Easter II:
John 20:19-31
It’s been a full week since we were last together here. But in our gospel story, it’s still Easter Sunday — the first Easter Sunday — “evening on that day, the first day of the week.” Last week Mary Magdalene went to the tomb early, when it was still dark. And here we are at the end of the day, as darkness falls.
Right before this, as you might recall, Mary and Peter and the Disciple Whom Jesus Loved found the tomb empty. Peter went in, and didn’t know what to make of it, and went back where he was staying. The other Disciple went in, saw the same thing, and believed (and then went home). Mary hung around, and had that personal and close encounter with the risen Jesus. And then went back to where they were staying, and told them all that happened.
We should know — from so many other episodes in the gospels — and we should know from our lives as and with followers of Jesus, that disciples don’t always catch on quickly. They (and we) don’t always get it… get the connection between our faith, our values, and how to live (how to embody our faith). Peter’s reported that Jesus’s body is missing. No response. The other Disciple has reported the same thing, and concluded that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Still no response. Mary reports that she had a full conversation with Jesus. They embrace, and he says “‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ”And what’s the result? “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week… the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews.”
It might be most responsible to very briefly go down a side path, and remind ourselves that “the Jews” is a shorthand that appears, regrettably, throughout this Fourth Gospel. It may have been written in a community where there was tension between the early Jewish followers of Jesus and newer non-Jewish followers, and so the term gets used to denote ‘the other.’ And, just like some words can have several meanings based on how it’s used, “the Jews” can mean just that (a description of a broad group), OR it can imply ‘the Jewish authorities’ (like the Temple priests or Sanhedrin that conspired against Jesus), or it might simply mean “Judeans,” meaning the people who lived around there. Given the disturbing history of Christian anti-semitism, and of all sorts of religious persecution in our world, we don’t want the take-home message of this powerful story to be that there is a group of people that we should fear, or worse… The message is that the disciples, even with news of the victory of Christ, remained captive to their fears — in this case fears of the powerful religious authorities, OR the general population around them; thinking of the crowds or mobs that not long before had called for Jesus to be crucified.
This story then shines the spotlight on Thomas: ‘Doubting Thomas.’ But the gospel has another name for him: Thomas, called “The Twin.” Some have speculated that Thomas may have borne a stunning resemblance to Jesus. Or he may have been very much in sync with Jesus. Or shadowed him closely. So it’s ironic that he’s not with the group when Jesus appears. Maybe it’s his closeness to Jesus that leads him to get out of there. Instead of just wallow like the others, he’s off to ‘do something’ — whatever that might be. But to him, it’s better than nothing. Or maybe… another possibility… maybe if he really was almost like a twin to Jesus, maybe seeing Jesus tortured and killed was traumatizing for him, in a unique way, as if he were faced with his own mortality.
It’s evening on the day of the resurrection, and the doors of the house are locked. We usually slide into assuming that this story’s about doubt, and the solution is faith. Or evidence. But it would seem that the opposite of faith or ‘belief’ isn’t ‘doubt’ in a head sort of sense, but other things that get in the way of people experiencing the amazing reality of the risen Jesus. Like: fear. Like isolation. Like hopelessness. Like spiralling. Like getting busy just to distract yourself and not really face what you’re really feeling. Thomas, it seems, is a bit like Peter; earlier in the book he says “let us go with Jesus to Jerusalem, and die with him.” But that’s just talk, or ideals, or zealousness, without faithfulness. Peter will deny Jesus, Thomas, with the others will fall away when it gets tough. And here, when he’s challenged by his fear or grief, he’s the type — and maybe we know people like this (maybe ourselves) — Thomas wants to ‘power through.’ So he’s out on the street, doing something.
But what we see from the story is that powering through doesn’t conjure up Jesus; in fact, it keeps him from seeing him the first time around. And rather than an ethic of powering through, Jesus appears to his followers and proclaims peace, then shows his wounds that still mark his body. Jesus shows a way of vulnerability. Not aggression; not guardedness; not powering through.
The good news for the disciples and for all of us, thousands of years after these events, is that there’s hope. There’s hope, because Jesus appeared, again and again. And Jesus gave each person what they needed in order to believe. He stood with Mary in her grief, and called her by name, and she recognized him. For the Beloved Disciple, somehow more mature and intuitive in his faith, things just clicked when he saw the empty tomb and the linen wrappings. Some people just have that sort of faith. For Peter, he had a longer journey. Things did not ‘click’ at the tomb. But later Jesus will confront him, and test his loyalty and love; and through that, rehabilitate him to a place of leadership. And for Thomas, Jesus appeared — that second time — to ensure that he didn’t miss out. And Jesus was willing to offer his hands and side, to bear witness to the reality of the wounds. But as we heard (and sometimes don’t notice), it turns out that Thomas, in fact, doesn’t need to inspect the wounds so closely. And he expresses a statement of faith that is the most developed within the Gospels: “my Lord and my God.”
It wasn’t Thomas’s attempts at powering through that brought him to this experience of Jesus and to this statement of faith. It was Jesus’s initiative: the resurrection that broke down the barrier between life and death, here breaks down the barrier of the walls and locked doors. Breaks down the barriers of fear and isolationism and hopelessness.
The key thing was that Thomas was open to this, and Thomas was present to the community that Jesus had called together. Showing us that the solution to doubt is not evidence or belief, but firstly, openness: openness to Jesus, and openness to the community of Jesus. Because the way of faith is not an isolated, wholly individual venture. Yet how often, in difficult times, do we lock ourselves up in rooms of our own making, for fear of others? So thanks be to God for Thomas, who shows us that even the most stubborn of us are within the reach of the risen Christ.
© 2024 The Rev’d Matthew Kieswetter