Our lectionary reading is really two post-resurrection appearance stories, tied together by Thomas the Twin, who dominates the second half. The first occurs in the evening of the first day of the week following the crucifixion, when Jesus comes to the disciples where they are huddled in a house, behind locked doors for fear of the religious authorities . . . last week we saw what had happened on the morningof that same day . . . Mary had come weeping to the tomb, had found it empty, and when Jesus appeared standing before her, she only recognized him after he called her by name, and she ran to tell the disciples she’d seen him.
All this to say that Jesus having been raised was not a new concept to the disciples, they’d heard it from Mary, and that may have been why they were gathered there in the house, behind those locked doors. To discuss the possibility of his being alive, and perhaps to talk about what he would do to them if he were. After all, hadn’t they betrayed him, hadn’t they deserted him? Hadn’t they denied him not once, not twice, but three times? If he really had come back, wouldn’t he want to punish them, to exact revenge for their folly? That’s certainly what an earthlymaster would have done to people who had abandoned him, betrayed him, and denied him, and it wouldn’t be rewarding them with an all-expense-paid trip to the Virgin Isles.
And Behold! There he is! Jesus, standing before them, just like he stoodbefore Mary, and the Greek verb to standis repeated here . . . he stands among them, like he stoodbefore Mary, and just as he will standbefore the them in later on, when Thomas is among them . . . he’s not floating, not hovering, he’s standing on two feet. Solid. Earthy. Nothing ghostly about him at all, no siree Bob! And now to their fear of the Romans, they might have added their fear of his wrath.
That’s why it’s so important that the first words out of his mouth are “Peace be with you” . . . it disarms for all time their fears of retribution, and points the way to the new creation, where revenge and reprisal are not the normative response, where payback is not the way business is done. But wait . . . there’s more! He then shows them his nail-scarred hands and his sword pierced side . . . and this flows out of the first pronouncement of peace, it is connected to it. By showing the marks of his death, his crucifixion, he is saying that this peace is more than just a lack of strife—though it certainly implies that as well. But even more, there is a peace in the never-ending war with the Powers, the power of death over our lives. And this peace is predicated on the fact—evidenced by those wounded hands and feet—that he has conquered death, he has triumphed over the powers that be. No longer will death signal an end, no longer will we cease to be, but in some unspecified fashion, we will exist beyond it. Here was the proof, standing before them.
But Jesus says “Peace be with you” once again, and this time it is connected with a sending: “As the father has sent me, so I send you” and this sounds important and significant, an elevation of the disciples’ station in life, but I wonder: after the excitement of the appearance of their beloved master dies down, when they go to their pallets deep in the night to sleep, do they ponder that double-edged statement? Did they think about what it meant to be sent just like Jesus? Did they remember just how God sent his only son?
Well. As if to cement the deal, he breatheson them, and is it the same breath that blew across the waters at creation? Is it the word that became flesh, the word that was spoken to Mary in the garden? Is Jesus bestowing something of himself upon his followers, Something of his essence? Earlier, he’d promised them an advocate, a Holy Spirit, which would teach them everything . . . and so here we have the fulfillment of that promise. No massive crowds, no tornado-wind-sound, no dancing tongues of flame. Just the Spirit, the pneuma, born on the pneuma—which also means breath—of Christ.
The Spirit has been given to them as an advocate, to teach them, to empowerthem to be the ones who are sent . . . and the first thing Jesus tells them they are sent to dois to follow in his footsteps, to continue in his work of forgiving sins: whatever sins they forgive will be forgiven; whatever sins they retain will be retained. Only . . . if what Jesus does is the model for what they are to do, if they are sent as Jesus is sent,I cannot imagine them as retaining many sins. Jesus’ life and work was radical in its notion that everyone should be included, that no one is exempt from the reconciling grace of God. If what Jesus has done is normative for us,there would be a whole lot of forgiving going on, and no retaining at all.
So that’s what the Holy Spirit teaches and empowers us to do: to display God’s forgiving grace to all we meet, to be signs and effectors,doers of that amazing grace. No matter how hard we find it, no matter how difficult or abhorrent or downright painful it is, we have the Spirit of Godon our side, who teaches us and reveals to us and comforts us as and powers us as weare sent just as Godsent Jesus the Christ.
And now we’re told that Thomas isn’t there, Thomas the Twin, who is nevercalled doubting Thomas anywhere in the gospels, and this introduces and gives a basis for the third post-resurrection story that John tells us, and the second half of today’s lesson . . . and I personally think it’s a set-up, that—like Peter—Thomas represents more than himself, he represents a general attitude, a seeing-is-believing one that is not too far removed from the one that prevails, or has prevailed, in our Western society in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. His outburst—dutifully reported by John—sets us up to hear and interpret Jesus’ lesson at the end.
"Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,” he says “and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." And when, a week later, Jesus appears standing before them, just as he’d stood before Mary, just as he’d stood before the disciples the previous week, Thomas is with them. Once again, Jesus wishes them peace, and—knowing what Thomas had said—offered to let him touch his hands and side. “Do not doubt,” he says “but believe.”
But Thomas no longer needs to put his finger in the nail-holes or his hand in the side, like the other disciples, he believes it’s him just by sight. “My Lord and my God!” he says. And here’s the set-up: Jesus, never one to pass up a teachable moment, uses Thomas’ having to see to believe, his refusal to believe just because he’s been told, to make one last point: “Have you believed because you have seen me?” he asks, and of course, the answer is “Uh . . . yes . . .” and I can just see Thomas looking hang-dog and shuffling his feet. “Blessed are those who have notseen and yet have come to believe.”
And this word “blessed” in Greek is a technical term, and I’ve seen it translated as “happy,” but it has a distinctly different connation from simple happiness: when you see the word blessed, it implies that it’s God bestowing favor, bestowing a blessing, upon the recipient. If it’s happiness, the happiness is God’s doing. And so Jesus is making a theological statement here: God blesses those who have come to believe without seeing. And one other thing we should notice: the careful translation of pisteuow,the Greek for both belief andfaith, as “come to believe.” In the Greek, it’s the participle form of the verb, which implies ongoing belief, without a definite beginning, and more importantly, without a definite cause. Thus, it does not imply that the blessing is a reward for those who come to belief without seeing deciding to believe on their own. Indeed, believing without seeing is a major theme in the Gospel of John. Elsewhere, Jesus explains that belief comes not from our seeing miracles, not from what we see convincing us to believe, but “from above,” by which he means God. God is the author of our belief, according to Jesus, not us.
And so, given all of this, given the setup of Thomas not believing until he sees, and Jesus’ simple declaration—and I don’t think he’s chiding him here, he’s just stating a fact, blessed are those who come to belief without having seen—and given that Jesus is adamant elsewhere that God and God alone is the author of our belief—I think that we can identify the nature of the blessing, and it’s not what we normally might suppose. It’s not eternal life or salvation or however you want to term it. After all, it’s pretty clear that Thomas—and the other disciples, for that matter—who believed only after they saw will inherit the Kingdom of God. I think the blessing, the favor bestowed upon those who come to belief is the belief itself.
Think about it: even in those days, there was an “I’ll believe it when I see it attitude.” It took Jesus showing the disciples his pierced hand and side before they would acclaim him Lord. Many of his followers only believed afterthey saw him doing miracles, feeding multitudes, driving out demons, and raising the dead. And how much more cynical have we become in this post-modern era, when the single-minded pursuit of science and rationality has sucked all the mystery, all the inscrutability, all the enchantmentout of life. The modern age has flattened our existence out into the dreary proposition that the only things that are realare things that are material, that we can hold in our hands, and the only things we can knoware things that can be repeated and “proven” by the scientific method.
Meanwhile, spirituality is relegated to a part of our lives that the world labels “religion” or “faith,” and it’s separated from our material lives by the extreme rationality of our time. How much more of a blessing, then, is our belief in a good and beneficent God in the face of all this mind-numbing mundane-ness? How much more wonderful that we have been granted belief without seeing, without touching, without weighing or measuring or investigating?
But the nail-scarred hands and the sword-pierced side provide us with a description, an explanation, a pictorial portrayal of the nature of the belief, of the message contained within, and when the disciples see them they—as well as we—know what it is. Through the life, death and resurrection, God has vanquished the powers that be. Death, where is your victory? Grave, where is your sting. Hallelujah, Amen.
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