pastor John talked about this very theme when
I was away last month—doubt can mature a belief, lead it to new levels, and cause
us to mature as Christians. But unbelief…that can bring us way, way down if we
let it. Unbelief is what discourages us
and gets us to give up on our quests, on our goals, or even on living out our
faith. Unbelief, if profound enough, can
break a person.
And
the point of this story of “Doubting” Thomas is that this sort of unbelief that
is destructive and hurtful and broken is also very much reversible. Even if it takes something as miraculous as a
bodily appearance by the Risen Christ Himself, Thomas is not so set in his
cynicism and his Eeyore-ness that he is unmovable. He is not the Rock, the Petros, the Peter of
last week. Thomas is movable. Thomas can be reached, even if only by extraordinary
means.
But
once he IS reached, the transformation is palpable. Thomas sees Jesus, and Jesus repeats Thomas’s
words right back to him, down to the letter, and the narrative doesn’t actually
say that Thomas put his hand in Jesus’ side, only that Jesus invited him to,
and that alone is enough for Thomas to exclaim with recognition, “My Lord and
my God!”
There’s
a lot in those five words. For twenty
whole chapters now, people have been assigned different titles to Jesus—the Word,
the Lamb of God, a prophet—and Jesus Himself has been assigning different
titles—the Bread of Life, the Good Shepherd, the True Vine—so His resume of job titles is already several pages long. And yet, it is
appropriate that all these titles culminate in this one title: my Lord and my
God.
For
it is no coincidence that Thomas utters these words. They are plucked straight out of Psalms 35,
where the Psalmist exclaims, “My God and my Lord,” which Thomas is mirroring
here. And it is a common theme
throughout the Psalms, this refrain of “My Lord and my God,” and it sometimes
takes on slightly different vocabulary depending on the Psalm in question. But my favorite version comes from Psalm 42,
which ends simply with these words: “Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him,
my help and my God.”
I
love it because it is what the Resurrection has promised us—a chance to AGAIN
praise Him. It’s the again part that gets
me, it isn’t enough to have hope just once, or to experience God only once, or
to praise Him only once, no, hoping in God means we get to do so again and
again and again. Being able to reach for
hope means more than just refusing to indulge in unbelief, it means that we are
being given that AGAIN—that chance to once more live in God.
Am
I Thomas? Well, he is also called
Didymus—the Twin. So, somewhere out
there, Thomas has a doppelganger.
Presumably, a physical lookalike.
But Thomas has many a spiritual twin as well, people like you and me who
find unbelief easier than belief because unbelief cannot ever disappoint
us. If we are right, then we get to
revel in being right, and if we are wrong, we get to revel in our meager
expectations being exceeded. It’s a
win-win on a micro level.
But
on a macro level, it can be very hurtful.
Enough people decide to quit on believing in something better than
ourselves, and that something cannot force its way in. Jesus does not bludgeon or coerce Thomas into
belief, He invites Thomas into belief, just as He does for all those who were
not there to see His Risen self. It’s
why John ends His chapter the way He does—in some ways, it acts as an end to
the Gospel, with chapter 21 as a sort of epilogue.
“But
these are written so that you may believe,” John says.
“Help
me in my unbelief,” we might cry in return.
And
so John tells us a story of one of our own, and of what is truly possible, if
only we believe.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
May
12, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment