Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
This may come as a shock to some of you, but when we say “the Lord is risen indeed, alleluia”, we do not all necessarily mean the same thing. Get two Episcopalians in a room and there you will have at least three firm positions on any subject. And to widen the lens to Christians across the country, the diversity is even greater. For conservative evangelicals, the physical resurrection of Jesus’ body on Easter morning is the irreducible essence of the good news. For some in mainline or progressive spaces, the physical body of Jesus may have been raised from the dead, but the emphasis is on the inner experience of the continuing spirit and presence of Jesus in and among the individual disciple and the community. The body may have remained dead and yet in a real way Jesus is risen in their hearts. The post-resurrection appearance stories are, for one group, historically rooted eyewitness memories of events passed on by the apostles and remembered perhaps by John himself. For another group they are metaphorical interpretations of the experience of Jesus in the midst of the surviving apostles as his words were shared among them.
These
two distinct perspectives will read this Gospel differently: the conservative will say, “See, Jesus proved
to Thomas that he was alive and dispelled his doubt. If we believe in Jesus’ resurrection, and
convince others to believe in it, our doubt and theirs will be dispelled as
well.” The progressive will just as
quickly say, “Thomas came to experience and know in his heart that the life of
Jesus as they had known him continued within the community and within himself
and could be carried and lived despite his death.”
My purpose this morning is not
to take a side or to make an argument, but to note that there is a great deal of
energy in the wider Christian world about what these appearance stories mean
and how they inform our lives as disciples in the present. Even the resurrection becomes a battleground
in the wider culture wars about the meaning of the Bible relative to science
and modern biblical criticism, the role of reason in faith, and the deepening
attitudes of suspicion and fear towards the other whose thinking seems
strange. Each interpretation is a
meaning-making exercise. As you heard
the gospel read just now, you were engaged in this process within your own
heart and mind. The text was poured
through what you have been taught to believe, how you have changed, your
questions and conclusions, the ways meaning and miracle, revelation and reason
interact and swirl through your individual experience. There is no such thing as a plain, objective
reading because we are always subjects shaped by our interpretive
formation. The gospels are written at
all and written the way they are to the universal human hunger for connection
to and identity in the risen Christ. But
we must hear and contemplate them humbly and thoughtfully. The stories, especially the resurrection
appearances, call forth our deepest hopes and our understandable doubts about
their reality and relevance to us. And John especially asks of us both a
passionately committed and a robustly thoughtful commitment to Christ.
So with that in mind, I approach the story with two points of interpretive context before the gospel proper;
First, the gospel of John is particularly interested in the question of access to and encounter with God. Torah and the temple, the ways of obedience and the residing place of God’s glory are pointers toward a future fulfillment, which John believes is the Son of God. Jesus proclaims himself to be the temple when he says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”, speaking of his body. To believe in him is to share in his identity as a dwelling place for God. In the incarnation I access and encounter God by the Holy Spirit living within me and am not dependent upon any external place or ritual for that life. The gospeler is eager to remind us that the revolution announced in Christ is the movement from temples of stone to human persons becoming living temples of the spirit of Jesus.
Second, the theme of “believing” is prominent in the gospel of John. We tend to hear the word “believe” turn it into an intellectual exercise. We rightly “believe” when we agree with and conform to particular truth claims. But in the gospel of John, believing is about becoming, about identity. Believing involves the question of truth, but it goes deeper than nailing down theological absolutes as an end in itself. It is much more akin to something that happens to me than something is grasp and comprehend as my project. To believe something is to have one’s very being defined by the truth, for the reality of God’s grace to bestow life. So running in the background of the reading is something larger than the question of whether we believe in resurrection or not. The more interesting questions concern how God comes to us, what God in Christ says about what it means to be human. Believing is bigger than the faith claims themselves, but the reality toward which they point and ourselves as creatures with dignity and vocation within that reality - in Christ as temples of his presence. The question Jesus wanted Thomas to begin to unpack is, “Who am I now?” If this is true, if Jesus has been raised from the dead, then the very nature of how we have understood how to approach and meet God has utterly changed. N.T. Wright says:
“...when Jesus rose again God’s whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of new potential and possibility. Indeed, precisely because part of that new possibility is for human beings themselves to be revived and renewed, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t leave us passive, helpless spectators. We find ourselves lifted up, set on our feet, given new breath in our lungs, and commissioned to go and make new creation happen in the world.”
So how does the appearance to the disciples reveal this new creation?
The lesson for us in the doubt of Thomas is then not principally his refusal to acknowledge the resurrection, but the resistance to his own full humanity as one who finds in the risen Christ his temple-bearing identity. Jesus’ risen flesh is not one more fact to be added to his belief system, it is an entry into a new creation which now lives in his flesh. “Stop doubting, but believe” is not Jesus scolding him for unbelief, but inviting him to be gathered in and embraced by a new creation for the sake of joy and hope that sets the mystery of death and resurrection into his flesh. “Get up, Thomas, take a deep breath, absorb this moment, because the rest of your life begins now. Heaven has come to earth, they are now joined. Now it begins. Now it all begins.”
Knowing that successive generations of readers will wonder about our own access to the risen Christ, ascended to heaven, Christ looks in the narrative camera, gazes through the eons of time yet to come, and addresses us. We, too, are blessed, though our seeing is not with physical eyes. Favored and gifted with the invitation to be embraced by the same Lord who appeared to Thomas and the other apostles. God’s new creation has come and sought a home in me, in my own flesh which will one day be raised and see Christ’s risen body as they saw it.
I conclude with this beautiful quote from Brennan Manning from The Furious Longing of God:
“The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian.”
Amen.
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