Stephen V. Sprinkle
Sermon for the Second Sunday in Eastertide 4/11/2021
dedicated to my students in the class Eschatology and Ministry in Uncertain Times, Brite Divinity School
Acts 4: 32 – 35
Psalm 133
1 John 1: 1 – 2: 2
John 20: 19-31
Could the Answer Be Right Here With Us?
20:27 Then [the Risen Jesus] said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.
Do not doubt but believe.”
The meeting of Thomas the Apostle with the Resurrected Jesus is the most human and the most agonizing in the Bible. The story reeks with humanity: it smells of it. And, yet, that is the very story John chooses to inspire faith. “These [accounts] are written,” according to John, “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” (20:31). John points back to the encounter between Thomas and the Risen Jesus as the “so that” of life-giving faith for you and for me. John admits, even teases us with the multitude of other “signs”, that is, accounts of God-revealed-in-Christ, that John might have written about, but didn’t. Instead, among all the stories John tells or could have told in the afterglow of Easter, the post-Resurrection engagement between Thomas and his Lord is the one John chooses to bring faith within our reach for all ages and real life situations to come.
I am astonished that John chose this way to invite us into the drama of Jesus’ resurrection. You have to admit that instead of moving the world toward faith, it could have gone the other way. You see, choosing Thomas as John’s subject presumes disbelief.
History calls him ‘Doubting Thomas’ for a good reason, and laying our modern skeptical sensibilities aside, the nickname of Thomas has not been meant as a compliment. No, the opposite is true: “doubter,” “skeptic,” “disbeliever,” “nihilist,” “hesitator”—they have all attached to the character of Thomas. But after the impulse to name-call wears off a bit, what is at stake in this story is the problem of faith itself, a problem that, frankly, we wrestle with whenever we hear the words, “Believe me.”“Well, why should I? It’s fake news. A hoax. Prove it, convince me, make me believe it.” As if we had the power to convince anyone of anything they didn’t want to believe.
Of course, there is something laudable about not taking things on “blind faith.” Investigating claims according to the canons of evidence and reason is prudent, right? Investigation is something we wish more Americans took to heart, rather than being taken in by a two-bit flim-flammer.
But taking something onboard like a gullible rube is not what we are tempted with in our day and age. The tendency toward disbelieving everything is the seduction of this current moment. Communities of reasoned faith like the Church of St. Thomas are like an oasis in a desert, more precious than gold or buckets of pearls. Like Flannery O’Connor, the great Southern writer said, “If you live today, you breathe in nihilism…it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight with it or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” The protests of Thomas could be recruited into a nihilistic conversation quick as a finger-snap!
Remember verse 25: “So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord [raised from the dead].’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’”
And that is where the whole shebang of the other disciples’ faith claim would have come tumbling down, were it not for return of the Incredible Visitor to and through the locked-shut door of the upper room. This is the agonizing moment in the story John tells, the knife-edge upon which the whole quest for faith teeters. Who comes to Thomas, and yes, also to us with quiet incredibility to address our incredulity?
“Incredulity” means disbelief all wrapped up in amazement. So the “Incredulity of Thomas” expresses his awe and astonishment at the incredible presence of the One who had been his Teacher but had died before his very eyes on a Roman cross, someone who by all rights should have stayed dead—someone whom he had wept bitter tears over for weeks…yet, here he was, wishing peace to all, but choosing him right out of the crowd, walking right up to him!
“Have you been looking for me, Thomas? Well, here I AM. I AM the one they crowned with thorns. I AM the one they nailed to a cross where I died. I AM the one they buried in a borrowed tomb. I AM the one. You knew me before. Know me now. I AM THAT I AM.
See the nail scars I carry in my hand. See the open injury from the spear I carry in my side.”
In 1602, the Baroque master Caravaggio captured the gritty immediacy of the very moment of encounter between Thomas and the Risen Jesus. Let your eyes follow the light and shadows of the painting around the canvas, a technique Caravaggio was celebrated for called chiaroscuro. Let yourself feel the emotion charged in the colors. Look at the faces of Thomas and the disciples, the weathered faces of working class stiffs the artist knew in real life, their lived-in clothes, the dirt under their fingernails, the musk of hard work they excrete.
See how Caravaggio draws us into the instant of touch, zooming us into where the action is within a tightly focused composition, just as it may have actually been.
See how the love of God pulls back the folds of his robe—a revelation, an unveiling—and with his nail scarred hand gently guides Thomas’s index finger into the open lip of flesh … Ah, yes!
Rather than reproach Thomas for his unbelief, look how the Risen One invites him to investigate how resurrection must feel. Oh, yes, the other disciples look on with intense curiosity, but it is the face of Thomas, with wide eyes and furrowed brow that registers astonishment and dawning wonder!
Surely, that instant of inbreaking faith gripped John as he wrote and Caravaggio as he painted as they both remembered the immediate cry of the father of a sick child in the presence of Jesus in Mark 9: Lord, I believe … Help my unbelief!”
There is no more understandable, human, agonizing moment of prayer in the whole life of faith—and none more foundational for a lifetime of Christian prayer and action than this one. How could we have missed it for so long? Could he really be here among us, too? With us, too? The answer we have been seeking with our heads alone has been awaiting the same quiet Visitor who enters the locked doors of our lives and takes us by the hand and the heart to the wounded God who heals and sets us free.
Touching the injuries of Jesus caused Thomas to fall down on his knees before the Resurrected One, offering up the first instance of full Christian worship in all of recorded history: “My Lord and my God!”
This is what makes Thomas the Apostle he became. This is what makes Thomas such a transparent window through whom we see the crucified One in the quiet embodied power of resurrection! “Put your finger here and see my hands, children of Saint Thomas. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.
Do not doubt but believe.”
***
Ayodeji Malcolm Guite wrote this poem, St. Thomas the Apostle, for his book, Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year (Canterbury, 2012):
“We do not know . . . how can we know the way?” Courageous master of the awkward question, You spoke the words the others dared not say And cut through their evasion and abstraction. O doubting Thomas, father of my faith, You put your finger on the nub of things: We cannot love some disembodied wraith, But flesh and blood must be our king of kings. Your teaching is to touch, embrace, anoint, Feel after him and find him in the flesh. Because he loved your awkward counter-point, The Word has heard and granted you your wish. O place my hands with yours, help me divine The wounded God whose wounds are healing mine.
