Second Sunday of Easter s1

The faith of Thomas

Maybe Thomas saw the news from the other disciples on the first Easter morning as a practical joke. But surely he wasn’t the only one that doubted. All the disciples had displayed their human frailties and weaknesses. One had betrayed Jesus, one denied ever knowing him and the rest just deserted him, scared out of their wits and for their lives – not the actions you would expect of men who had understood all that Jesus had told them during his ministry. To the disciples huddled in the Upper Room after Jesus’ crucifixion, dead men stay dead, however good their lives had been. Anything else is a practical joke! It is easy to assume that because the disciples had been with Jesus and listened to his explanations as to why he was to die and rise again, they would immediately believe in Jesus’ resurrection. But this assumption is wrong. Thomas, in our Gospel story this morning, was so negative. Hearing that the disciples had seen Jesus, he wasn’t particularly overjoyed or convinced, promptly saying: “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails and place my finger in the mark of the nails and place my hand in his side I will not believe.” Emphasis was definitely on the negative. It wasn’t ‘if I see I will, but if I don’t see I won’t.’ Such pessimism!

But from Thomas’ negativity came an amazing turnaround. Thomas’ meeting face to face with Jesus is, for me, one of the greatest moments of faith in the Gospels. Thomas exclaims: ‘My Lord and my God’ – such a totally unexpected yet convincing exclamation of faith. It is incredible that doubting and negative Thomas should utter, arguably, the greatest and clearest statement of faith, in the whole of the Gospel. What a signpost this is for any personal reflection of the Resurrection.

Thomas saw Jesus and believed. For everyone else the evidence lies in the beliefs and actions of others and in the Church itself. The hopes of the disciples had been buried in a closed tomb by Joseph of Aramathea. None of the disciples were expecting good news; they met on that first Easter Sunday morning mainly because they didn’t know what else to do or where else to go. Stranded in Jerusalem, miles from home, their leader, way of life and future purpose had all gone in a week. Yet the contrast a few weeks later is proof enough. The spirit of the followers, once demoralised , spread across continents and down the centuries to us today. Christians spread Christianity very quickly. They taught, travelled and suffered – many died for their newly established faith. Something big had happened and that was what Thomas saw with his own eyes – the Resurrected Jesus. Scarcely able to believe their eyes all of the disciples (and not just Thomas) had to be convinced. They hadn’t planned this. If they had done so, Peter, John, Thomas and the rest would have been the first to shout: ‘We told you so! We knew it would happen and it did!’ In reality, they were as amazed as anyone else. Thomas went as far as being extremely negative, totally unconvinced, until his meeting with Jesus. That is proof enough on which to build our personal experiences of the Resurrection. No doubt about it!

As in Jesus’ world we not only see and experience inequality, bullying and prejudice but also arrogance, greed, selfishness and callousness, extreme hunger, anger, hatred, and mourning. So often anxiety, despair and fear rule, single parents seem to struggle on, many teenagers are driven to drugs and even suicide (as the recent tragedies of students at Bristol University, for example, have shown). Many people, for many different reasons, lose their self-respect and identity and innocent lives, families, people’s futures (particularly children’s) are ruined for all time because of terrorist bombings (some using chemical weapons) and senseless terrorist attacks such as those in London and Stockholm. Somebody loses their home, security, freedom, family, hope, their life every minute. Jesus came and planted a cross right in the middle of our world. But that was Good Friday. Those of us who experience the Resurrection are led to rethink our thoughts about death, about our faith, about Jesus and about the future. To so many people the Resurrection means nothing at all; they have no idea what Easter is about and many do not care. To many the Resurrection conveys no idea whatsoever of God’s power or his plan. You need to experience to believe! Thomas was fortunate; he met Jesus. We can only experience it; surely it is an experience to be shared.

Thomas’ statement of faith, in itself, is incredible enough but it can be seen in a wider context. Tom Wright, in his commentary on this passage, looks at a clock and sees the journey that it makes from midnight to midday. The hands start together at 12. They take their time making their separate way around the clock face. Finally they come back together again. It’s the same time as when we started yet it’s half a day later. It’s a different time because of all that has happened in between and yet it’s the same. In looking at John’s Gospel as a whole, He says that this feeling of same-but-different, of coming round and ending up where we started, is what John intends in his Gospel. This morning’s Gospel is the original ending of St John’s Gospel. With Thomas’ breathtaking statement of faith: ‘My Lord and my God’ the full circle from those unforgettable opening words of the Gospel: ‘Before the world was created, the Word already existed; he was with God and he was the same as God’ is completed. Thomas brings the Gospel back round to where we started with his statement of new-found faith. ‘My Lord’ he says, ‘and my God!’ He is the first person and only (in John’s original Gospel) to look at Jesus and address the word ‘God’ directly to him. Yet from the beginning, this is what John has been working towards throughout all the twists and turns of his Gospel. It was T S Eliot, who wrote, in his poem, “Little Gidding”: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Thomas was at the end of a long, vividly portrayed line of characters that John had painted on his Gospel canvas. Doubting and negative Thomas was the one who would bring the line to a spectacular conclusion. Poor Thomas, he wouldn’t bring himself to believe that Jesus was the same Jesus that had been nailed so cruelly to a cross and buried in a tomb. That is until he meets Jesus face to face and exclaims: ‘My Lord and my God’. This truly was the Word of God now making the invisible God visible.

Dennis Duncan, in his book of daily meditations, writes in an April meditation, that the theme of salvation focuses on three gardens. The Garden of Eden is the garden of human failure where God’s gift of freedom was abused in deliberate disobedience to his will. Next is the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus feared, faced and accepted that he is the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.’ It is in the wonder of the third, the Garden of the Resurrection, that the seal is set on his victory over sin and death. The empty tomb proclaims his resurrection. I can imagine a stream flowing through all three gardens; it is where the stream flows from the third garden that is crucial. T S Eliot writes in “Little Gidding,” ‘What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.’ On the local television news last week a pensioner was showing off his model of Folkestone Harbour. He had painstakingly made it out of used matchsticks and it looked amazing. It reminded me of the model of a large sailing ship that is housed at Chartwell House, the former home of Winston Churchill. Again it has been made from used matchsticks and these useless objects have been transformed, like the model of Folkestone Harbour, into something unique. Can you get anything more useless than a used match yet these have been patiently moulded into something beautiful? Is that not what God wants to do with us? We may feel useless and a bit of a failure but God wants to mould us into something special. Maybe we can then see that, however futile we feel our attempts are to make our world a better place, to grow in faith and share our Easter experience with the people we meet, they are not scattered, meaningless efforts. Bankrupt and useless to us maybe, but not to God!

Jesus says (John 14): “You heard me say; I am going away and shall return…I have told you this now before it happens so that when it does happen you may believe. I shall not talk with you any longer, because the prince of this world is on his way. He has no power over me but the world must be brought to know that I love the Father and I am doing exactly what the Father told me. Come now let us go.” Perhaps we should reflect: ‘Come let us go now and experience the Resurrection.’ Remember that to make an end is to make a beginning. The end of the Gospel is where we start from and it is up to us where the stream from the Garden of the Resurrection will take us.

Peter Smith 23/4/17