Doubting Thomas

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Low Sunday, 24^th April 2022

The Incredulity of St Thomas, Caravaggio, c.1602

John 20:19-31  
1 Peter 1:3-9  

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 faith-less’.
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 faith-less-ness to faith-full-ness.
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,
            and their corresponding opposites of doubting and faithlessness
 
Belief implies a set of propositions,
            to which one must either assent or dissent.
If you don’t agree with the truth of the propositions,
            you’re a doubter.
 
But faith, on the other hand, implies a state of being;
            faith is about being "in Christ", as Paul would put it.
Being faith-less, is a necessary part of being faith-full.
 
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.
 
Rather, 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
            is not 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
                        to 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 Markan resurrection narratives
            inserted later in that gospel’s 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 think 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,
                                    to 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 in his first epistle,
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)

An Inconvenient Body

A reflection for Good Friday, 15^th April 2022

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

 

Caravaggio, La Deposizione di Cristo, 1602-3

John 19.31-42
 
Bodies are something of an inconvenience,
            both in life and in death.
 
In life they are, at their best, wonderful.
 
The problem is that keeping them at their best
            requires quite a lot of hard work, and quite a lot of luck.
 
Either neglect or illness can suddenly rob us
            of that which we’ve taken for granted,
and the experiences of the last two years of pandemic
            has brought home to us just how frail our bodies can be.
 
We can exercise, eat healthily, and have all our jabs,
            but I’m afraid there are no guarantees
                        that our bodies won’t let us down,
                        cause us pain, or just go and die on us.
 
And in death, bodies are even more inconvenient,
            certainly to those who are ‘left behind’ to deal with them.
 
In our society we have a whole system in place to deal with dead bodies,
            usually involving so-called ‘private ambulances’,
            chapels of rest, and cemeteries and crematoria.
 
Because we know that a dead body,
            left to its own devices for a few days,
will start to spread death and disease
            to those who are already healthy.
 
Dead bodies can also tell a story.
 
Any sudden death must be investigated for evidence of foul play,
            as every episode of every TV detective drama ever has demonstrated.
But also, as we are now hearing from Ukraine,
            they can provide evidence of war crimes.
 
Forgive my rather depressing, earthy, bodily, introduction.
            But we are, after all, at Good Friday,
and our reading for today tells the story
            of the disposal of the body of Jesus after his crucifixion.
 
The ancient Roman practice
            was to leave the bodies of crucifixion victims on their crosses,
            to be gradually decayed and eaten by carrion.
 
But the Jewish practice was to bury people before sundown,
            to give them the dignity of a ritual burial.
 
This is why the legs
            of the two criminals crucified alongside Jesus are broken,
            to hasten their deaths and allow for burial.
 
Jesus, however, is already dead.
            But that doesn’t save his body
            from the barbaric act of being speared by a soldier.
 
And up to this point in the story of that first terrible Good Friday,
            everything has seemed normal.
People are executed, people die, people are buried.
 
But the spear in the side of Jesus,
            surely intended as a final indignity to mark the end of his life,
            has an unexpected outcome.
 
Blood and water flow from the side of Jesus.
 
Too much speculation has gone into finding a medical cause for this,
            and I think that to do this is to rather miss the point.
 
None of what’s about to happen can be explained medically.
 
Rather, we already know from John’s gospel
            that both blood and water have symbolic meaning
            as indicators of new life.
 
Earlier (6.53-56), Jesus has spoken about the importance
            of eating his body and drinking his blood to receive eternal life;
and also of the gift of living water (4.10; 7.37-38)
            as a gift of life to all who receive it.
 
The blood and water that flow from the wound
            in the side of the dead body of Jesus
are, if we’re paying attention, the first indications
            that something unusual is going on
            in this otherwise unremarkable execution.
 
Even at the moment of Jesus’ death,
            the signs of new life are already starting to show.
The light of the world is glimmering
            through the cracks in the shroud of death.
 
There is a direct link here, in John’s symbology,
            to the Christian rituals of communion and baptism.
 
In communion, we receive the bread and wine
            as symbols of Jesus’ death,
and yet we also proclaim them to be a sign
            of God’s undertaking for the life of the world.
 
In baptism, the person being baptised goes down into the ground,
            like a body being laid in a grave,
before rising to new life in Christ
            symbolically washed clean of the power of sin over their life.
 
These rituals of blood and water are life-giving,
            because the one who gave his life on the cross
            continues to give his life to us.
 
But for now, in the story of that first Good Friday,
            the clue of the blood and water is overlooked.
Instead, the people around the cross
            busy themselves with the horrifically mundane task
            of dealing with the body of their dead friend.
 
Two of his lesser-known disciples,
            Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus,
take his body, anoint it with expensive perfume,
            and lay it in a newly cut tomb.
 
We’ve met Nicodemus before in John’s gospel,
            and to make sure we don’t overlook him,
                        we’re specifically reminded by the author
            that he was the disciple ‘who had at first come to Jesus at night’.
 
He was, we know from earlier in the gospel, a Pharisee,
            a leader of the Jews (3.1) who had come to Jesus in secret
            and discussed with Jesus what it meant to be born again from above.
 
Nicodemus didn’t realise it back then,
            but Jesus’ language of being ‘born again’
was another of the gospel’s clues
            that death doesn’t get the final word on life.
 
Life keeps erupting into situations of death.
 
And here on the day of crucifixion
            we meet Nicodemus again,
coming out of the shadows,
            to minister to Jesus at his moment of death;
bringing with him all the expectations of new life
            that are carried in Jesus’ words to him back in chapter 3:
the promise that ‘God so loved the world
            that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him
            may not perish but may have eternal life.’ (Jn. 3:16)
 
And Joseph of Arimathea is present too,
            another seldom mentioned disciple,
who appears in each gospel only once,
            and always doing the same thing:
he asks Pilate for the body of Jesus,
            and lays it in a freshly cut tomb.
 
The other gospels give us a bit more information about him,
            but here in John he is a secret disciple, a hidden follower,
            in fear of the Jewish leaders.
 
Unlike Nicodemus who encountered Jesus at night
            and then stepped into the light,
Joseph continues to walk his discipleship along hidden pathways.
 
But there’s something interesting about Joseph of Arimathea.
 
He might be a bit-part character in the gospels,
            but within the Christian tradition he emerges
            as person of great significance.
 
He is present in almost every classical depiction
            of the burial of Jesus, whether painting or sculpture.
 
He gives his name to the group known as the Nicodemites,
            who hid their faith to avoid persecution through the Reformation.
 
Somewhat astonishingly he becomes an integral part
            of the founding mythology of England,
            in the stories of King Arthur and the Holy Grail.
 
He becomes Jesus’ uncle,
            taking the young Jesus to visit Glastonbury.
 
He features in William Blake’s subversive poetry,
            and is in the background to the opening premise
                        of the hymn Jerusalem -
            ‘And did those feet, in ancient times,
                        walk upon England’s mountain green?.
 
Goodness, what an afterlife he has had!
            So much so that my friend John Lyons wrote a whole book about him.
 
So what are we to make of Joseph and Nicodemus,
            taking Jesus’ body and burying it in a tomb?
 
Well, I think they invite us to see ourselves in this narrative.
            None of us really know what to do in the face of death.
            It is, after all, the ultimate mystery.
 
Some of us avoid it, some of us deny it,
            some of us pluck up the courage and face it.
Some of us are confronted with it against our will.
 
And I think the actions of Nicodemus and Joseph
            invite us to reflect, today, before the cross of Christ,
            on our own reaction to the distressing reality that is death.
 
But as we do so, John’s gospel offers us a glimmer of hope.
            The blood and the water, the promise of life,
            the hope that death is not, in fact, the end.

Broken

A short story for Good Friday

Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I shall begin.
 
This morning I want to tell a story, and it’s a story that is both the oldest story that there is, but also, perhaps, the most recent.
 
It begins in a garden, as ancient stories often do.
 
This time, it’s a garden square on a spring morning in late March. The frosts of winter have finally surrendered, and the early snowdrops and crocuses are offering hope that life yet lies latent in the dead ground.
 
There’s a woman there, eyes closed, warming her face in the morning sun. Her friend, the man, is sitting by her side, reading something and waiting for nothing in particular.
 
It’s one of those days when nothing much happens, but everything seems significant. A perfect moment, of tranquil friendship and quiet hope.
 
The man lifts his eyes from the page to look at the woman, and she flicks her eyes open to return his gaze.
 
As their eyes meet, a shadow flashes between them. Maybe it was nothing more than a cloud passing the sun; maybe it was something more. A moment of desire, perhaps; a hint that friendship might turn to something more than companionship.
 
The woman looks away, and the man looks down, but in that brief second of wordless encounter, something has changed. Tension has entered the garden.
 
The man mutters silently to himself, remembering a mantra from his childhood, “I want, I want, doesn’t get.” The woman is more cautious, remembering the last time desire took her by surprise, and she too recites a proverb of caution, reminding herself ruefully that, “one bitten, twice shy.”
 
And so they sit there in silence for a while longer, the woman closing her eyes against the brightness of the sun, the man distracting himself with the words on the page in front of him. But the silence has been broken, and that which is broken is not so easily repaired.
 
...
 
Three years later, the silence was broken again, by the wedding bells of a parish church; an appeal to hope, as bride and groom walk each other down the aisle. Friendship surprised by desire had blossomed to something approximating to love, and promises were made in the hope of a better future.
 
The day had dawned sunny, as weddings days surely should, but by the time of forced smiles for photographs a cloud had started to cast its long shadow.
 
And it wasn’t long before the game we call blame began. “She started it”, said the man. “But he deserved it”, replied the woman.
 
Their conversations followed well-worn paths, as the man and the woman discovered the true nature of their deep need of the other. “I love you” became “I need you”. A need to be needed, certainly; a need to be loved, sometimes; but more than these, a need to have someone with whom to share the blame of life, the shame, the guilt.
 
And she became jealous, in time, of the time he gave to the voices on the pages that he read. And he resented her ability to close her eyes and turn her face towards the sun. And each learned to blame the other, for that which had once been so desired.
 
...
 
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.  ⁷ Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.  ⁸ They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.  ⁹ But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"  ¹⁰ He said, "I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself."  ¹¹ He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?"  ¹² The man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate."  ¹³ Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent tricked me, and I ate." [Genesis 3.6-13]
 
…
 
Three years later the silence was broken once again, this time by a baby’s cry, as fractured love gave birth to startling innocence; and for a while the frosts of winter melted in the warmth of the hopeful new life that had come into their lives.
 
A child can, for a while, paper over the cracks in a marriage. And two sons, a few years apart, can offer welcome respite from the lonely tension of two.
 
The man and the woman discovered a surprising unity of purpose, as they learned together a new game of blame focused not on each other, but on their boys. “Life was so easy until you came along”, she said. “Your mother and I have made such sacrifices for you”, he echoed.
 
And so, as they say, the sins of the parents were visited upon the children, and two brothers took the quest for self-justification deep within their young souls. Each brother yearned for acceptance, and each learned who to blame when it was withheld.
 
Childhood squabbles bred habits of hatred and jealousy, as brother turned against brother.
 
The elder, for a few brief idyllic years the sole object of his parents’ attentions, always resented the imposition his younger brother had made on his memories of those early golden years. “My life was perfect,” he would say, “until you came along and ruined everything.”
 
The younger, of course, had no such memories to draw on, he just saw his elder brother getting to everything in life ahead of him. He was, definitionally, years behind, with no way of catching up. He would always be the second son, the perennial prodigal, and it was his destiny in life to be denied the privileges of the firstborn.
 
In time the brothers grew apart. Separate lives, separate careers, separate families. Occasionally, seasonally, they would meet up with their father, now alone and living an uneasy long silence. The boys would tell him of their lives, hoping for affirmation, but they were always a disappointment.
 
Until, one Christmas, the younger son announced that he was changing career, following in his father’s footsteps. And, for the first time, his father smiled with pride. His son was doing what he had done. He was vindicated.
 
The father turned accusing eyes on his disappointment of an elder son, who flushed with shame and anger. Meanwhile the younger brother turned to his elder brother in triumph, knowing that for the first and only time in his life he had got there first.
 
...
 
The silence of the garden of remembrance was broken by the tears of a woman. A mother crying for her younger son, refusing to be comforted by the man who stood by her side. A couple reunited in grief and guilt. Both sons lost to them, neither one now the keeper of the other, while the blood of the slain cried out from the ground for vindication.
 
....
 
Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, "I have produced a man with the help of the LORD."  ² Next she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground.  ³ In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground,  ⁴ and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering,  ⁵ but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.  ⁶ The LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen?  ⁷ If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it."  ⁸ Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out to the field." And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.  ⁹ Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He said, "I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?"  ¹⁰ And the LORD said, "What have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground! [Genesis 4.1-10]
 
…
 
And so the story continues, from one garden to another.
 
...
 
This time the silence is broken by the sound of a man crying. A man alone with his tears, seeking some release from the burden of shame, and guilt, and grief that has been handed to him. A man longing to pass his suffering on to another, but unable, or unwilling, to do so.
 
Then there are more men, and some women, and one man betrays his brother with a kiss of death.
 
The betrayer has realised the futility of projecting hopes and dreams onto another, and so he projects shame and guilt instead.
 
And then the voices of others join the voice of the first accuser, and guilt is proclaimed over and over and over again, until the brother is guilty enough to deserve the death that is no longer his to refuse.
 
...
 
Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, "Sit here while I go over there and pray."  ³⁷ He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and agitated.  ³⁸ Then he said to them, "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me."  ³⁹ And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want."  ⁴⁰ Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, "So, could you not stay awake with me one hour?  ⁴¹ Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."  ⁴² Again he went away for the second time and prayed, "My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done."  ⁴³ Again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy.  ⁴⁴ So leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words.  ⁴⁵ Then he came to the disciples and said to them, "Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.  ⁴⁶ Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand."  ⁴⁷ While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived; with him was a large crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the elders of the people.  ⁴⁸ Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, "The one I will kiss is the man; arrest him."  ⁴⁹ At once he came up to Jesus and said, "Greetings, Rabbi!" and kissed him.  ⁵⁰ Jesus said to him, "Friend, do what you are here to do." Then they came and laid hands on Jesus and arrested him. [Matthew 26.36-50]
 
…
 
Another garden, a place of death. Women weeping.
 
Death of love, death of hope, death of fear, death of guilt, death of shame, death of death.
 
Silence. A shadow. Darkness.
 
...
 
Another garden. Silent as the grave.
 
...
 
Pilate said to them, "Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?" All of them said, "Let him be crucified!"  ²³ Then he asked, "Why, what evil has he done?" But they shouted all the more, "Let him be crucified!"  ²⁴ So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves."  ²⁵ Then the people as a whole answered, "His blood be on us and on our children!"  ²⁶ So he released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.  ²⁷ Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor's headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him.  ²⁸ They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him,  ²⁹ and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, "Hail, King of the Jews!"  ³⁰ They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head.  ³¹ After mocking him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.  ³² As they went out, they came upon a man from Cyrene named Simon; they compelled this man to carry his cross.  ³³ And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull),  ³⁴ they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it.  ³⁵ And when they had crucified him, they divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots;  ³⁶ then they sat down there and kept watch over him.  ³⁷ Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, "This is Jesus, the King of the Jews."  ³⁸ Then two bandits were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left.  ³⁹ Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads  ⁴⁰ and saying, "You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross."  ⁴¹ In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying,  ⁴² "He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him.  ⁴³ He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, 'I am God's Son.'"  ⁴⁴ The bandits who were crucified with him also taunted him in the same way.  ⁴⁵ From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.  ⁴⁶ And about three o'clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  ⁴⁷ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, "This man is calling for Elijah."  ⁴⁸ At once one of them ran and got a sponge, filled it with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink.  ⁴⁹ But the others said, "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him."  ⁵⁰ Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. [Matthew 27.22-50]
 
…
 
And again, and again, and again, the innocent die to satisfy the guilt of others.
 
It is both an old story, and a new story. It is our story.
 
How will it ever end?
 
That, as they say, is a story for another day...

Noli me tangere

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Easter Sunday, 17 April 2022

Noli me tangere: Engraving by Martin Schongauer, 15th century

John 20:17  Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"

One of my lockdown projects
          was to read my way through the entire set
          of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe Novels.
                    All 23 of them!
 
I now know more than I ever thought I would
          about the Napoleonic wars,
but my big problem came when I got the end of book 23.
          because I always find the ending of a book, or a book series,
          to be something of a bereavement.
 
You see, when I’m reading, I enter into the story:
          the characters become real to me
                    and losing them at the end of the last page
                    can feel like a real loss.
 
I don’t want to let them go.
          I want to hang onto them, to cling to them,
          to find out what they will say and do next.
 
It can be very hard to let go of the friends I make in the stories I read.
          And I know I’m not alone in this,
                   because the whole industry of fan-fiction is designed to cater for those
                    who want to know more about the characters they have come to love.
 
Sometimes, as with Sharpe,
          if the book I’m reading is part of a series,
                    I need to plough straight on into the next one,
          not losing the characters that I’ve come to know so well,
                    wanting to see what happens to them next.
 
But sometimes, what I really want to do
          is go back to the beginning and start reading it again,
          now that I know how it ends.
 
And here’s my question:
          In what way does knowing the ending
          affect the way we engage the story?
 
Of course, there is one golden rule with novels,
          that I try desperately hard not to break.
And that is the rule that one should never, ever,
          turn to the end and read the last page.
 
To do that is to break covenant with the author,
          it has something of the air of cheating about it.
 
But of course, once the ending is properly known,
          any future re-reading of the story
          has to take place in the light of what is now known
          about the outcome of the story.
 
And this is exactly what we have going on
          in our reading today from near the end of John’s gospel.
 
It’s not quite the last page, because there’s a little bit after it,
          but it’s certainly part of the concluding narrative of the story.
 
And the thing about John’s gospel,
          as with all the other gospels,
is that it is written for people who already know the ending.
 
Not a single person sitting there in the first century,
          hearing John’s gospel read to them for the first time,
would have been wondering, at the crucifixion scene,
          whether this was the end of the line for Jesus.
 
This whole gospel, that we’ve been reading through since the start of the year,
          is a story that’s been written for those
          who are already part of the next instalment.
 
And so we need to hear the account of Jesus’ appearance to Mary
          from the perspective of those
          who already know the end of the story.
 
The significance of this narrative isn’t
          that Jesus is, in some way,
          still very much alive and with his disciples.
 
Rather it is that the encounter with the risen Christ
          needs to go somewhere.
 
It is a story about the significance of the events,
          rather than the events themselves.
 
And so we come to the characters in the story.
 
And don’t hear me wrong here,
          I’m not suggesting that there was no such historical person
                   as Mary Magdalene, or Simon Peter,
                   or the otherwise anonymous disciple whom Jesus loves,
                             or even Jesus of Nazareth himself.
 
But what is certainly true for us,
          is that we don’t directly encounter the historical figures
                   that lie behind the gospel stories.
 
We meet them instead through the words of the gospels.
          So, here in John’s gospel,
                    we meet John’s ‘Mary’, John’s ‘Simon Peter’,
                   John’s ‘beloved disciple’, and yes, John’s ‘Jesus’.
 
They become real to us as we read them into being in our minds;
          and people long-dead come to life in our lives
                    as their stories take breath
                   and are breathed into being once again.
 
And so it is that Mary Magdalene reaches out
          to try and cling onto the man she encounters
          in the garden outside the empty tomb.
 
The usual translation of this verse doesn’t really do justice
          to the force what of John is trying to put across here.
 
Jesus’ response to Mary is often translated as ‘don’t touch me’,
          which can seem very odd given that only a few verses later
                    Jesus is happily inviting Thomas to not only touch him
                    but to put his fingers into the wounds of crucifixion.
 
And there has been much, in my view unnecessary, metaphysical speculation
          about the nature of Jesus’ resurrected body,
          and why Mary isn’t allowed to touch it.
 
But I think this is to miss the point.
 
We’re not talking here about Jesus’ physical historical resurrected body.
          We’re talking about the resurrection of Jesus
                    as it is encountered within the narrative of the gospel of John.
 
And so we need to meet the story on its own terms,
          and to hear it as readers who have already encountered
                   the resurrected Christ in our own lives,
          present with us by ongoing encounter with the Spirit of Christ.
 
So the simple translation ‘don’t touch me’ is inadequate,
          and we need to delve a little deeper
to discover the more accurate renderings:
          of ‘don’t cling to me’,
                    or ‘don’t try to keep me’,
                              or ‘don’t try to possess me’.
 
This isn’t about whether Mary can touch Jesus.
          This isn’t about the nature of Jesus’ resurrected body.
 
Rather, it is about the fact that Mary has to let Jesus go.
          She cannot keep him, she cannot possess him,
                   she cannot cling onto him.
 
We know Mary Magdalene from earlier in John’s gospel,
          when she is standing near the cross with the other women,
                   watching Jesus die.
 
And the other gospels similarly have her playing her part in both
          their crucifixion and resurrection stories.
 
Luke’s gospel even gives us a bit more information,
          telling us that she received healing from Jesus
          for the seven evil spirits that had possessed her.
 
This is clearly a woman whose name is known
          throughout the early Christian community
          as a person who was close to Jesus during his life.
 
And here in John’s gospel we are shown her crisis in the garden,
          as she meets the resurrected Christ for the first time.
 
What is immediately clear is that, for her, things are very different now,
          but also that she still wants them to be the same.
 
She wants to cling onto the Jesus she has known.
          She wants to hold fast to the Jesus of history.
 
And she has to be told
          that this isn’t the way it will be from this time on.
 
Her encounter with Jesus has to move from the physical to the spiritual.
          She has to learn to let go of the earthly Jesus
                   and to embrace the new experience of the resurrected Christ
                   that will be found in through lived encounter with the Spirit of Christ.
 
For Mary, there is no going back to before the cross,
          the resurrection doesn’t negate or undo
          the decisive moment of the crucifixion.
 
The physical body of Jesus dies on the cross,
          and the resurrection does not render that moment void.
 
Rather, those who, with Mary, encounter the resurrected Christ
          do so from the perspective of those who already know the ending.
 
At the time of John’s gospel,
          written some sixty years after the crucifixion,
the disciples of Jesus in the late first century
          knew that they didn’t encounter Jesus
                   walking and talking with them,
                   eating with them,
                   and touching them.
 
They knew that they didn’t meet Jesus in the same way
          that the disciples in the gospel stories
          had met him prior to the crucifixion.
 
Rather, they encountered him speaking to them
          through the words of the stories about him;
they met him by his Spirit present with them
          when they gathered together in his name;
they met him as they broke bread and shared wine
          in memory of his death on the cross;
they felt him touch them in the waters of baptism,
          as their lives were transformed by divine encounter
          and their sins were forgiven.
 
And this is the journey that Mary must make
          in these closing pages of John’s gospel.
 
She becomes the archetypical disciple,
          making the journey we must all make
          in our encounter and ongoing relationship
          with the resurrected Christ.
 
Because this is where the Jesus of history becomes the Christ of faith.
          This is where crucifixion gives way to resurrection.
This is where death gives way to life,
          and despair is transformed into joy.
 
This is the new world from beyond,
          breaking in upon Mary
          as it breaks in upon all those who embrace the resurrected Christ.
This is the kingdom coming on earth, as it is in heaven.
 
I often think that contemporary Christianity
          has something of a problem with the resurrection.
 
Most Christians seem quite happy with the cross of Jesus,
          and we have our finely drawn arguments
          about the nature of atonement.
 
But we don’t seem to know quite where the resurrection fits into things,
          and my concern is that the resurrection
                   gets relegated to being a kind of cosmic publicity stunt,
          the sole purpose of which is to prove that Jesus is the son of God
                   and allow us to know about what happened at the cross.
 
Mary’s encounter with the resurrected Jesus
          takes us beyond such problems,
and points us to a more profound way of engaging the resurrected Christ.
 
The resurrection needs to be more
          than a cosmic publicity stunt which validates the cross.
It needs to become an invitation to a new way of living,
          a gateway to a new way of being.
 
And a key to this is to be found in the way Mary relates to Jesus.
          Did you notice what Mary called Jesus as she tried to cling onto him?
                   She called him ‘Rabbouni’, which John tells us is Hebrew for ‘Teacher’.
          Mary was still stuck in the role of student, to Jesus’ role of teacher.
                   She was a disciple, and he her master.
 
Jesus counters this by re-writing the script, by changing the language.
          In the post-resurrection encounter with Christ,
                   those who would be his disciples
                   find that he is no longer their master, but their brother.
 
Three are 120 instances in John’s gospel
          where God is identified as ‘father’,
and yet this verse is the first time that God is mentioned
          as the father of anyone other than Jesus.
 
John 20:17  Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"
 
In the new world that comes into being at the resurrection,
          God moves from distant-other to present-father,
                   from elemental force to parental love,
                   from wrathful dictator to enfolding grace
          And Jesus moves from master to brother,
                   from Lord to friend.
 
The new Moses becomes the new Adam
          as humanity is reborn in the resurrection of Christ.
 
God comes near and greets us as lost children welcomed home,
          and Christ is no longer merely an intermediary between us and the divine,
          dispensing words of judgment and guidance.
 
Rather, Jesus is most fully God with us,
          present with us by his Spirit
          in each moment of each day.
 
And yet it seems to me that so many of us, so much of the time,
          keep trying to cling onto the Jesus of history.
 
We want the master who will teach us, and tell us what to do,
          we want the Lord who will sit in judgment on our enemies,
          and uphold our righteousness before the unfaithful.
 
We treat the stories about Jesus
          as if they were synonymous with the historical Jesus himself,
rather than invitations to encounter the resurrected Christ
          in our lives by his Spirit.
 
We cling onto our preferred version of Jesus,
          and persuade one another that he is ours to keep and control.
 
And if this is us, we need to learn the lesson of Mary Magdalene,
          that in order to have Christ with us, we first need to let go of him.
 
If you look at Mary’s journey through our passage this morning,
          we see her making three distinct moves.
 
She begins the chapter in the darkness of un-faith,
          in despair at the cross,
          and in confusion at the empty tomb (vv. 1-2, 11-15).
 
Then she recognizes Jesus in the garden,
          and moves to a conditional faith,
she can see him, but still can only see him as Rabbi,
          as teacher, as master and Lord (vv. 16-17a).
 
And so she tries to cling to him, to keep him familiar and close.
 
But the third stage of her journey of faith
          is the move to becoming someone
                    who has truly encountered the risen Lord,
          and who is then able to bear witness
                    to the truth of this new world
          that has come into being in her life
                    by the power of the resurrection (v. 18)
 
And John’s gospel encourages all its readers
          to undertake this journey of Mary:
                    a journey from the darkness of unfaith,
                              to the confused joy of partial faith,
                              to the gracious outpouring of resurrection faith.
 
We must take care not to get stuck at partial faith,
          where Jesus is Lord and Master,
                    but not yet brother and friend,
          because that way lies legalism and grace-less religion.
 
We need to discover God as our loving parent,
          drawing us close in love,
          and embracing us as long lost children.
 
Because if God remains distant and other,
          then our faith remains theoretical and abstract.
 
To end where we began,
          we are those who know the ending.
 
We are living the end in the present,
          and we read into being the stories of our own lives
          in the light of the presence of the resurrected Christ in our midst.
 
A church like Bloomsbury, with our emphasis on social justice
          and our seeking to participate in the transformation of the world,
can find it very easy to relate to Jesus as our inspirational teacher,
          and to God as our guiding principle.
 
But I wonder if sometimes we are so good at following Jesus
          that we miss the fact that he is our friend and our brother.
 
I wonder if sometimes we are so good at worshipping God
          that we miss the loving embrace of a parent who longs to hold us close
          and to speak words of deep comfort to our troubled struggling souls.
 
And I wonder what it means for us to let go
          of our well-known and dearly-loved Jesus of history,
in order to encounter the mystery of the resurrected Christ in our midst
          in a new and transformatory way.
 
What might it mean for us to discover through mystical experience
          the presence of Christ in our community?
 
What would it mean for us to meet the Spirit of Christ
          in ways yet to be made known,
as our lives find their fulfilment and peaceful resolution
          in the love that draws all things to their perfect conclusion?
 
We already know the ending,
          so let’s live in the light of it,
          and see what a difference that makes to the story we live by.