St. David's United Church

Sermon: John 20:19-31
Easter 2 “Believing Thomas”
St. David’s United Church
April 11, 2010
Janet Gear

“But these are written so that…through believing you may have life in his name” – John 20:31

Most families have a designated story teller – the one whose official version of mis-remembered events is the tie-breaking rendition that sets the record straight. In my family it is our older sister who calls us on the unique embellishments that make our story tell the tale we want it to tell.

The trouble with the story of Jesus’ disciple Thomas is that we love to tell it our way. The church reads this story every year the week after Easter (and admittedly the Easter Story is not the most rational story in the book, if it’s rationality we’re after). And every year, I’ve noticed, we get to the story of Thomas and we make it tell the tale we want it to tell! And it goes like this….“Thomas was as confused about Easter as we were last week but don’t worry – this week Jesus blesses anyone who is still confused, who still doubts they REALLY grasp the story line.” “Blessed are those who didn’t see the resurrected Jesus with their own eyes (didn’t understand the story) and go to church anyway.” That’s how we like to tell it. We tell it our way – a story about the merits of doubt in a life of faith.

But if Thomas were at my dinner table last Sunday night, jostling with a couple of siblings for a chance to tell the story his way, I don’t think we’d hear the same version the church likes to tell about “Doubting Thomas.” “Is THAT all you got out of the story,” I can hear him saying over top of all the turkey-eating biblical interpreters. “Clearly you weren’t there…. it wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t about doubting and believing. We weren’t talking to Jesus about the resurrection, we were talking about God. And for once, we weren’t confused. For the first time since we’d known him, none of us were confused at all. I saw him and finally understood what he meant when he said “if you have seen me, you have seen God.” (14:7). “I understood completely what he’d said the week before about being the vine and we the branches (15:1). Do you know what he meant by “abundant life?” “Well, we did.” “He told us to be a living sanctuary – the presence of God to bless and forgive as he had done and we believed without any doubt that we could do that.” “He gave us everything we needed in that moment. I understood who I was and what my life was for.” And at my dinner table, if we hadn’t interrupted to re-tell the story our way, we might hear him go on, “I don’t know why you call me “the doubter;” I was, in that moment, the clearest I’d ever been about what matters.”

So where does that leave the story of Thomas…?

“This is what I really want you to know…” I read these final few verses of John’s Gospel as if the author were saying that… “This is all you need to know… The point of the whole book is really just to tell you this”, he writes, “this is written so that you will have life.” Nowhere does it say, I have written this book “so that you will be convinced of the resurrection.” Nowhere does it say, I’ve written this , “so you will understand these theological concepts.” It doesn’t even say, “so you will know everything Jesus said and did.” In fact, the author of John’s Gospel says, “I’ve left out a lot because the purpose of this book is for you to live your life, “so that your joy may be complete” (imagine that) (15:11). The purpose of Jesus’ life is not Jesus; the purpose of Jesus’ life everyone else’s, the “abundant life” as he called it, life that understands itself to belong to God, to be situated in holy, redemptive wholeness and creativity of the divine heart. The purpose of each of our lives and the whole of our lives is discovered there.
Exactly what Jesus meant by “Peace be with you,” I don’t know. But whatever it was he offered Thomas and the rest of the disciples that night, it was enough to keep them going for a lifetime. If that’s what Thomas experienced, the routine version of his story, the way we like to tell it, becomes a little thin and I find myself believing Thomas.

“Above all, this is what I want you to know”… . It might be a good exercise for each of us to do at some point – to try to write that down. We probably do that on occasion
- in a birthday card, a graduation message, an email to comfort a friend.
“All you need to remember is this….” And what do you write? “you are loved?” “I forgive you?” “Be true to yourself?” “You are not alone?” “I believe in you.”

Well, to answer it the author of this gospel told this story (among others) – Jesus came to his disciples — a group of petrified, grieving and threatened men and women in hiding. When he noticed Thomas wasn’t there, he came back a second time to make sure he saw him too. And he breathed on them (says the author, telling the story his way by using the same verb for breathing that appears only one other place in the whole collection we call the bible – the verb used to describe how God breathed life into the nostrils of the clay figure that became Adam. In other words, “Jesus brought them to life.”) Nothing short of that. “Jesus brought them to life”, the author says, “that’s what I want you to know.” It’s not a story about doubt; it’s a story about the promise of life.

Our daughter Colleen was using the family computer this week for her social studies research and saw the text from John propped up beside the screen. “Ooo, disgusting, she said and I knew how far she’d read. (20:27)

I remember feeling exactly this way about the story. It was explained to me that some people need proof to believe in God but we’re supposed to believe without proof. I spared my daughter that particular interpretation. Like all children, she came into the world seeing God everywhere – “each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings – and like some children, she has been given words for what she sees “the Lord God made them all.” So believing without proof doesn’t make much sense.

But we know it doesn’t take long in even the gentlest life, for corners of the world to hide proof of the power of life and love we call “God.” I myself couldn’t reconcile God and suffering as a child so I understand why some children grow up to be atheists – not because they don’t see God most places but because a God who isn’t absolutely everywhere is no God at all. The promise “I am with you” pales in comparison with the impossible, “I will fix it” so fragile humans heart grow-up in the world without trusting the promise or believing the fix. “What I want you to know is this”, says the Gospel writer, “don’t go without knowing this, without believing Thomas – He heard Jesus say “you are in God and God is in you and if you forget what this means, remember me – I’m what that looks like – it looks like life – and then he showed them his bloody side and torn hands – “and sometimes it looks like this – but in every minute – God is with you.”

We all have lived long enough to know that there are no guarantees – suffering shatters some lives and emboldens others. God doesn’t use suffering to accomplish anything but we sometimes can.

So I don’t think the story tells us about Jesus’ wounds to show up Thomas as a skeptic who needed proof. I don’t think Jesus’ wounds are the identifying marks of his authenticity in that moment as much as they are indentifying marks of life in God in any moment. “Put your hands on my side and believe,” Jesus said. We can make too much of that statement but my fear is that we can make too little of it. The word “hand” in the language of the first hearers of this gospel meant more than an appendage. It was a metaphor for your life – “the continuity of your being” – Put your hand here is to say – place the lasting imprint of your life here – here, on the wounded side of what is happening around you.

We hear it again. It must be gospel – “all we need to know about the promise of abundant life” ends up having as much to do about belonging to each other as it does about belonging in God. “All we need to know” ends up stretching our lives and placing them somewhere tender, and needed. The worth and meaning, the complete joy as Jesus said, of our own life is found where our hands touch the human side of the most fragile and vulnerable, the wounded side, of the heart of God.
There are still no guarantees. We’ve already established this. Placing our lives in the path of God’s heart by siding with the suffering – the children of Haiti, the families of the north, the grandmothers of orphaned Africans, the salmon, the oceans, the wetlands – siding with the vulnerable, the fragile in the world may enlarge our lives in compassion or diminish them in pain. But the gospel wants to have us believe we will be no less than saved by doing this. And I believe that’s true.

I believe it because I’ve seen it. Like you, I’ve seen it over and over in every chapter of my life and in every place I go – people who are brought to life by placing themselves on the edges of life where they are stretched beyond themselves into the wide community of humanity and the myriad miracle of living things. The most beautiful people I know have been brought to life by being summoned beyond themselves into a life of uncalculated passion, care and self-giving. Like you, I am grateful for such people, met in person or in books or on radio, grateful beyond words for their example and inspiration: My mother who loved her children in a way that filled her with beauty; my first employer at Project Ploughshares who taught me to research, write, plan campaigns but above showed me what it looks like to love the world enough to want to save it, showed me (not coincidently) that it looks equally as beautiful to love the world as it does to love your children. We all know them -family, friends, teachers, mentors, spiritual and public leaders, communities, congregations – with a heart for the wellness, protection and wholeness. These are the people who help us understand our life the way Jesus helped Thomas understand his. We become human, filled with the breath of God, when we know we belong to the whole of things. The call to life is a call to love the world. We know how to do that; we were born knowing how to do that. We do not invent or make the meaning of our lives, we live the meaning of our lives.

The word “faith” has been lost in translation a thousand times over and we find it again here in this text used and misused in the telling of the story of Thomas. It is a verb in this text; it means “living as if you knew that you belong in God” – it means being attuned to the way all things are eternally compassionately beckoned toward their flourishing and away from harm, it means hearing how the world calls you to its side.” To have ‘faith’ in Jesus, means the more you remember of what he did, the more readily you’ll remember what your life is for. It is to belong, like he did, to something greater than your own skin; it is to belong to the movement of hope, love, forgiveness, and compassion we call “life in God.”

It seems to me that the edges of life – birth and death – are thresholds to the holy in ways that ordinary time seldom is. It makes sense to me that the holiest days in our religious tradition are the days we celebrate the birth and the death of Jesus.

At the edges of life there comes a fierce clarity about what matters, about “all you need to know.” No wonder the event of Jesus’ death is as much a clarifying event as a confounding and mystifying one.

In the barren landscape that is the edge of life, there is a way in which all that is important rises in confident relief against the horizon of our life and we see with unusual clarity all we need to know.

The text today is about a number of things but it’s not about anything and everything. It is about God’s desire for us to find our way to the promise of abundant life. So the text matters to me. In the moments in my life when grief flattens the landscape ahead of me and I can make out with unusual clarity what I need to know, one way or another it has a familiar shape – the shape of the hope and promise I read in the gospel…

“All I need to know,” tends to appear as it does in this text as a beautiful reminder of the sacred circumference of wholeness in God that is the place where the edges of life are held safely and mended finally. A reminder of the particular way we can experience the meaning of our lives as something that lies not within the days or years of our labour but in the legacy of where our love has landed along the way. And it is a reminder to the church who got side-tracked about skeptics, imposters and proof, a reminder of how we have been created to borrow and make temporal the eternal and transcendent love that connects each living thing one to another and all things to the promise of life. And it reminds me of those I’ve known who can do this. There is an exquisite dignity in living this way, a humility that resembles the One who invited us to follow this Way.

In John’s gospel, the word “see” doesn’t mean to lay eyes on; it means to have life-altering clarity. When Thomas “saw” Jesus, he didn’t merely notice him. He understood his own life – and in an instant he was filled with passion and gratitude. How else do we respond when we discover ourselves summoned by love into the world pulsing with God? How else but with gratitude because we are fashioned to belong to something beyond our own skin and bigger than our own lifetime. We come to life when we feel ourselves a part of the wide community of humanity that creates space within itself for the heart of God to dwell; we long to offer the imprint of our own heart on the fragile side of this vulnerable earth; we long to be part of the living sanctuary where love for all things is held, where the edges of life are sheltered and finally mended, where we, believing Thomas, know we have been promised life. We have been made and freed and called to this abundant life. And perhaps that’s all we need to know.

Thanks be to God. Amen.