I.N.I.

a sermon to be preached on the Second Sunday of Easter, or 28 April 2019, at Christ Episcopal Church, Accokeek, Maryland, and based especially on the Gospel for the day: John 20: 19-31

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus, our Lord,

Dear Friends in Christ,

So: Thomas. Maybe we should cut him a break. Or at least try to understand him and his story a little better. Because I believe he’s a lot like us. I mean, who among us hasn’t had a bad day, or bad week, at least once in our lives? And here, with Thomas, his bad week saddled him with a nickname that’s come down through the centuries to our day. You’ve heard it. I’ll just say it once, so it’s out in the open. We’ve all called him “Doubting Thomas.” Right? But that’s not his whole story.

Let’s start with re-creating the scene in today’s Gospel. The disciples are gathered together in a locked room, one week after the first Easter. A week before, that is on Easter evening, just hours after Jesus rose from the dead, hours after he appeared to Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb, that evening Jesus came and stood among the disciples.

That first Easter evening Jesus told them “As the Father sent me, I am sending you.”(20:21) Then He breathed the Holy Spirit onto His disciples; and He told them, “If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” (20:22) Seems like a pretty short encounter if that’s all there was to it. But you can be sure there were questions in the minds of the disciples. St Luke gives us a little more about what happened that Easter evening, how the Emmaus disciples had hurried back to Jerusalem and told their story, how Jesus the came among them all, how the Lord showed them His wounds, how He “opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures” (Lk. 24:45). All wonderful stuff. Fearful disciples transformed by their experience with the risen Jesus, and by hearing His words, into excited, knowing, more fully believing apostles.

But Thomas. Thomas wasn’t there that evening. Where was he? If you spend but a minute thinking about it, you’ll likely come up with several possibilities. Where was Thomas Easter evening? Maybe he was holed up somewhere that he didn’t feel safe leaving “for fear of the Jews.” (Jn. 20:19) Or maybe he wasn’t afraid of the Jews and was even hurrying from house to house whispering what the women had told them that morning after seeing the angels in the otherwise empty tomb. Or maybe he was working out how to cash in his discipleship chips and cast his lot with some other Teacher. Maybe all or none of those or something else altogether.

How about maybe Thomas was still dealing with his grief? What if he was so struck by the death of Jesus that he wrapped himself up in his cloak in a dark corner of a borrowed room in someone else’s house, crying his eyes out Friday night. And all through the Sabbath. And all of Sunday, to boot. Maybe he was known to his friends as ‘Sensitive Thomas’ or ‘Emotional Thomas.’ It could be that his love for the Lord Jesus ran so deep in his heart that when the Master was so quickly and violently ripped away from all of them, that Thomas had a huge amount of pain and sorrow to deal with. It could be that his way of dealing with emotional pain was, as it is for many animals and at least some people, to go off someplace quiet and private to work it through in silence by himself. I don’t know. Thomas could even have missed all the morning buzz about the resurrection.

Then here we are a week later. The disciples are again gathered (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had been gathering in the same place every night, hoping to see Jesus yet again). And this Sunday evening Thomas is present.

But in the meanwhile he’s made it clear to his friends that he’s “Thomas the Scientist.” He needs evidence. Something observable. Preferably repeatable. Oral testimony is great and all, but Thomas wants — he needs — to know in a physical way that what the others said is true. He won’t just take somebody else’s word for it. ‘Unless I see those nail marks with my own two eyes, and unless I can touch Him, I won’t believe,’ he said. He’s the researcher, the investigator, the scientist.

But, I think he’s also a believer.

In the last week, the other disciples had fanned out across Jerusalem and found Thomas. They’d talked to him. Comforted him. Encouraged him. They got him to re-join their band. Something about their enthusiasm and certainty must have moved him. He had his doubts, sure. But I think Thomas really did want to be convinced. What he wanted was his own encounter with Jesus. He was demonstrating for us that we can’t rely on someone else’s faith. We need our own.

So he’s there behind the locked door this week. Then “Jesus came and stood among them.” (20:26) And the Lord went right to the heart that needed Him most at that moment. Right away, He spoke directly to Thomas and — echoing the disciple’s words — said “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach your hand out and put it into my side.” Just as if Jesus had heard Thomas tell the other disciples that that’s what he would need to do in order to believe Jesus is alive . . . because, of course, Jesus did hear him.

Jesus heard Thomas. He heard his prayers and praises. And He heard his doubts. Because Sensitive Thomas the Scientist was doubting. Jesus the living Lord tells Thomas “Do not disbelieve, but believe.” (20:27) Or in the NIV translation “Stop doubting and believe.” It sounds like Thomas was trying to contain both doubt and belief in his heart at the same time. It’s as if Thomas were re-enacting the internal struggle of the father in Mark 9 whose son was tormented with an evil spirit, the father who told Jesus, “Lord, I believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”, (Mk. 9:24) Because people can have both faith and doubt at the same time.

The great thing is that Jesus always hears us, too. He hears our prayers and praises. And He hears our doubts. Jesus hears you and me expressing our doubts alongside our faith. And it’s as if the two were in a foot race down the center lane of our soul. Which will win? The one we cheer on, the one we support, the one we feed regularly at the Lord’s table.

Unless, of course, you never have any doubts. Then the race has been won already. If that’s the case then your vision of the Lord Jesus is probably less that of Thomas in the locked room, and more that of John on the island Patmos. John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” was an old man in exile when he received the lengthy vision he recorded in Revelation. What an amazing portrait of Jesus he gives us there. Same Jesus that Thomas saw, but also a whole different one.

We read this lesson from Revelation chapter 1 earlier this morning. John writes, “I saw … someone ‘like a son of man’ dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet with a golden sash around his chest. His head and hair were white as wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. … His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.” (Rev. 1: 13, 14, 16) John’s reaction? “I fell at his feet as though dead.” (v. 17) I think that’s understandable, don’t you?

When I picture Thomas realizing who it was standing in front of him, I picture him dropping to his knees in adoration. Dropping at least to your knees is the appropriate posture before the Holy One of Israel, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Yes, of course, we can be familiar with the loving Lord Jesus who is our gentle good shepherd; but we dare not forget just who He is. Jesus is our friend, and He is our Lord and our God.

Thomas saw Jesus, risen from the grave, and believed. But most of the believers through time have not seen Him with physical eyes. Most of us have not seen and yet have believed. Even if still, like Thomas, we doubt once in a while.

And that’s where his story hits ours head on.

Because we all have doubted from time to time. I have. You have. Pretty much everyone has. Maybe not, we would pray, doubted the whole revelation, but surely some little thing here or there. Maybe not, again we would pray, for very long, but surely for brief spells now and again.

But here is what the experience of Thomas can teach us: even though we doubt, we can still believe. When we doubt, we need not despair. When we doubt, we are still in relationship with our Savior because He always keep up His side of the relationship.

Thomas and Jesus show us today that doubting is not in itself sin. It could, perhaps, lead us to sin, if doubting leads us to reject God, to reject the Scripture, or to reject what the Bible teaches us especially about how the death and resurrection of Jesus gives each of us eternal life. But in itself doubt is more like a temptation, which itself is also not a sin.

Jesus — faced with one of His close disciples who had told the others “Unless I see the nail marks in His hands … I will not believe” (John 20:25) — Jesus lovingly told Thomas to go ahead and put his finger in the nail marks if he still wanted to, just as long as Thomas would “stop doubting and believe” (verse 27). It’s like Jesus is saying, ‘Come on, Thomas, I know you’ve got that faith inside you, I’ve seen it before, we’ve talked about it together, let it out Thomas, let it out.’

Jesus says basically the same thing to each one of us whenever doubts creep into our own hearts. Maybe we read something by a rank unbeliever, an enemy of the faith. Maybe we follow some aimless path on the Internet one day that ends up in the middle of irreligious conversation. Maybe our minds are just creative or speculative enough that we have spontaneous doubts all on our own. Whatever our doubts might be or wherever they might come from, Jesus gently and patiently calls us back to the right path of faith: ‘C’mon show Me that faith we both know is in your heart.’ He wants to see it. And deep down, you want to show it.

So now we know that we aren’t left on our own in a land of doubts. Jesus constantly calls us. He holds out His hand to us. He pulls us close to His wounded side. He has breathed His Holy Spirit into the world to inspire us. He has left us His Word and the Sacraments. All of that combines to make it so that today we are among those “who have not seen and yet have believed.” (v. 29)

Take your doubts to Jesus as Thomas did. Take your fears and your joys. Take your griefs and hurts. Take Him your hopes and dreams, too. Take it all to Jesus our risen Savior. He comes to each of us the same way he came to Thomas, with open arms, a loving smile, and warm words. And Jesus draws us close. He pulls us in tight despite our doubts, even though we feel the need for evidence, even when He has to remind us to “Fear not!”

You may think that Thomas really had it pretty easy. He did, after all, get to see the risen Lord Jesus in flesh and blood. We don’t get to see Him yet with our physical eyes, but we will one day. In the mean time we see Jesus in the faces and actions of our brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow Christians here and in the wider Church. We don’t now get to see the physical hands of Jesus and the nailmarks there; but we do see the hands of Jesus in the way Christians treat those around them. Other people see Jesus in how we treat them. How are we loving God with all our heart and strength? How are we loving our neighbors as ourselves? That’s how Jesus becomes visible between the Ascension and the Second Coming.

So maybe Thomas didn’t have it that easy. Not any easier than us, anyway. He saw the risen Lord that night in Jerusalem, and then again a few times over the next 40 days. You and I can see Jesus every day, many times a day.

Don’t doubt, but be believing. Be among the blessed who have not seen and yet believe.

Amen.

And may the peace of God that passes all human understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

S.D.G.