Faithful Thomas (John 20:19-31)

image: "Thomas Inspecting Jesus's Wounds" © He Qi

This sermon was originally preached on April 7, 2024, Low Sunday,  at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.

The livestream of our service may be viewed here (with video the excerpted sermon at the end of this entry).
Today's Gospel text is John 20:19-31.

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Peace be with you, beloved of God. 

This morning we get to peek into the mind, body, and heart of a man who’s been veiled in a very particular reputation over the millennia since Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. We all know him as “Doubting Thomas,” and in all honesty I was not thrilled to preach about the disciple I was taught never to be like but who I seemed to mirror anyway, in all the wrong ways. I’ve always doubted and always wanted proof because my faith has never been an easy blessing but something I’ve worked out in such fear and trembling that I was well into my 20s before I permitted myself to entertain what author David Dark calls “the sacredness of questioning everything.” It took a few more years after that to lose god altogether, which I did, about nine years ago. And when I tell you I lost god, I mean it in the most literal sense: In the midst of the asking some of the heaviest and hardest questions of my life about evil and suffering and why God never did anything about the world’s unmitigated grief and violence, I woke up one morning with an overwhelming clarity that it was because, simply, there is no god. It’s not that I stopped believing, but that god had never existed to begin with. And my life was a lie. 

The loss was exactly that sharp, terrifying, sad, and painful, but it was honest. So I went quiet and gave myself permission to enter the absence of God. I left the church I led worship at and joined Redeemer Lutheran in North Minneapolis which might sound weird, except that I was clinging to my husband, the only safe place I had left, and he wanted to go back to his Lutheran roots. When I told Pastors Kelly and Babette that I didn’t believe in God and was tired from a lifetime of church work, they hugged me, welcomed me, told me they were my home, and gave me permission to heal in the dark heaviness of Holy Saturday for as long as I needed to. When they served me the meal saying, “Amy: This is the body of Christ and blood of Christ given for you,” I cried. I didn’t believe in this meal at all -- but it fed me.

Eventually, they started saying I should go to seminary, which was, again, weird because I thought it was only for people who believed in god. But they insisted there were a lot more agnostics like me in the church than anyone likes to admit, and they deserve to be seen and heard and held by pastors who get it, are undaunted, and make space for them to come exactly as they are. So I went. In the fall of 2018 I started seminary, still fully agnostic, but also committed to going until I could go no further. And that’s how it happened, how I came back to life: Not all at once, but through the slow and careful gathering of the tiniest, most beautiful pieces, and re-fitting them into something resembling faith. I took the bread and wine when offered, and learned to re-member my Baptismal belonging each time I went for a run in the rain, or swam at the lake, or splashed water on my kid in whom I was so pleased. By the end, the inevitability and inescapability of my life’s trajectory toward ministry became as hilariously obvious as their non-existence was that day I lost God. But even so: I’m not who I used to be and neither is my faith. That death was real, the wounds were real, and the scars remain.

So now: having rebuilt a brand new kind of faith from the shards of the one that crumbled under utterly reasonable doubts, I did not relish the idea of exploring John’s  “Doubting Thomas” or explaining why neither he nor I are the kind of disciples you should listen to. Blessedly, I had him all wrong.

We’ll enter his story via the garden of verses 8-18. Peter and the other disciple have just confirmed the emptiness of Jesus' tomb but still do not understand what it means, so they return home, leaving Mary Magdalene alone to weep in the loud, mournful way we talked about on Palm Sunday. Her grief is interrupted twice, first by angels and then by the Christ she mistakes for a gardener asking, “woman, why do you weep?” And, in what I imagine to be a rush of anxious frustration, she replies to each in turn that her Lord has been taken to some place she does not know, and if they could just tell her where he is she could go to him!
 
But then Jesus speaks her name, just her name: “Mary.” And her heart ears are so attuned to the sound of her name on his lips that she immediately sees Jesus, her Lord, her beloved “Rabbouni,” and rushes into his arms and clings so forcefully that Jesus has to tell her to let go because he will soon ascend to His father who is also HER father, and she must go and tell the disciples before he does. 

So she goes, which is how we come to the locked room of today’s text that very same evening, where the disciples are gathered, hiding in fear of being caught and crucified like Jesus, and He just appears, greeting them with Peace. And “after this,” the scripture says, “he showed them his hands and feet” -- and looking, they rejoiced at Jesus’s presence. But still -- they don’t get it! Not fully, and not until Jesus says again, “Peace be with you” -- and offers the kind of Peace that is wholeness, oneness, and rest, and directly responds to and disarms their abject fear -- and “Breathes the Holy Spirit into them,” sending them in the Spirit’s power to do all the Father sent him to do; a sending which itself prefigures Pentecost when the same Holy Spirit Breath will fall on all the people, the same Holy Breath that comes to us still, breathing new Life into us for all our healing, wholeness, and peace. NOW they believe.

But Thomas -- beloved Thomas -- he was not there. He was not with Mary in the garden and he did not see Jesus' wounds or receive Holy Spirit breath into his lungs with the disciples. 

He was there when Jesus was arrested, tried, tortured, and crucified. Just like he was undoubtedly there for hundreds of crucifixions throughout his life, it being the Roman empire’s favorite feast of humiliation, degradation, and threat. So he has watched time and again as another one dies the slow, breath-stealing death of the cross, and not a single one has ever come back to life. So off the bat, he does not -- will not -- believe any of his brothers’ preposterous stories of a risen Jesus who beat crucifixion. 

Not only that, but Thomas may well still be reeling from the Lazarus incident, where we first meet and get to know the kind of man he is. Remember that? How in John 11, when Jesus tells the disciples that Lazarus has died, Thomas speaks for the first of only three recorded times, and his words are, “Let us also go, that we may die with him”? In that one sentence we glimpse the depth of Thomas’s love for and devotion to those he calls brother. And we see that wherever Thomas goes, he goes fully, with his tender heart on his sleeve and unashamed of his big, dramatic, out-loud feelings. So imagine him now, hearing Jesus has risen, and knowing that’s not how this works, and that resurrection from the dead is not something anyone gets to witness ever, never mind twice in one lifetime. The total unfathomability of that notion would keep anyone from even entertaining it.

So maybe he reasons they’re imagining things. That in their grief and pain, one or two of the other disciples either mistook a stranger for Jesus, or conjured an apparition, and all the rest latched on to the story, so desperate for it to be true that their messed up minds saw, or they said they saw exactly and only what they wanted to see, despite all real facts and demonstrable reality. And Thomas will not, for the sake of his own sanity, join them in that delusion. He will not be swayed by group think or persuaded by impossible stories, no matter how convinced or convincing his best friends are. He is, I suspect, a man consumed with grief and rage at the Empire, utterly crushed, and done with impossibilities. His big, deeply wounded heart cannot bear the sharp edges of such radical, impossible hope. 

And so he responds to their stories the best way he can, and issues an ultimatum as grotesque and offensive as their stories are to his grief, saying that unless and until he puts his very own fingers into the still-open holes of Jesus’s hands, and digs them into Jesus’s sword-pierced side, the wound that proved him all the way dead, he will not  believe. 

Put another beautiful way by author Andrew Prior, “Thomas will not trust a Christ without wounds.” Never mind one made up of words.  

Do you sense where I’m going here?

It’s not that Thomas is a petty doubter or a faithless fool. In fact, he isn’t demanding anything less or more than the other disciples got: Jesus gave his own body to each of them in the particular ways they would receive -- his voice to Mary’s ears, his wounds to the disciples eyes, his breath in their lungs -- and then they believed. 

Rather, he is SO faithful to the one, singular Christ he gave up his life to follow, the Christ he saw nailed to the tree, the Christ whose body, after only eight days, should still display those raw and gaping wounds if he’s real, that he will accept no tale, no testimony, no matter who or how many tell it, not even his most trusted friends — nothing but that very man’s flesh, his wounds of death, at Thomas’s own fingertips. 

What Thomas needs is the only One whose still-tender wounds speak to his own still-wounded heart. 

And Jesus -- oh, I love him so. Because at the end of it all, when Jesus re-enters that locked room full of disciples, he speaks Peace and turns away from them to face Thomas the way the good shepherd leaves the 99 for the one, and offers himself to his broken friend in exactly the way he’s demanded: He says, “Come, Tender Thomas. Put your fingers where the nails pierced my hands, put your hand into my side. Grab hold of me and release your unbelief. It’s okay to hope. It’s safe to believe. It really is me, and I am yours.” 

This moment takes my breath away. In my holy imagination, that room has gone silent as everyone watches Thomas with Jesus. Thomas’s steeled exterior cracks open and he lets out a sob of grief -- the kind that mixes with joy the way bitter blends with sweet, the way spit is mixed with dirt to make mud that can make a blind man see. Can you hear that sob give way to messy, snotty weeping, when, with a choked voice and red-rimmed eyes, Thomas confesses Jesus, “His Lord and His God”? 

We don’t even know if Thomas actually touched Jesus’s wounds, and it doesn’t really matter. Because here at the end, however it happened, Thomas becomes the third disciple, after Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter -- and the first after his resurrection -- to confess Jesus as the Lord God; and WE see fully that it was not doubt that kept Thomas from believing Jesus had risen, but deep faithfulness to him, and a fiercely guarded loyalty deep within that would not permit him to entrust his hope to any but the Wounded One.

There is so much Thomas teaches us about faith in these few verses. Like how choosing doubt can be the most faithful thing. Like how it’s okay to scream at God and demand answers that reach us in ways and places no one else knows exist. Like how beautiful and blessed it is to be given a faith that thrives without ever seeing or touching or screaming or losing. On this point, the author of John is perfectly right. For as grateful as I am to the God I met through the painful collapse and rebuilding of my faith from scratch, as astounded as I am in how they still come to me in ways my eyes can see and ears can hear, I wish such loss on no one. No one who’s lost or buried the god of their heart and endured an endless string of Holy Saturdays when the dead are JUST dead, would ever wish it on anyone else. So yes, blessed are those who believe without seeing.

And today, I pray that Blessed faith is yours and that you remain steadfast in its fullness. 

But if that’s not you -- if you come today like Thomas, or like I did to Redeemer, waiting on or done with a God you’re not sure is real; and unwilling or unable to believe until God meets you in your need and gives you what your trust demands, Hear this: Your questions are sacred. Your doubt is holy. Your faith and doubt are yours alone to entrust to the trustworthy in your own time. You are welcome here and loved just as you are, without condition or caveat. We are your people. We will be your home.

May Peace be yours.
Amen.