John 20:19-31
May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit
In the Tuscany town of Sansepolcro is a fresco of The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca which Aldous Huxley described as the best painting in the world. Jesus stands powerfully behind the tomb he has burst open, one foot rests on the sarcophagus, blood runs from his wounded side and in front lie four guards collapsed in sleep. They haven’t seen, let alone believed the earth shattering event which has just taken place on their watch.
On Easter Sunday we celebrated the breath-taking truth of the resurrection. Mary finding the empty tomb runs to tell Simon Peter and John. They run to the tomb and John ‘saw and believed’ and then Mary on hearing Jesus say her name, recognised and believed that she had seen the Lord. On this second Sunday of Easter, we have John’s account of the Jesus’s resurrection appearances to his grieving, frightened, and bewildered disciples locked in a room. The disciples who, on receiving the Holy Spirit, will become empowered to courageously proclaim the truth of Jesus’s resurrection in Jerusalem and beyond.
John’s gospel records twice as many resurrection appearances as the other gospels and at the heart of his narrative is the significance of ‘seeing and believing’ which reaches its climax in Jesus’s appearance to Thomas and Jesus’s declaration of ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’
Thomas appears three times in John’s gospel. The first is when Jesus is going to Judea on his way to raise Lazarus. The disciples urge Jesus not to go there because the Jews were threatening to have him stoned, but Thomas responds differently, and says that they should go with Jesus so that they might die with him. It is an expression of profound loyalty and Thomas’s willingness to accept that whatever happens, he will remain with Jesus. The second is when Jesus is talking about his Father’s house with many mansions and when he will be leaving the disciples. Thomas in response says ‘Lord we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way’. Here, again, Thomas is expressing his desire to stay with Jesus wherever he might go. Finally, in today’s reading, Thomas, who wasn’t with the disciples on that first Easter day, refuses to believe their witness to the risen Jesus unless he sees the marks of the nails and puts his finger in Jesus’s side.
Thomas is a complex character. He is loyal, courageous, committed, not swayed by others and tenacious in following Jesus. And somewhat surprisingly, it is Thomas, the so-called doubter, who makes this great confession of faith as he moves from doubting, to meeting the risen Jesus and proclaiming him as His Lord and His God. This declaration is beyond seeing and believing, it is a point of knowing, knowing the truth, the very truth which begins John’s gospel: that Jesus was the Word, both with God and the Word that was God. Jesus: the Word made flesh, truly recognised as divine. Furthermore, Thomas’s confession of faith encapsulates both the underlying theology of John’s gospel, and its very purpose- written ‘so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’. So it is Thomas, who struggled to believe the witness of the other disciples, who is the first to ultimately realise the truth that Jesus, who God raised from the dead, is indeed the one whose true identity was revealed when he said ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me’. This Thomas event is the climax of John’s gospel; everything builds up to this point of Thomas not only seeing and believing in the risen Jesus but also knowing who Jesus truly is.
Now for many of us, the tension between faith and doubt is stretched to its limit by the truth of the resurrection. It is easy for us to identify with Thomas’s doubting, but taking the step of believing in the strange reality of the resurrection demands something far more challenging and radical from us. And yet, it is belief in God’s action of raising Jesus from the dead which offers us life in its fulness and orientates us towards the new promised world beyond this world, into a world ablaze with resurrection light.
What can we glean from Thomas for our journey of faith?
First, Thomas’s doubting of the witness of the other disciples to the risen Jesus challenges us to risk trusting in the disciples’ testimony. The overwhelming evidence of history is that this small group of ordinary disciples were so utterly convinced by their encounter with the risen Christ, that when energised by the Holy Spirit, they established the early beginnings of the Christian Church. Their witness to the love and grace of God revealed in the God-sized event of the resurrection, has and does transform the lives of millions and changed the history of the world.
Second, Thomas might have doubted the identity of who the disciples had seen but once convinced that it was the risen Jesus, he immediately exclaimed ‘My Lord and My God’. This was a moment of profound knowing. A knowing which reaches beyond what can be seen and validated in this life and requires an openness to the surprising work of God in this world and the next. Thomas needed to see for himself, but when Jesus said, ‘blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’, he was speaking into the future, speaking to us. And for us, these moments of knowing require firstly, a faith that embraces a willingness to be responsive to the signs of God and a faith that is also open to trusting the testimonies of the saints who have gone before us. And secondly, it requires a willingness to allow the Holy Spirit, to open our hearts and minds to the presence of the living Lord, who reaches out to us, and invites us to know Him like Thomas as ‘My Lord and My God’. Amen.