On Easter Sunday, Molly Haws told us how important jokes are to the Easter season. (If you missed that wonderful sermon, be sure to ask her about Frankenstein the next chance you get.) I think she was right on target. And this isn’t some new-fangled modern idea. It’s very ancient. You may not think of orthodoxy as funny, but it is. 

From earliest days, Christians have been telling the story of how Death and Satan thought they had won. They snared Jesus on the cross and swallowed him whole. But they hadn’t reckoned on God’s sense of humor, and they soon heard God chuckling. They had swallowed the hook along with the bait, and the process of coughing their ill-gotten prize back up was going to be very painful for them. 

Our Eastern Orthodox sisters and brothers—who, by the way, are celebrating Easter Sunday today, since they have a slightly different way of calculating it—know this story. One of their best-loved icons shows Christ at the moment when he has invaded and defeated Death and Hell. He’s taking Adam and Eve up by the hand and pulling them up out of their graves and starting a regular revolution in Satan’s own territory. Now, there’s an Easter joke for you. All of Satan’s best-laid plans thrown suddenly onto the scrap heap!

So the big joke is on Satan. But what about Thomas? Every year, on this Second Sunday of Easter, we read the story of Thomas’s uncertainty. He’s entered the English language as “doubting Thomas” with the implication that he was just stubborn, that he somehow failed a test that his fellow disciples all passed. So the joke was on him, too, wasn’t it? 

Now, let me say up front that I like Thomas a lot. He wasn’t given to flights of enthusiasm. He wouldn’t have been one of these renegade preachers who insist on their congregants all coming to church in the middle of a pandemic. If anything, he was a bit of a pessimist—or “realist,” as we pessimists like to put it. We get a lot of insight into him, a few chapters earlier in the story, when Jesus announces that he’s going to Bethany because his friend Lazarus has died. The disciples remind him that there are people down there who were trying to kill him not so long ago. But Jesus is going anyway. And it’s Thomas who says, “Well, let’s go along. We can at least die with him.” (11:16)

So Thomas isn’t one to leap up and do a jig over what might or might not be good news. He wants some evidence. Maybe he felt that some of his colleagues were (what shall we say?) a bit less hard-headed than they might have been. It’s a simple enough matter for him. We know Jesus died on the cross. We know who buried him and where. Whoever or whatever they saw, therefore, was not Jesus. 

But Jesus appears and gives Thomas what Thomas needed: the evidence not just of Thomas’s eyes, but of his hand, touching the wounds crucifixion had inflicted—still open, it seems, though no longer fatal. And Thomas is stunned into a complete reversal. The unthinkable was true. Joke on Thomas, right?

We often think so: “Well, Thomas, you little skeptic. You won’t believe without a special favor, so now you have it. Now, couldn’t you be more like the other disciples who believed without having to see it for themselves?” Thomas is the doubter, the questioner, the one weak in faith. Isn’t it much better just to believe?

But, then, where are all those good people who just believed? In all the Easter stories in the gospels, you’ll hardly find a single person who recognized the risen Jesus right off the bat. Mary Magdalene, on Easter morning, knew Jesus was dead. Therefore the man standing in front of her was not Jesus—until he said her name. And then she knew! Later that day, Jesus had visited the other disciples. He said “Peace be with you,” and showed them his wounds. And only then, John tells us (20:20) they recognized him. 

Even later on, in the next chapter of John, we find the disciples up in Galilee fishing from Peter’s old boat when Jesus appears on the shore and tells them to cast their net on the other side of the boat, where they promptly net an enormous catch. And only then does one of them recognize who it is that’s been standing there on the beach all this time and whispers to Peter, “It’s the Lord!”

Thomas isn’t an exception to the rule at all! He’s just like all his sisters and brothers. He knows the rules of the world, the rules of nature. It can’t be Jesus. Therefore it isn’t Jesus. His world has fallen apart; therefore nothing life-giving can happen now. If the joke is on Thomas and his skepticism, it hits everybody else in the story, too.

So the joke was on Satan and Death and Hell. And the joke was on all the disciples, Thomas included, who had such a hard time accepting what had happened. So who else gets caught? Who else gets taken by surprise? Is anybody exempt? 

In one way, I suppose we are the exempt ones. We know when Easter is coming. We know exactly what it’s all about. It’s about Jesus’ resurrection. We’re no more likely than Mary Magdalene and Thomas and the other disciples to believe such a story if it were happening in our own day. But this was a long time ago. It’s become simply a reality for us. I suspect that each of us understands the story in our own slightly distinct way. If we had to say what exactly we think happened on that Easter morning so long ago, we might be hard pressed to give an account. But we know the story. We celebrate it. We’re enlivened by it. It brings us joy. “Christ is Risen” is a familiar reassertion, not a radical break in our world. So, yes, we believe. But is it too easy? It it really the same challenge that faced Mary and Thomas and the rest?

Well, sooner or later, actually it is. What they had to discover was not just the risen Christ. They had to discover that their own lives and hopes had been given back to them, despite those days of disaster, of being scattered hither and yon, of losing their great love and their great hope, of finding themselves marooned in a hostile world. They hadn’t lost just Jesus, they’d lost their trust in God. Crucifixion turned their world, their lives, upside down. Now, the resurrection suddenly turned them right side up again. And that was what was so hard to imagine, so hard to accept

And the question for me now is whether it can make the same kind of difference in my world, here and now. As a pessimist I’ve been getting a lot of confirmation for my possibly jaundiced worldview lately—a lot of confirmation and from all directions. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine a different world ahead.

And yet, blessedly, there are signs of resurrection around me, too—signs of God interfering for good. I see them here at Good Shepherd in people who keep us connected, caring for one another and for our neighbors. I see them in the world around us with governors and mayors taking leadership on behalf of public health—sometimes at real political risk to themselves. I see them in people of all sorts tackling what needs doing—making masks and safety clothing for those on the front lines, forgiving rent for people who are thrown into desperate economic circumstances by loss of income, bringing some cheer to the isolated, caring about each other. 

I still find the pessimistic scenario easier to envisage than the hopeful one, but I am persuaded that Christ really isn’t dead, that the grace of resurrection is at work here and now. I’m convinced that God is at work among us, at work in our world. This won’t resolve all our problems. God doesn’t work that way. But it gives hope and hope gives power and perseverance and even a sense of joy dawning on the horizon. 

When Thomas saw the risen Christ, all he could do was exclaim “My Lord and my God.” God was at work before his very eyes. And I consider myself blessed that God is making God’s presence known to us, too, through one another and through other people in the world around us who are touched by the power of God’s love. And this love is the power that made the world and sustains it still and will never be defeated by gullible villains like Satan and Death and their many followers. 

Thomas and I don’t get any prizes for spiritual quickness. So maybe we rank as comic figures in the great story. But Satan and Death are the real butt of the joke, not us. And if we are still struggling, God loves us enough to provide the evidence we need. 

Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA

Second Sunday of Easter, April 29, 2020

Readings: Acts 2:14a; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31