Without a Doubt
Carolyn Seaton, Episcopal Lay Chaplain
Kay Spiritual Life Center
April 18, 2004
John 20:19-31
I don’t know about you, but this is the gospel lesson for me. Thomas has always been my guy. He’s the one whose story has given us the expression “doubting Thomas,” which the dictionary says is “one who is habitually doubtful.” I’m not sure he was, in fact, “habitually doubtful,” but I have been intrigued by him ever since hearing the story in Sunday School. I’ve identified with him, and some of you may have also.
I wondered and wondered, as we were shown that papier mache stone rolled away from the door of the tomb constructed in back of the Sunday School building, how Jesus could have come out of that tomb alive. Anyone I had known who had died was most certainly gone–departed–not coming back. When they told the story in church on Easter Sundays, I tried to “get my head around it.” As I got older, I devoured books on the historical Jesus as if they would tell me something sure. I listened to the testimonies of true believers in the literal truth of the resurrection and pondered the sermons I heard from those who thought it was only some kind of really lovely myth. Like Thomas, I still wanted to know if it was REAL. My life depended upon it. Like John Updike in his poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, I figured that “. . .if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.” You may have always had a calm and certain assurance of the Resurrection. But, if you’ve ever had even moments like mine—or Thomas’s–it might be helpful for us to look at the story again and consider what Jesus says to Thomas about the subject.
As we heard, Thomas had missed the visit of Jesus to the disciples the week before. He overslept. . .he didn’t come to dinner that night. . .he had a paper to write. He forgot to Mapquest the address?
But he’s been told by the others: You won’t believe what happened! “WE HAVE SEEN THE LORD!” These are his colleagues, his beloved fellow disciples, but he says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails on his hands, unless I put my finger into the place where the nails were, and my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” –I will not believe it.
Now Thomas is the one who, when Jesus had been heading into unfriendly territory on his way to Bethany, the hometown of Lazarus, and other disciples were discouraging Jesus from continuing, had said to them: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” At the Last Supper, it was Thomas who had said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” He doesn’t sound a like a person who has a problem with commitment, who is reluctant to follow. He’s ready to go if he knows it’s the right thing to do and he knows where to go.
Now, it’s Thomas Jesus speaks to as he visits the eleven in the same place he appeared the previous week. He says to him , “Reach your finger here: see my hands; reach your hand here and put it into my side; be unbelieving no longer, but believe.” He knows Thomas’s need, and he offers him a real flesh-and-blood opportunity to confirm what the others have told him. Thomas sees marks of the nails in Jesus’s hands. At the moment he sees those nail marks, he exclaims, “My Lord and My God!” The gospel does not say that he touched Jesus. He doesn’t need to. He sees the nail marks. He GETS IT right then. At an earlier time, Thomas had addressed Jesus as “my master.” Here he makes the highest claim anyone in the New Testament makes–my Lord and my God! He SEES now, he KNOWS now, that in Jesus, God himself is present. Jesus, you remember, had said in his words to his disciples before the trial and crucifixion, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Thomas really knows that now.
Jesus then comments on Thomas’s exclamation. He says to Thomas, “Because you have seen me you have found faith.” He says, I think, to us: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” It’s a beatitude. “Blessed” in some modern translations is translated as “happy.” “HAPPY are they who never saw me and yet have found faith.” He’s telling us a great truth about the nature of faith. It’s not about seeing with the eyes, but with the heart. It’s not faith we create in our minds; it’s faith we find. It is a mystery, but it is one that we can touch.
If scholars are correct, John’s gospel was written sometime between 80 and 110 A.D., when some Christian communities were experiencing rejection and persecution. They still had eye witnesses to the resurrection in their midst– and the stories from those who had been there. They were taking real risks to live in Christian community, and those writing down their experiences and giving them meaning, were providing strength to those living the message .
For all of us born after, we ask, “What about us? –We missed the chance!” We wish Jesus could make another appearance, would show us those nail marks, but it hasn’t happened. The Episcopal preacher and writer, Barbara Brown Taylor, says this story of Thomas gives each of us “the opportunity to think about how we do come to believe.” She says that “…where Jesus is concerned, only a precious few saw him in the flesh, either before or after his resurrection. Millions more have discovered him not in the flesh but in the stories, which have a way of jumping off the page. Rooted in history, they are more than history. Jesus is still alive in them, with power to make us weep, rejoice, hope, act. Maybe that is why we call both him and the stories about him the LIVING word of God.”
We can’t see the wounds, but we can hear the stories. I know the power of them and so do you. We also have what those living at the time John was writing did not have—centuries of witnesses to the truth and power of resurrection in millions of lives. Some have died for the truth of the resurrection; some have acted in heroic and world-changing ways for the truth of the resurrection; some have written heart-stirring testimonies to the truth of the resurrection; and so very many have witnessed to it in countless small acts in everyday lives.
We’ve got the reality in our OWN lives. What happens when YOU live in the faith of the Resurrection? When you go out and live the truth of the story? When you read the Words, walk out into the growth of spring, feel the sun and know the joy of the resurrection? When you offer a listening ear to a friend who’s stressed to the breaking point? When you go to the D.C. Food Bank and box up food for those whose lives you didn’t know about who really need that food? When you journey to the Cherokee nation and work with those whose reality is very different from yours? When you really stop to pray for those you read about in the newspapers, whose lives are broken by war, violence, and disease? I don’t know about you, but when I slow down to do those things, something happens. I was in a wonderful gathering the other evening with a small group of women of different ages, different Christian denominations , and different backgrounds, who live in different parts of D.C. One was a woman whose daughter was brutally murdered a few years ago, but she is busy making reconciliation and renewal happen. Two were women who grew up in countries other than the U.S. where perhaps the claims of faith are lived out differently. One was a college senior whose dedication, creativity, and energy give us hope for the future. As we read about resurrection in the scriptures, talked about how we experience Jesus when we help “the least among us,” and prayed for one another, each of us knew something of the power of the Resurrection. It might be trivial to mention a bumper sticker at this point, but you may have seen the one that says “Resurrection happens.” It does.
Yes, we’ve all got some of Thomas in us. Some of us more than others. Jesus urges us to see and to hear and then to believe. Our world desperately needs it. The world that begins right outside the Kay Chapel door. And the larger world you will go back to in a few weeks. So I suggest that today we say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” Thomas is saying that the God of all creation, the sustainer of all life, the giver of all the love in which we ever participate, the author of the saving reality that was present in the risen Jesus, is the ruler of his life. Let us do the same. Amen.
