27th April 2014, 11.00am
John 20:19-31 When it was evening on that day, the first day
of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked
for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be
with you." 20 After he
said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced
when they saw the Lord. 21
Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me,
so I send you." 22 When
he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy
Spirit. 23 If you forgive the
sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are
retained." 24 ¶ But
Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when
Jesus came. 25 So the other
disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." 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." 26 ¶ A week later his
disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors
were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with
you." 27 Then he 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." 28 Thomas answered him, "My
Lord and my God!" 29
Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed
are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." 30 ¶ Now Jesus did many other
signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this
book. 31 But these are
written 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.
1 Peter 1:3-9 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that is
imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who are being protected by the
power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last
time. 6 In this you rejoice,
even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, 7 so that the genuineness of your
faith-- being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by
fire-- may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ
is revealed. 8 Although you
have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you
believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the
outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
Locked in my heart there’s a child,
knocking the door to get out.
Asking the questions that hurt,
and sometimes there’s a question of doubt.
I can’t pretend that it’s easy,
I can’t pretend that I win.
When your search in this life is over,
that’s when the struggle begins
And
if I don't find out the search is not in vain
And
if I don't find out…
I
treasure the questions, as they rage in my mind.
I
treasure the questions, some day I will find.
I
ran out of answers, such a long time ago,
and
I treasure the questions, wherever I go.
Searching Sahara's of sorrow,
trying to understand why.
But the journey has brought me so much closer;
I don't have to stand here and lie.
Over and over I cried in the darkness,
over and over to see:
the crime is to sit and not wonder,
renewing my mind set me free.
Martyn Joseph.
Some years ago, I found myself part of one of those conversations over the meal-table,
you
know, the ones where you begin to wish
that
everyone was talking about something else!
The topic had turned to questions of doubt and
faith,
and
one of my dining partners had expressed the firm view,
that
a Christian with doubts wasn’t really a Christian at all.
I’m afraid I found myself rising to the bait
dangling before me,
and
replied that it seemed to me
that
the kind of belief which never questions itself
is
not only doubt in denial, but also potentially dangerous.
After all, I went on, who can honestly say
that
they haven’t woken up some mornings,
and
wondered whether the whole faith thing is just a big mistake,
or
some figment of the imagination?
“Simon Woodman,” came the reply, “you are a
very wicked man!”
Well,
similar things have been said before,
and
will probably be said again before I’m done with this life.
But on this occasion I stand by what I said:
Faith
without doubt seems unlikely to me,
and
I certainly don’t experience them as incompatible opposites.
And yet, as Christians,
we
are so often afraid to talk about doubt,
we’re
so often afraid to talk about the things we don’t believe,
we’re
so often afraid to own the hesitations, misgivings,
qualms,
and uncertainties,
that
lie behind the articulation and practice of our faith.
Thomas, or ‘Doubting Thomas’ as he has forever
become known,
isn’t
one of the biblical heroes of the faith; he’s a wuss!
He’s the guy who famously doesn’t get it,
the
one who needs a special appearance from Jesus,
complete
with wounds that he can poke his finger into,
before
he can bring himself to utter his own statement of belief.
Or so we’re led to believe… However…
Firstly, despite the lurid depictions
of
pretty much every artistic representation of the scene,
there
is no actual record of Thomas prodding his finger curiously
into
the gaping wound in Jesus’ side.
Rather,
he responds to Jesus’ invitation to do so
by
uttering the greatest confession of faith
to
be found in any of the Gospel narratives.
‘My
Lord and my God’ he declares,
putting
into words the ultimate truth of the gospel,
which
is that in Jesus, God has become frail flesh.
These
are not the words of a doubtful prodder,
they
are the confession of an archetypically faithful disciple.
But secondly, the verb ‘doubt’
doesn’t
even appear in the story of Doubting Thomas
as
we might think we know it from John’s gospel.
Oh, it’s there in the English alright,
the
translators of the NRSV and other versions have helpfully added it,
having
Jesus say to Thomas, ‘Do not doubt, but believe’ (v.27).
However, in the Greek of the original,
what
Jesus says to Thomas is not ‘do not doubt’,
but
rather, ‘do not be faithless’.
And the positive antithesis that follows is not
‘believe’,
but
‘be faithful’.
It’s not doubt
that Thomas must leave behind,
but
faithlessness.
And it’s not belief that he must embrace,
but
faith.
Which, I think, puts quite a different spin on
the story,
as
most of us have grown used to it…
Thomas isn’t ‘Doubting Thomas’ at all;
he’s
a man on a journey towards faithfulness.
As, I hope, are well all.
In his letter to the Corinthians,
Paul
lists ‘faith’ as one of the gifts that comes by the Spirit (1 Cor. 12.9)
And it’s surely significant that Thomas,
the
disciple still on his journey towards faith,
was
absent for the first visit of Jesus to the locked upper room,
missing out when Jesus breathed his
Holy Spirit the others (20.22).
The other disciples have already had a personal
experience of the resurrected Christ,
they
have already received his Spirit,
they
have already moved from faithlessness to faithfulness.
But Thomas has yet to make that journey,
and
he struggles to take it on trust
from
those who claim it to be true.
And I don’t think I’m so different to Thomas on
this one:
I
have always struggled to believe things
just
because somebody has told me that I should.
Apparently, as a small child, my favourite
question was ‘why?’
followed
by ‘What’s going on now, Daddy?’
And whilst I no longer have to ask my father to
interpret everything for me,
I
think the desire to know ‘why’, the desire to question,
the desire to dig deeper, to know
more,
remains
as strong for me now as it ever did.
It’s one of my fundamental convictions
that
no question is un-askable.
No dogma is unquestionable,
no
truth is unshakeable.
When I went to university in my late teens to
read Biblical Studies,
one
of the well meaning elder members
of
the congregation that I had grown up in
took
me to one side and warned me
that
going to study the Bible in a secular context
might
be quite damaging for my faith.
I’m not sure now how I answered him,
but
I can remember thinking that if faith couldn’t withstand
the
most difficult questions that one could ask of it,
then
it wasn’t much of a faith, really.
The other memory from that period
was
of a former minister, long retired and living locally,
inviting
me round for dinner a week or two before I set off
on
my journey of questioning and knowledge-seeking,
and
he said something that has stayed with me very powerfully ever since.
What
he said was this, that ‘faith is a relationship, not a theology’.
Faith is a relationship, not a theology.
And what I hear this to mean
is
that faith in Christ is predicated
on
a relationship with the risen Christ by his Spirit.
Faith it is not predicated on a set of
theological propositions,
which
must be assented to in order to ensure orthodoxy.
And it is not predicated on a list of things
one must believe
in
order to be a Christian.
Faith is a relationship, not a theology.
This is one of the reasons why I have always
resisted
any
attempt to make me sign anything that looks like a statement of faith.
I don’t think we need lists of things to
believe in
in
order for us to be in faithful relationship with the risen Christ.
We know the risen Christ by his Spirit,
not
by a carefully worked out and systematic belief system.
And this takes us to the heart of the
difference
between
belief and faith.
Belief
implies a set of propositions,
to which one must either assent or
dissent.
Whereas
faith implies a state of being;
faith is about being "in
Christ", as Paul would put it.
So,
to return to Thomas, and his journey towards faith:
According to John’s gospel, he finds
faith
through a personal experience of the
risen Christ.
He
does not get there
by believing what others tell him
about their experiences of Christ.
And
neither does he get there
by assenting to their propositions
about an empty tomb.
Thomas
discovers that faith in the resurrected Christ
is the product of a relationship
with Christ,
which comes to him as a gift from
the Spirit of Christ.
Faith,
for Thomas, is about a relationship, not a theology.
And
so also with us.
I
think that the key question for faith
isn't whether we believe in the
historical proposition of the empty tomb.
Rather,
it is whether the resurrection of Jesus,
to which the gospels bear testimony,
becomes true in our
lives,
as by faith we discover
the new life that is ours "in Christ"
For
Thomas, the journey towards faith
wasn't about him becoming convinced
by the testimony of others
that the body of Jesus
had been reanimated,
and could pass through
locked doors.
Rather
it was the appropriation in his own life
of the resurrected power of the
risen Christ.
It
was this experience of resurrection that generated
the gospel's ultimate and
culminative articulation of faith
- the naming of Jesus as
God.
There
is a delicious irony in the fact that the only person,
within the narrative of
the gospel,
to grasp the point of
the gospel,
is Doubting Thomas.
Only
Thomas echoes the authorial assertion of the prologue that Jesus is God,
only Thomas grasps that ‘in Jesus’
the regenerative love of
God has taken flesh
and become real in the
lives of all of those bound to mortal flesh.
It
takes the doubter to grasp faith,
and this is because for Thomas it's
not about doubt and belief,
it's about the lived experience of
the resurrected Christ.
It
might be worth taking a moment at this point
to consider the difference between
truth and historicity.
After
all, this is at the core of Thomas' story.
What
does it mean to confess faith in the resurrection of Jesus?
Is it the same thing as asserting
belief
in the physical resuscitation
of the body of Jesus?
It
may indeed be that the two are synonymous,
and certainly the dominant consensus
within the Christian tradition
has been that to have
faith in the resurrection of Christ
is to believe the
proposition of the empty tomb.
But
the thing is, the Bible itself is somewhat more ambiguous on this point.
Here
in our story from John's gospel,
it is clear that the disciples'
experience of the resurrected Christ
was of a different order
of experience
from that which had characterised their engagement with
him
during his
earthly ministry.
The
resurrected body of Jesus is able to pass through locked doors,
and moves around despite continuing
to be scarred
by the fatal wounds of
crucifixion.
Mark's
gospel, the earliest of the four, originally ended at the empty tomb,
with the resurrection narratives
inserted later in the tradition.
Paul,
who wrote the earliest texts of the New Testament,
spoke at length and frequently
about the necessity of faith in the resurrection
of Christ,
but
never once did so in terms of a physical body resuscitated after death.
Indeed,
Paul’s own experience of the resurrected Christ
had something of the mystical,
visionary nature of Thomas’s experience.
For
Thomas, the resurrected Jesus appeared mysteriously in a looked room,
while for Paul he appeared
mysteriously in a vision on the road to Damascus.
The
stories of physical resuscitation in the New Testament
are all to be found within the later
documents,
in
those gospels written a generation or more after the time of Jesus,
as Christians sought language and
stories to express their lived faith
in the resurrected Christ.
I
will put it boldly;
Thomas did not come to believe in
the resurrection,
he came to faith in the resurrected
Christ as his Lord and his God.
I
sometimes thing we get it round the wrong way:
The
truth of the story of the resurrection
is to be found in the realisation
that
the
tomb is empty because Jesus is risen,
rather than that Jesus is risen
because the tomb is empty.
The
empty tomb does not prove the resurrection,
rather, the experience of the risen
Christ
means that the tomb is empty.
This
is the purpose, of course,
of the original, shorter ending of
Mark’s gospel.
Mark
deliberately leaves the narrative hanging at the empty tomb,
because he invites his readers to
answer in their own lives
the question posed by the empty
tomb.
Where
is Christ? Why is the tomb empty?
It is empty because Christ is risen,
and
he is present now by his Spirit
in the lives of those who have, by
faith,
encountered
him in life-giving relationship;
as, by the power of his Spirit,
he brings transformation and resurrection
to
being in the lives of all those who come to him in faith.
How
do we know Christ is risen?
We know this because we know the
risen Christ.
And
we know him by his Spirit at work in our lives,
bringing to birth the fruits of
resurrection.
We
know him as he breathes his Spirit on us,
and speaks words of peace and
reconciliation over and into us.
We
know him as we gaze upon his wounds,
and realise that God-made-flesh
has
entered into the depths of human pain, and sorrow, and suffering,
to
open the path through death
to new life, to new hope,
to
resurrection, and forgiveness,
and peace, and love.
As
Archbishop Rowan Williams puts it,
There is no hope of
understanding the Resurrection
outside the process of renewing humanity in forgiveness.
We are all agreed that the
empty tomb proves nothing.
We need to add that no amount of apparitions,
however well authenticated, would mean anything either,
apart from the testimony of forgiven lives communicating
forgiveness.
Or,
as Jesus himself put it,
in the parable of the Rich Man and
Lazarus:
If
they do not listen to Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be convinced
even if someone rises from the
dead.’ (Luke 16:31)
Faith in the
resurrected Christ is a gift of the Spirit of Christ,
it is not the product of evidence or
theological assertion.
Faith is a
relationship and not a theology.
And, faith is not
incompatible with doubt.
As Philip Yancey has put it:
I’m
an advocate of doubt,
because that’s why I became a
Christian in the first place.
I
started doubting some the crazy things
my church taught me when I was
growing up!
Doubt is the skeleton on which faith is built,
and
yet too often churches have taught, either verbally or tacitly,
that
to doubt is to sin.
Well, you have heard it said, that doubt is
despicable,
but
I say to you, question everything,
and
treasure the questions,
because
in the questioning, the resurrected Christ is to be found and known.
As Peter himself puts it,
the
genuineness of your faith
-- being more precious than gold
that, though perishable, is tested by fire—
may be found to result in praise and
glory and honor
when Jesus Christ is
revealed.
Although
you have not seen him, you love him;
and even though you do not see him
now,
you believe in him
and rejoice with an indescribable
and glorious joy,
for
you are receiving the outcome of your faith,
the salvation of your souls. (1
Peter 1.7-9)
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