John 20:19-31
Rev. Richard R. Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
April 11, 2010
On the day after Easter I received an e-mail from a member of the congregation asking a theological question. I’ve asked permission to share it because I think the matter raised is representative. This is what it says: “I’m stumped by a question posed to me yesterday by my mother,” the parishioner writes. “My Easter visit to her brought this puzzler: Mom says, ‘O.K., so Jesus says to the good thief that today you will be with me in paradise. But the various creeds say Jesus died and descended into hell, and was raised on the third day. So how was he in paradise with the good thief on Friday?’ This is why people meet my mother and say, ‘Oh, O.K., now we understand you,’” the writer continues. “Seriously, I couldn’t even begin to figure this one out,” he concludes.
I said that I think the e-mail is representative. That is, I think many of us could find ourselves in it, either in the son who is stumped by his mother’s question or in the mother who is confused by an apparent contradiction in what she reads in the Bible and what she repeats in worship in the creeds. Even after Easter, questions persist. Why didn’t those who framed and nurtured our faith get it right? It’s hard enough to believe the unbelievable in the first place, and then the ones who tell us the story can’t seem to get their stories straight.
To respond to my friend who e-mailed me, I quickly compared the four Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion to check the details. Indeed, all of them mention Jesus being crucified between two others. John simply calls them that – “others” – while Matthew and Mark call them “robbers” and Luke calls them “criminals.” And it’s only in Luke that the one on the left and the one on the right say anything at all. In that Gospel one of the criminals challenges Jesus to save himself and them if, indeed, he is the Christ. Though the criminal’s challenge is also a plea, since he would like his life spared, it yet sounds somewhat like the taunts of Jesus’ detractors who dare him to come down from the cross if he holds the power of God within him. Which is precisely what Jesus would deny to do on the grounds that that would be “testing” God.
But the other criminal quickly rebukes his companion, reminding him that they have been sentenced legitimately for crimes they have committed, while Jesus is innocent. It’s then that he turns his head to Jesus and says, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” Those words sound familiar? Throughout Lent we took on the words of the repentant thief, singing those words three times every Sunday as we approached the time of confession in our worship service. It’s as if we recognized in the repentant thief our own sinfulness and our plea that Jesus show us mercy. We didn’t say the words of Jesus in response, but unspoken they were yet the ones we would want to hear: Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.
The richness of this story is that it tells part of the story of repentance and redemption which frames the whole Passion narrative and the wonder of the Easter Resurrection. The truth of the story overwhelms the details that differ from one storyteller to another, each with his or her own way of remembering. This is what I was trying to say on Easter morning as well. The story comes out differently in the Gospels, and then the creeds take the story and make theological proclamations that are not always true to the storyline. We have to take a great deal on faith. And maybe it’s good that questions persist because we’re drawn in again and again to consider the nuances that each storyteller brings.
And every second Sunday of Easter, whether we’re emphasizing Matthew, Mark, or Luke that year, our lectionary calls us back to John’s Gospel and the story of Thomas, a story that appears only in John’s Gospel. It, too, is a story that seems to say that we must take some things on faith. Not everything can be seen. Not everything is logically coherent. God’s mystery transcends human understanding. That’s something Thomas learns in encountering Christ.
I suspect that most of us, if asked, would call the story we heard this morning the story of “doubting Thomas.” And I would suggest that it’s Thomas’s reputed doubt that captures our curiosity. For we doubt, too, don’t we? I mean, the whole Resurrection idea challenges our bounds of credulity, our reliance on the modern scientific methods of empirical evidence and experiential proof. We’re just like the disciples were, though they lived in an age of less verifiable knowledge of the universe. The truth was hard for them to swallow, too. But Thomas was no more doubting than the rest of them. We’ve given him a bad rap over time. Thomas simply wanted what the rest of them had experienced the night of Easter. He simply wanted to see Jesus. Then he thought he could believe. The story turns out to be a story not about Thomas’s doubting, but about Jesus’ grace. Jesus gives Thomas what he needs to believe.
The story really has two parts. The first part occurs in the evening of Easter day, the second precisely a week later. The second part happens today, the second Sunday of Easter, the first day of the second week of Christ’s resurrection. There’s quite an immediacy to this whole narrative, even two centuries later.
In the first part of the story, the disciples have locked themselves away in fear. Apparently they have not believed the report of Mary Magdalene who saw Jesus in the garden, and they fear for their own safety after Jesus’ crucifixion. But then, in their descending darkness (remember, we’re in the Gospel of John where light and dark are strong images for either knowing or not knowing), Jesus comes among them as he had promised.
We’re thrown back to those words he spoke to them in what we now call Jesus’ Farewell Discourse, a group of sayings he left as promises to them for what would happen after his death and resurrection. And, already, just hours after his resurrection, he’s making good on those promises.
“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus had told his disciples on their last night together. “Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
On the evening of the first Easter day Jesus comes again to reassure his disciples and to begin preparing a place for them. “Peace be with you,” he said, trying to calm their fears. Then he showed them the wounds of his crucifixion. Seeing with their eyes, they began to believe with their hearts. Then, John says, he breathed on them. The word John uses for breathing on them is used only here in all of the New Testament. And it’s used just twice in the First Testament – once in Ezekiel when God gives life to the dry bones and, the first and only other time, in Genesis when God breathes life into dust to create the first human beings.
You see what’s happening here? God is creating all over again. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” Jesus says to the disciples. Jesus is wasting no time creating his new body on the earth. That body will be in the bodies of the disciples then and the disciples to come. That body is you and me. That’s the power of this morning’s story for all of us. God is making all things new through the risen Christ, and that newness is planted in us.
Thomas wanted a part of that. That’s why he was dismayed that he had missed seeing Jesus the night of Easter. There has been much speculation about why Thomas had not been there. There’s no way of knowing, of course. But maybe he was the only one not afraid to be up and about rather than locked away in fear. Whatever. The next week he is with the rest of them, and Jesus comes again. “Do not doubt but believe,” Jesus implores Thomas after showing him his wounds. And then – in that statement so full of invitation and promise – Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” I guess that’s where we come in, isn’t it? For we can no longer see the Jesus who once walked the dusty paths of ancient Palestine. But we can see the wounded and exalted Christ in the sorrows and joys of one another. We can hear the teaching Christ in the words of Scripture. We can feel the compassionate Christ in the testimony of others who have come to believe that he still lives among us.
And maybe that’s the bigger truth of the Thomas story than his doubting Christ’s resurrection. Maybe John wants to point out that Thomas could have believed the voice of his friends who had testified to having seen Jesus among them. Maybe that’s a good lesson that the church of Jesus Christ today can learn from the example of Thomas. Maybe we should try harder to be more trusting of others, even those whose version of the story differs from our own. Maybe we should make an effort not only to believe in the goodness of the Lord but also in the inherent goodness of each other – even when someone else delivers the strangest news we’ve ever heard – “I have seen the Lord!”
Remember John Irving’s charming book, A Prayer for Owen Meany? The narrator is named John, and John has a number of conversations with Owen Meany about the meaning of belief. In one scene at the schoolyard, Owen illustrates his faith in God by pointing to a gray granite statue of Mary Magdalene as twilight falls. When it has become so dark that the statue is no longer visible, Owen asks John if he knows that the statue is still there. John says that of course he knows. Owen keeps pushing:
“YOU HAVE NO DOUBT SHE’S THERE,” [Owen] nagged at me.
“Of course I have no doubt!” I said.
“BUT YOU CAN’T SEE HER – YOU COULD BE WRONG,” he said.
“No, I’m not wrong – she’s there, I know she’s there!” I yelled at him.
“YOU ABSOLUTELY KNOW SHE’S THERE – EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN’T SEE HER?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I screamed.
“WELL, NOW YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT GOD,” said Owen Meany. “I CAN’T SEE [GOD] – BUT I ABSOLUTELY KNOW [GOD] IS THERE!”
In A Prayer for Own Meany, Owen believes in God and God’s work in his life, without verifiable evidence or proof. His lifelong friend John does not have the same solid conviction. But what John has is a confidence in his friend that carries him through his own skepticism and into a new life. That’s probably what Thomas might have wanted to say after feeling a bit shamed by Jesus’ dramatic and demonstrable – and gracious – appearance before him. In his confession – “My Lord and my God!” – Thomas invites us to belief and trust. And to the resurrection life that awaits us, calling us to works of love in Christ’s name in such a way that others seeing them will “see” our God in us. Amen.