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Doubting Thomas

AND THE JOKE IS ON . . . PRETTY MUCH ALL OF US!

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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

WHEN A NEW WORLD BREAKS IN ON US

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER, April 28, 2019

Year C: Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 118:14-29; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31


Every year on the Second Sunday of Easter, we hear the same Gospel reading, which we commonly refer to as the story of “Doubting Thomas.” It’s a bit like a cup of strong black coffee after the bubbly effervescent quaff of Easter. Brings us right back down to earth, even as we continue singing “Alleluia.”

Actually, it’s a misnomer to call this the story of Doubting Thomas. It’s really the story of Doubting Everybody. And the story began with the Gospel reading we heard last week, where Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb and finds it open and empty. Jesus had spoken about his coming crucifixion and resurrection, but no one seems to have caught his meaning. Mary can’t imagine that he’s anything but dead. She tells Peter and John, and they doubt her story. Still, they go off to check, probably muttering to themselves, “Oh, she’s got the wrong tomb. Who could possibly have moved that stone?” But they find it as she said. In fact, they identify the linen wrappings left on the floor as the ones Jesus had been buried in. What can they do but trudge back in a state of perplexity and doubt.

Mary lingers at the tomb weeping, but she stoops down to look into the tomb and sees twoangelssitting in it, one where the head of Jesus’ body had lain, the other at the foot. This is very strange. Death, according to the Torah, renders everything around it impure. Yet, here are two angels, utterly pure beings, sitting right where Jesus’ body had been. They ask her why she’s weeping, and she tells them. But her grief is so great she can’t bear to wait for a response. Instead, she turns away, only to run into someone she takes to be the gardener. 

We can easily understand it. She’s at a complete loss. She’s not only lost her beloved teacher; now she can’t even visit his burial place since the body has been moved. It’s not even too surprising that she doesn’t recognize him. After all, this can’t possibly be Jesus standing in front of her. But then, when he calls her by name, her entire world changes around her. All her existing presuppositions have been shattered. And she has set foot in a new age. All her doubts are caught up into an unimaginable sense of joy.

Mary told the disciples, who apparently doubted this part of her story, too. Yet, that very evening, a frightened little group behind barred doors for fear that the mob violence of Friday hadn’t quite exhausted itself, they, too, see Jesus standing before them. And they’re as disoriented as she had been. It was impossible, of course, but there he was—a being now of a different order, but still the same Jesus who had been crucified. He made a point of showing them his wounds so that they would know that. 

And, then, when the disciples told Thomas, who’d been missing from that gathering, he was as doubtful as they’d been, as doubtful as Mary had been before Jesus spoke her name. This is just the third round of doubt in these stories. But it’s also the climactic one, because here—on this very Sunday going on two thousand years ago—Thomas first gives voice to the true shock of the resurrection. 

People sometimes suppose that the story of Jesus’ resurrection was easier to believe in the first century than in our own time. They might say, “Well, people believed in miracles then. Even Elijah and Elisha were said to have brought children back to life. Jesus himself had done it. Ancient people were just more credulous than we. So what would kind of problem would this one be? It’s just more fabulous than the others?” 

No, actually, our own world is full of credulous people, too. It’s just that we exercise our credulity on the internet and conspiracy theories and such like. It’s clear in these stories that this array of first-century people were no more prepared to believe the resurrection than we would be. Jesus’ disciples were completely unprepared for what was happening to them even if he had mentioned it in his teaching. This was something that went far beyond the mere working of miracles. This was the beginning of a new world.

Thomas’s response to Jesus, as we heard, was “My Lord and my God.” It sounds at first, in English, as if Thomas is addressing Jesus with those titles. In Greek, it’s clear, actually, that he’s not. He may be saying “[You are] my Lord and my God.” Or it may be an exclamation, “My Lord! My God!.” Either way, it was an acknowledgement that God was truly at work, right there, right in front of Thomas, fashioning a new creation. Thomas realized that he was standing on the threshold of a world very different from the one he’d been living in. 

The disciples were living, of course, as we all inevitably do, in their past, in a world of limited possibilities most of which they’d already explored. Our past experience pretty much defines what we expect of the future. Yes, they’d seen miracles of healing, even performed some themselves. For most people in their day, it was just the only available form of healing. But the Risen Jesus wasn’t some minor aberration in an otherwise familiar world. He belonged to a different world altogether with different rules and different expectations. He showed up in locked rooms. He still bore the marks of the wounds that killed him, but was more alive than ever. His new world crossed paths with theirs, but wasn’t limited by their normal expectations. Above all, he embodied a world where love and hope are the driving forces, not fear and death. 

The world we’ve all been living in is a world where love and hope sometimes have a very difficult struggle just to survive. Fear and death keep reasserting themselves. In recent years, their power seems to have redoubled. It’s a big leap to get from a world shadowed by death and fear to a world lighted by love and hope. None of the disciples found it easy. Thomas was no different from the rest. But he understood better than anyone else what was going on. From here on, nothing would be quite the same. 

And what would it mean for us, doubters as we all are—even the most faithful of us—what would it mean for us to recognize that the world has changed around us? For some people it comes as a moment of illumination when we discover that the deep reality of life is different from the day to day rules we’ve been living by. The poet W. S. Auden told of a moment of being overwhelmed by an inexplicable awareness of God’s love for this world and its people. 

Others discover the power of this new world in acts of service, given and recieved. I’ve heard people say something like that when they talk about participating in the Friday lunches here. It may come to some of us in reading or study, in singing and worship, in the words of scripture or of a hymn. Maybe we see it at work in another person’s life and think, “There’s something important going on there!”

In Thomas’s case, it was Jesus standing in front of him with his wounds bared. And Jesus’ response to Thomas’s realization was something like this: “You’ve seen and understood and put your trust in this new age. Good. But the really lucky ones (Yes, that’s pretty much what “blessed” means here)—the really lucky ones are those who somehow just know.” And maybe some of us fit that pattern, too: the pattern of those blessed from an early age with awareness that the world of hope and love is the real world and the hostility and hate of this world will not, ultimately, prevail. But even for those lucky ones, there is still a lifelong opportunity to be surprised anew and move deeper into the gifts of the new world.

However you may discover this world, judge all the doubters in this morning’s stories kindly. Like all of us, they found it hard to escape the prison of their past, of the world they lived in, of their sometimes difficult experiences, of their long-standing assumptions.—hard to imagine a life of trust and hope and love, hard to take the long step of actually living as citizens of that new world. In fact, they probably sensed that it would probably get them in trouble here and now. But the new world was and remains an available choice. And it’s a choice that offers us new freedom and life.