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Armadale Uniting Church |
Sermon for Easter - 2
Resurrection & Doubting Thomas
Sermon for Easter 2
Martin Wright
Armadale Uniting Church, 30 March 2008
1 Peter 1:1-9; John 20:19-31
Last Sunday, we celebrated the event of Jesus Christ’s resurrection as that great day of days, the moment when all of God’s life-giving work in creation and salvation is brought to a head and made perfect. Today, and through the coming weeks of the season of Easter, we reflect on how that story continues.
Easter is not over in one day. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is an event which stretches; it’s not confined to those three days at Calvary and the empty tomb, but somehow it fills the whole of history. The stories of those days reach beyond their own particular historical moments, and continue to be lived out and fulfilled even up to the present moment, and so they will be, until God brings all things to their final completion.
So we find, as we read through the New Testament, that even though these various texts are written a couple of generations after the events they describe, their authors still have a very vivid sense of the continuing presence of the risen Lord Jesus in the midst of his people. Both our readings today are examples of this. Both bear witness to the new community of faith which sprung into being in instantaneous response to Jesus Christ’s resurrection; both reach out beyond their pages to address us today, the inheritors of that faith.
Peter writes his first circular letter to a group of young churches throughout the Near East. When he writes about the faith and hope and joy they all have, he’s not being idealistic, he’s reminding his readers what the church truly is. He challenges us to see in the church, not just an association of partly like-minded people, but the community of the resurrection, in fact the beginnings of the kingdom of God on earth. We have all received “new birth” through the resurrection of Jesus—we are already “receiving the salvation of our souls”. This new life, it seems, is not something we have to wait for until we die and go to heaven—we are experiencing it already.
Not necessarily the easiest thing to believe. It has to be said, if we are living “new life”, it looks and feels a lot like the old life. Just as the church looks and feels a lot like any other social institution, with our quaint forms of government, initiation rites, our politics and squabbles and all sorts of particular cultural practices. Just as Jesus Christ looked like an ordinary man. And of course he was an ordinary man—as well as an extraordinary one. Surely we must learn from his resurrection that it is from ordinary human things and lives that eternal life begins.
The nature of the Christian faith is that we are to look for God in the ordinary. When we gather around the Lord’s table, it’s ordinary bread and wine that we eat and drink, and yet what really happens here is that we share in the body and blood of Christ, and somehow are knit together into his body. A baptism is a sprinkling of ordinary water, and yet what really happens is death and resurrection, rebirth into eternal life. The words of scripture, of a sermon or a prayer are ordinary words like we use every day, and yet through these we encounter again and again the living Word of God.
So when Peter writes to tell us all how great is our faith and our hope, he is not being naïve, but reminding us of what is really happening in the church. Even if we don’t feel particularly hopeful, we remain a people of hope; even if our faith sputters and fails and is swamped by doubts, we remain a people of faith. This image is what we truly are, however much we may obscure it. The church as a whole is bigger than the failings of any individual or any age.
When you look at the church, what do you see? A fading and struggling institution undergoing all sorts of change, with God knows what future? Or the community of the resurrection, the body of Christ, the saints of the kingdom of God? Both are true—but the second is much more true than the first. If only we can allow our eyes to adjust to resurrection light, it is this deeper, eternal truth that we will learn to see.
John too is concerned with what we do and don’t see. The story we heard today is almost certainly the original end of John’s gospel, to which chapter 21 was added later as a sort of appendix. Those final verses that we read mark the conclusion and climax of the whole book, in which we are told the reason it was written: “So that you may believe in Jesus Christ, and believing, have life in his name”. Like those first verses of Peter’s letter, these words reach straight out of their original context to address us directly today.
It’s no accident that the story of Thomas comes at the end of the gospel. He is a figure we have remembered very unjustly—it’s still a figure of speech to call someone a “doubting Thomas”. True, he had his doubts, which was only fair, given that the rest of Jesus’ disciples got to see the risen Lord, when he didn’t. But when he finally did meet with Christ, his confession of faith was the very greatest in the whole gospel, even the whole New Testament: he gazed upon Jesus Christ and say in him “My Lord and my God”. Nobody else had seen that—had seen in Christ not just the Lord, the Messiah, the Son of Man or the Son of God, but very God himself.
So it would be more just to remember this disciple as “believing Thomas”—or, better still, “doubting and believing Thomas”. Because it is important that the most profound confession of all is made by the one who doubted. Thomas belongs both among those who doubt and those who believe; among those who did not see the risen Lord, and those who did. He has a foot in both camps; he stands like a bridge between the age of the apostles and our own age, an example to those of us who cannot see and yet would believe. From the story of Thomas we learn that Christ reaches out to us in our unbelief, meeting us as he met Thomas, in whatever way is needed to bring us to faith.
So then may our eyes be opened to recognize Christ when he comes to meet us in word and sacrament; when he comes to meet us in the least of our brothers and sisters. And when, at the last, we meet him face to face, may we like Thomas find the faith to leave our doubts behind, and embrace him as our Lord and our God.
See Also - Poem "Doubting Thomas"