Holy Cross Monastery, West Park
Brother Randy Greve, n/OHC
BCP - Proper 10 - Sunday 16 July 2006
Amos 7:7-15
Ephesians 1:1-14
Mark 6: 7-13
Imagine that you are one of the Twelve disciples. At the call of Jesus you have left your family, your livelihood, your familiar and safe world to follow a man who somehow captured your imagination and who performs miracles and preaches and teaches with authority about the Kingdom of God. Clearly God is with him but who or what is he? Could this be the Messiah? You’re not entirely sure. He has told you that this talk of the kingdom is no mere show that begins and ends with Him - this is the beginning of the end of the old era of sin and evil and the ushering in of a world reigned by God. Not only that but he says you will share in his works and participate with him in bringing new life. This eclectic mix of men and women - who would surely not be hanging around each other except for Jesus - suddenly finds itself entrusted and empowered with the authority of the kingdom. Jesus has begun to transform you and give you a vision of what life with God can be like. After time observing and beginning to understand what Jesus is talking about and what his actions mean, you’re sent out to preach repentance, cast out demons, and cure the sick. You’re partner is Philip or Andrew or Peter or Judas… Where do you go? What do you do? What would this power in action look like? You immediately encounter a world of danger, opposition, and mystery. Not everyone is warm and welcoming. Yet as much to your surprise as to the amazement of those you encounter - Diseases are cured, demons cast out, and new life is embraced. And despite being chased away from an unfriendly house or village, some trust you and listen, some are open to the possibility of hope and a future.
Bringing us back into the present, I would like to stop on the idea of unclean spirits; how the disciples might have engaged such spirits and how we might know and respond to them ourselves. To the ancient, pre-scientific understanding of things, the world was a battlefield where good and evil forces and influences were locked in combat within and between peoples, cultures, religions, and beliefs. Suffering, disease, and other demonically-inspired pain was the outward evidence of what was unseen but no less real. The ancient world understandably attributed spiritual origins to what they did not have the knowledge to explain by any other means. Diseases like depression and epilepsy, for example, which have biological origins, were assumed in their world to be the relentless attack of these unseen forces. So does the technology to diagnose and treat mental and physical illness solve the problem of unclean spirits? Because we can scientifically explain a condition previously attributed to unclean spirits, does that totally negate their existence? Not completely, because uncleanness and evil are still spiritual realities.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, writing in the Spiritual Exercises, sheds some helpful light on a more modern way of understanding the inner nature of what is going on here. For St Ignatius a spirit may be called an inclination, an attraction, a motivation which is either God-centered or self-centered. God-centered inclinations can lead us to our best, most authentic self in the love of God and neighbor which is new life in the kingdom. Self-centered inclinations, if followed, can lead to the bottomless pit of self-protection and self-gratification, making us numb to our real self and unable to love God and others fully. St. Ignatius then asks us first to examine our own inclinations in the light of our best self, moving us toward the God of love. To recognize evil means paying attention to what is going on inside us and around us with great sensitivity and care. We recognize the evil or unclean spirit by listening for the lie or truth in the words and actions, the inclination toward reality or unreality. In the face of evil within us or around us, we ask how the kingdom of God break into this moment, change my closed heart to one of openness, my hardness to receptivity to light and truth. As Brian McLaren says in The Secret Message of Jesus “Jesus must draw out, expose, name, reject, and banish this systemic, transpersonal evil…”
Discernment, which is the process of examining where our inclinations are coming from and where they intend to take us, is only possible by living a holy life. Discernment is not the acquiring of skills to detect good from evil spirits; it is living in Gospel humility, faith, purity, obedience, and patience so that we will see with clarity the nature of the inclinations within us and around us.
For the disciples to have had the insight and wisdom to distinguish good spirits from evil, they had to have been willing to listen and test at a deep level. Jesus himself is the model discerner who is described in the Gospel of John especially as knowing the thoughts and inner inclination or spirit of those around him. Jesus often responds to what he sees of the inner, real self rather than only to outer words and actions. He recognizes great faith in those who display simple trust, humility, readiness, and receptivity and is able to strike at the heart of the hypocrisy of religious leaders who claim to be models of faithfulness but inside are smug, arrogant, hard, and dead.
Nowhere in the New Testament do we find the “how-to’s” of discernment, but it does tell us the conditions for discernment to happen. Living in the truth and obedience of the whole Gospel, especially where that truth is not popular, easy, or pleasant, is the starting place. As we are sent out into the world, into our lives - how will we use the authority given to us? Are we attentive and awake enough to expose and reject the evil that opposes God’s best? Every day we are sent out to confront the reality of evil and suffering and, using the authority we have, to bring healing, goodness, and wholeness. We may not be sent out far. Perhaps the person most in need of our empathy and kindness is in our own house, our own family or church. The sending out is more about our breaking out of the inclinations of self-protection and self-gratification than a physical distance. The longest mission trip is often from one heart to another.
To accept the offer of healing given by another is also important. I am grateful for those times when I have been the one with the unclean spirit and been met by friends who exposed and banished the uncleanness that lurked in me. As the disciples came face to face with the fallen, broken nature of the world, I can’t help but imagine it turned them inward. Perhaps it was in their reflection on the reality of the coming Kingdom that Peter learned lessons about grace and forgiveness that Judas did not.
The authority given to the Twelve was not just a weapon used to zap demons and cure illness; it was the gift of seeing the world as Christ saw it beginning with their own transformation. To be given the authority of Christ is to share in the interests, attitudes, and affections of Christ himself, to be motivated in everything by his loving compassion. We are invited to live in such a way that we become more aware and awake to the uncleanness that besets us and to name, expose, and repel it. We are invited to embrace the deepest good for the building of God’s reign by offering hope and healing to those who need it - which is all of us.
I close with this reflection by St. Theresa of Avila:
Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which He looks
compassion on this world
Christ has no body now on earth but yours
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Funeral - Br. Douglas Brown - 10 May 2006
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Sermon preached at the Requiem for Brother Douglas Brown, OHC
Wednesday 10 May 2006
A Resurrection Life
The essential message of the Easter proclamation has always been: Christ has won the victory. Death has been trampled down by death, and Christ now gloriously risen invites us to join Him in faith, and when we do, His victory will be ours as well. And so it will. The victory of Christ on the Cross has opened to all the world the possibility of resurrection, and our hope as committed Christians is that all will come within the reach of that saving embrace. On Easter morn we sing, "Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia. Our triumphant holy day, Alleluia." His rising makes our day holy.
That's our proclamation. But how do we get there? How can we be transformed by the resurrection?
There are so many Easter symbols of new life: The new fire, the flowering cross for the children, the festive food, the Easter eggs and chocolate in baskets, the bunnies and chicks and other soft and fragile offspring which remind us of the newness of spring and the renewal of life. When I was a boy, we used to get new shoes for Easter. The week or so before the great day, the stores would be full of parents and children trying on shoes, which we children would eagerly compare on the great day. The Black Church has an image for heaven: it's the place where all God's children got shoes. All God's children are loved and gifted and privileged. A child's Easter is a festival of sweet and tender newness: The victory of the Resurrection is given as a free gift, from adults to the children, from God to us, new life and love unbounded, uncomplicated, rejoicing love.
But gradually, the complications, the failures, the compromises, the shadows, of adult life gather round and penetrate our souls, till many believe that the Christian proclamation of the Resurrection victory is, in one of St. Paul's favorite words, foolishness: foolishness to Gentiles, to the thinking secular world, and worse, offensive to Jews, to serious religious people. So one righteous man died and was justified, the criticism goes. That gets you off the hook? Absurd. Where's the responsibility for the individual to engage in the struggle? Where's the need to build up social structures, to share with others in human solidarity?
An adult Easter needs to take into account the darkness of our lives. In the words of the great hymn which I heard for the first time on Good Friday, 1976, in St. James' Cathedral in Toronto, so beloved of Douglas, "My song is love unknown, my savior's love to me: Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be." We become lovely by being loved, and in turn loving others into loveliness.
The victory may have been won, but appropriating the fruits of victory is no easy task. Douglas Brown was a man who lived into these questions with deep sincerity, and whose life is a paradigm of the answer to the world's criticisms of the Christian faith. He placed himself in the path of the Resurrection, and that path took him to strange and wonderful places. This Chapel, the worship in it and the community which lives its life around it, became Douglas' life, and the strange and wonderful place where he struggled to appropriate the victory of the Resurrection.
Douglas was profoundly liturgical. He loved the ancient liturgies of the Church, the monastic offices, the chanting, the community's times of simple shared prayer, the psalms and canticles and antiphons, the public reading of scripture, the hymns of Anglican worship in all its glorious variety, the shared physical movement of the community in the daily dance of praise, the Peace at the Eucharist which he would share in a great bearlike embrace, the bread and the wine and the fellowship around the Table of the Lord. He found here his heart's center, and in the stability of the forms of monastic prayer I believe he found the strength to take up his cross and follow Jesus. Because the cross is the answer to the criticism of cheap grace: We are offered the Resurrection victory won by Jesus Christ if - "if" - we follow his life and death and make it ours.
Douglas embraced his cross. He allowed himself to die to parts of his life that could not give him life: shyness, insecurity, drinking. His life was a work in progress on all these fronts. I believe that the great gifts he shared with us were made possible by the Resurrection victories won on the crosses of his struggles.
When our Founder, Father Huntington, wrote about the houses of our Order, his first thought was about the spiritual struggle they make possible: "The ladder of the cross is planted firmly within the walls of a religious house and angels pass up and down that stairway. Our house is a house of God; let us strive to make it for ourselves the gate of heaven." Jacob's ladder is the ancient Jewish and Christian symbol of mystical contemplation, and at a deep level, the union with God symbolized by that ladder is the goal of every monk. I think the genius of the image is not so much in the ladder, however, as in the picture of the angels ascending and descending. Up and down, up and down, an interplay of the interior life, which is never simple, always dynamic.
This ladder has an ancient pedigree in monastic tradition. St. Benedict gives it 12 steps, and each one of them is an act of humility. The fear of God; leaving behind your own desires; submission to a human superior; obedience under difficult circumstances; the vulnerability to share your inner life with those who have power over you; contentment with whatever comes your way, especially abuse and deprivation; willingness to live by the community's norms; keeping silence when what you want to do is chatter; restraining the laughter of hysteria and self-preoccupation; when you do speak, speaking modestly, gently and briefly; and finally, realizing that we speak not only with our words, but in our actions. They too must be characterized by humility.
This is a big order. It is a sixth century 12 step program of formidable challenges. Ascending this dynamic ladder of humility requires more than one act of faith. It requires first of all that we are willing to give ourselves to God unreservedly, not looking to our own strengths and gifts but allowing God to use us as we are. "Just as I am, without one plea" says the old hymn, and that is the monk's daily song as we struggle up a rung or two of the great ladder. This first act of faith requires us to trust that we, our own essential being, and not what we can say or do or produce on our own, is worth God's trouble. A tall order for a shy, insecure alcoholic. But Douglas took it on.
A second act of faith climbing this ladder requires is that the community will be a faithful partner in the struggle. Submission, obedience, vulnerability, joining in the no doubt flawed life of people no better than you are; all this presupposes a community and leadership whose first focus is on the Cross and its victory, and not on its own power and gain. This is a struggle for all of us in monastic community. But what joy when we all honestly share its tasks: "How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity." It is like the fine oil anointing Aaron, running down in seeming waste all the way from head to foot, signifying not the usefulness of the oil but the overflowing abundance of God's Spirit, not the daily tasks of earning a living and running things and being productive, but the hope of a superabundant overflow of generous, mutual love. A tall order for a man who could so easily analyze the realities of personal dynamics in himself and others, and whose call to leadership was complicated by his understanding of the inner dynamics of the exercise of power. But Douglas took it on.
A third act of faith that climbing the ladder of humility requires is that you only reach the top when you have hit the bottom. St. Benedict famously does not recommend humor to his monks, and if there were one thing I would like to change in the Rule, that's it. I think a joyful approach to life is always welcome, but then, we don't live in the sixth century, with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire a living memory, with the collapse of the successor state of the great and wise Theodoric the Ostrogoth on the horizon and chaos drawing closer and closer, surrounding them like the darkness of an enveloping night. But there is a delicious irony in the thought of a ladder of humility. If the Cross is a paradox, so is the ladder. Imagine: climbing higher and higher to become more and more humble. When you reach the top you are really at the bottom, so to speak. I cannot help but think that this is a parable about leadership as well as a profound observation of the course of a truly redeemed life. Perhaps that could be the monastic message to our leadership shortly to assemble in Columbus (editor's note: the triennal General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA). Here is where I think Douglas found his Resurrection victory. He hit bottom. He embraced another 12 step program, one I think not unrelated to Benedict's. He understood that when you reach the top of that program, you're still no better than the day you started. I think he made this his life's work: To see in himself and in others the daily work of grace, grace that picks you up after you've been thrown down, and keeps picking you up, day after day after day. Not an easy way to live your life, but Douglas took it on.
I loved Douglas' ways of being humble. The schlumpfy clothes, the sandals (didn't the man have a single pair of shoes?), the only-occasionally trimmed hair and beard, the muffled voice, which you had to strain to understand sometimes, low like an organ pipe. He didn't much like spending money. I would try to take him out to a nice restaurant near the seminary in Chelsea, and more often than not we would end up in a Chinese place just north of 23rd Street where it was a challenge to bring the bill above $20.00 a person. He loved being a monk, even perhaps playing a little in his ironic way with the outward symbols of humility.
Douglas was a holy person. Not a saint, I think, but holy. He let himself be transformed by grace and the Spirit. When his life hit bottom, he saw it as Christ's cross for himself. He saw the ladder of humility planted firmly in the midst of the monastery and embraced it. He trusted the Lord and he trusted the community, not without struggle, but with an admirable constancy.
And as a result, his life became a blessing. He was a rock of integrity to us in the monastic life. His preaching and retreats were beacons of reason and generosity and insight to thousands. His spiritual direction reached deep into the souls of hundreds and hundreds of earnest Christians. His wide sympathies, born of his own sufferings, opened channels of grace which are still flowing with the waters of life. His love of justice and compassion in public life led him to become a voice in the struggles of our day.
In my church we sing a song after the sermon, a song born in the Black Church:
Thank you Lord, for saving my soul.
Thank you Lord, for making me whole.
Thank you Lord, for giving to me
Thy great salvation so rich and free.
.
Thank you, Lord, for saving Douglas. Thank you for making him whole. Thank you for giving to him your great salvation so rich and free. Thank you, Lord, for giving Douglas to us all, for the great gifts his salvation has brought us. Thank you for the Easter life, for the free gifts of childhood, for the Ladder of the humility of the Cross, for the humility which lifts us up, and brings us, finally, to You.
Amen.
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Sermon preached at the Requiem for Brother Douglas Brown, OHC
Wednesday 10 May 2006
A Resurrection Life
The essential message of the Easter proclamation has always been: Christ has won the victory. Death has been trampled down by death, and Christ now gloriously risen invites us to join Him in faith, and when we do, His victory will be ours as well. And so it will. The victory of Christ on the Cross has opened to all the world the possibility of resurrection, and our hope as committed Christians is that all will come within the reach of that saving embrace. On Easter morn we sing, "Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia. Our triumphant holy day, Alleluia." His rising makes our day holy.
That's our proclamation. But how do we get there? How can we be transformed by the resurrection?
There are so many Easter symbols of new life: The new fire, the flowering cross for the children, the festive food, the Easter eggs and chocolate in baskets, the bunnies and chicks and other soft and fragile offspring which remind us of the newness of spring and the renewal of life. When I was a boy, we used to get new shoes for Easter. The week or so before the great day, the stores would be full of parents and children trying on shoes, which we children would eagerly compare on the great day. The Black Church has an image for heaven: it's the place where all God's children got shoes. All God's children are loved and gifted and privileged. A child's Easter is a festival of sweet and tender newness: The victory of the Resurrection is given as a free gift, from adults to the children, from God to us, new life and love unbounded, uncomplicated, rejoicing love.
But gradually, the complications, the failures, the compromises, the shadows, of adult life gather round and penetrate our souls, till many believe that the Christian proclamation of the Resurrection victory is, in one of St. Paul's favorite words, foolishness: foolishness to Gentiles, to the thinking secular world, and worse, offensive to Jews, to serious religious people. So one righteous man died and was justified, the criticism goes. That gets you off the hook? Absurd. Where's the responsibility for the individual to engage in the struggle? Where's the need to build up social structures, to share with others in human solidarity?
An adult Easter needs to take into account the darkness of our lives. In the words of the great hymn which I heard for the first time on Good Friday, 1976, in St. James' Cathedral in Toronto, so beloved of Douglas, "My song is love unknown, my savior's love to me: Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be." We become lovely by being loved, and in turn loving others into loveliness.
The victory may have been won, but appropriating the fruits of victory is no easy task. Douglas Brown was a man who lived into these questions with deep sincerity, and whose life is a paradigm of the answer to the world's criticisms of the Christian faith. He placed himself in the path of the Resurrection, and that path took him to strange and wonderful places. This Chapel, the worship in it and the community which lives its life around it, became Douglas' life, and the strange and wonderful place where he struggled to appropriate the victory of the Resurrection.
Douglas was profoundly liturgical. He loved the ancient liturgies of the Church, the monastic offices, the chanting, the community's times of simple shared prayer, the psalms and canticles and antiphons, the public reading of scripture, the hymns of Anglican worship in all its glorious variety, the shared physical movement of the community in the daily dance of praise, the Peace at the Eucharist which he would share in a great bearlike embrace, the bread and the wine and the fellowship around the Table of the Lord. He found here his heart's center, and in the stability of the forms of monastic prayer I believe he found the strength to take up his cross and follow Jesus. Because the cross is the answer to the criticism of cheap grace: We are offered the Resurrection victory won by Jesus Christ if - "if" - we follow his life and death and make it ours.
Douglas embraced his cross. He allowed himself to die to parts of his life that could not give him life: shyness, insecurity, drinking. His life was a work in progress on all these fronts. I believe that the great gifts he shared with us were made possible by the Resurrection victories won on the crosses of his struggles.
When our Founder, Father Huntington, wrote about the houses of our Order, his first thought was about the spiritual struggle they make possible: "The ladder of the cross is planted firmly within the walls of a religious house and angels pass up and down that stairway. Our house is a house of God; let us strive to make it for ourselves the gate of heaven." Jacob's ladder is the ancient Jewish and Christian symbol of mystical contemplation, and at a deep level, the union with God symbolized by that ladder is the goal of every monk. I think the genius of the image is not so much in the ladder, however, as in the picture of the angels ascending and descending. Up and down, up and down, an interplay of the interior life, which is never simple, always dynamic.
This ladder has an ancient pedigree in monastic tradition. St. Benedict gives it 12 steps, and each one of them is an act of humility. The fear of God; leaving behind your own desires; submission to a human superior; obedience under difficult circumstances; the vulnerability to share your inner life with those who have power over you; contentment with whatever comes your way, especially abuse and deprivation; willingness to live by the community's norms; keeping silence when what you want to do is chatter; restraining the laughter of hysteria and self-preoccupation; when you do speak, speaking modestly, gently and briefly; and finally, realizing that we speak not only with our words, but in our actions. They too must be characterized by humility.
This is a big order. It is a sixth century 12 step program of formidable challenges. Ascending this dynamic ladder of humility requires more than one act of faith. It requires first of all that we are willing to give ourselves to God unreservedly, not looking to our own strengths and gifts but allowing God to use us as we are. "Just as I am, without one plea" says the old hymn, and that is the monk's daily song as we struggle up a rung or two of the great ladder. This first act of faith requires us to trust that we, our own essential being, and not what we can say or do or produce on our own, is worth God's trouble. A tall order for a shy, insecure alcoholic. But Douglas took it on.
A second act of faith climbing this ladder requires is that the community will be a faithful partner in the struggle. Submission, obedience, vulnerability, joining in the no doubt flawed life of people no better than you are; all this presupposes a community and leadership whose first focus is on the Cross and its victory, and not on its own power and gain. This is a struggle for all of us in monastic community. But what joy when we all honestly share its tasks: "How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity." It is like the fine oil anointing Aaron, running down in seeming waste all the way from head to foot, signifying not the usefulness of the oil but the overflowing abundance of God's Spirit, not the daily tasks of earning a living and running things and being productive, but the hope of a superabundant overflow of generous, mutual love. A tall order for a man who could so easily analyze the realities of personal dynamics in himself and others, and whose call to leadership was complicated by his understanding of the inner dynamics of the exercise of power. But Douglas took it on.
A third act of faith that climbing the ladder of humility requires is that you only reach the top when you have hit the bottom. St. Benedict famously does not recommend humor to his monks, and if there were one thing I would like to change in the Rule, that's it. I think a joyful approach to life is always welcome, but then, we don't live in the sixth century, with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire a living memory, with the collapse of the successor state of the great and wise Theodoric the Ostrogoth on the horizon and chaos drawing closer and closer, surrounding them like the darkness of an enveloping night. But there is a delicious irony in the thought of a ladder of humility. If the Cross is a paradox, so is the ladder. Imagine: climbing higher and higher to become more and more humble. When you reach the top you are really at the bottom, so to speak. I cannot help but think that this is a parable about leadership as well as a profound observation of the course of a truly redeemed life. Perhaps that could be the monastic message to our leadership shortly to assemble in Columbus (editor's note: the triennal General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA). Here is where I think Douglas found his Resurrection victory. He hit bottom. He embraced another 12 step program, one I think not unrelated to Benedict's. He understood that when you reach the top of that program, you're still no better than the day you started. I think he made this his life's work: To see in himself and in others the daily work of grace, grace that picks you up after you've been thrown down, and keeps picking you up, day after day after day. Not an easy way to live your life, but Douglas took it on.
I loved Douglas' ways of being humble. The schlumpfy clothes, the sandals (didn't the man have a single pair of shoes?), the only-occasionally trimmed hair and beard, the muffled voice, which you had to strain to understand sometimes, low like an organ pipe. He didn't much like spending money. I would try to take him out to a nice restaurant near the seminary in Chelsea, and more often than not we would end up in a Chinese place just north of 23rd Street where it was a challenge to bring the bill above $20.00 a person. He loved being a monk, even perhaps playing a little in his ironic way with the outward symbols of humility.
Douglas was a holy person. Not a saint, I think, but holy. He let himself be transformed by grace and the Spirit. When his life hit bottom, he saw it as Christ's cross for himself. He saw the ladder of humility planted firmly in the midst of the monastery and embraced it. He trusted the Lord and he trusted the community, not without struggle, but with an admirable constancy.
And as a result, his life became a blessing. He was a rock of integrity to us in the monastic life. His preaching and retreats were beacons of reason and generosity and insight to thousands. His spiritual direction reached deep into the souls of hundreds and hundreds of earnest Christians. His wide sympathies, born of his own sufferings, opened channels of grace which are still flowing with the waters of life. His love of justice and compassion in public life led him to become a voice in the struggles of our day.
In my church we sing a song after the sermon, a song born in the Black Church:
Thank you Lord, for saving my soul.
Thank you Lord, for making me whole.
Thank you Lord, for giving to me
Thy great salvation so rich and free.
.
Thank you, Lord, for saving Douglas. Thank you for making him whole. Thank you for giving to him your great salvation so rich and free. Thank you, Lord, for giving Douglas to us all, for the great gifts his salvation has brought us. Thank you for the Easter life, for the free gifts of childhood, for the Ladder of the humility of the Cross, for the humility which lifts us up, and brings us, finally, to You.
Amen.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
BCP - Easter 2 B - 23 Apr 2006
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
BCP – Easter 2 B - Sunday 23 April 2006
I’m not sure Thomas gets a particularly fair deal in history. For two millennia he has been, more or less, the poster child for doubt: Doubting Thomas - an archetype that has entered the mainstream psyche. All generations will call Mary blessed... and apparently all generations will call Thomas doubting... I’m thinking Thomas needed a better public relations plan...
This is one of those stories that we’ve heard so many times we almost don’t hear it at all anymore. We just hear the echo of it. The echo in my mind is of a belligerent Thomas confronting Jesus - show me the wounds or I won’t believe its you. And of a gentle Jesus showing him the wounds and then almost taunting him - you see and believe, more blessed are those who believe without seeing...
That, of course, isn’t really the story. When Jesus arrives at the home where the disciples are huddled the first thing he does is show everyone his hands and his feet. But Thomas is not there. So when Thomas says he needs to see the wounds, he’s just saying he needs to see what everyone else has already seen. But he doesn’t say this to Jesus. He says it to the other disciples.
When Thomas next meets Jesus, Jesus invites him to look at, to touch, the wounds. Jesus knows Thomas’s heart and knows that Thomas is dying to get a peek. And it seems as though Jesus is as interested in showing the wounds as Thomas is in seeing them.
What strikes me is that maybe doubt is not the point of the story. Maybe this is not a story about overcoming doubt or about having faith. I’m beginning to understand it as being a story about the wounds. The story of Wounded Jesus rather than of Doubting Thomas...
Doubt is no big deal. I have doubts. We all have doubts. It would be a bigger story if Thomas had no doubts. After all, he knew for a fact that Jesus was dead. He should have had a hard time believing Jesus was walking among them again in the flesh. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want some proof.
But what strange proof Thomas seems to want. Show me the puncture wounds, the stab wounds. Its strangely intimate and pretty gory all at the same time. Surely there are other more beautiful and appealing ways that Thomas could have had his doubts allayed.
Jesus does nothing to provide any alternatives to coming face to face, finger to gash, with the wounds. Surely Jesus could have given another sign, or just talked to them, or changed some water into wine... Instead he seems to be saying here I am, look at my wounds, look at my hands and my side.
But as I say, I’m beginning to understand that the wounds may be the central part of this story.
What if Thomas had not been so honest? What if he had said “I have no doubts... I don’t need proof. I have faith.” What if he lied?
Those doubts would still have been there and they would have worked on Thomas. One way or the other he would have been looking for proof. What type of proof might he have sought?
What are some of the ways we seek to prove that we know God?
Some people see proof of God in disasters. A hurricane strikes the Gulf Coast and the City of New Orleans is devastated. Some see this as proof of the hand of God. Not any old God, but a really angry God; and isn’t it convenient that this God is angry at the same folks we’re angry at...
But this is not what Thomas sought. The hand of this angry God has no nail holes in it. This God knows no crucifixion. This angry and punishing God causes suffering. Jesus, with his wounds takes on the world’s suffering.
I’d love to be smug and say I don’t look for this proof - I don’t worship this angry God... but when bad things happen to people I don’t like, somewhere in the back of my mind I want to see the hand of God... How much more healthy to be like Thomas...
Some people see proof of God in unexpected rewards. I suspect many who have won the lottery have felt that they won not by chance alone, but by divine intervention. I know if I ever win the lottery I will thank God... and at some level I might suspect that God stuck a hand in that machine that picks the winning numbers... that the divine fix was in...
But again, this is not the God that Thomas was seeking to know. This God’s hands have no nail holes either. This is the hand of a God who rewards a few and forgets about the rest, rather than a God who died so that all might have abundant life.
Thomas is refreshingly direct about his doubts. He doesn’t require God to destroy his enemies or make him rich. He just needs to see the wounds. He needs to see the loving, sacrificing God who died for all... who wants to punish nobody... who extends grace to everybody.
Jesus does not seem too bothered by Thomas’s doubts. There is no condemnation is the way he talks to Thomas. He is very willing to show the wounds, to even have Thomas touch them. Everybody gets to look at the wounds. Do not doubt but believe. That’s what Jesus says.
Two things happen when Jesus does this. He relieves the disciples doubts and he fixes the wounds permanently in their memories. They can never remember Jesus without remembering that he was crucified... that he was wounded. Those nail holes and gashes will never be separated in their minds from Jesus.
That’s why I think this story is more about the wounds than the doubts. I think this story is Jesus way of saying to us, two millennia later, “remember I was crucified.” We can’t know Jesus without knowing the wounds. Jesus has managed to fix those nail holes and gashes in our minds as well.
The point in remembering the wounds is not sentimental. We are not meant to feel sorry for Jesus or for ourselves. There is not a trace of self-pity in Jesus in this story - or in any story for that matter.
The point in remembering the wounds in not to place blame; though clearly we Christians have been tempted, and have sometimes given into that temptation with horrible consequences, to blame somebody for wounding Jesus. The truth is we are all responsible for wounding Jesus. More importantly, Jesus’ wounds are for all of us. There is no guilt or blame in this story.
Remembering the wounds changes our entire relationship with God. Saint Paul said we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to some and foolishness to others. Our relationship to a crucified God can’t be rational and intellectual, because it doesn’t make sense. Our relationship to a crucified God can’t be based on demonstrations of great might, because a mighty God would not have been crucified.
When we want a God who will smite our enemies we only have to remember the nail holes in the hands. When we want a God who will make us rich, we only have bring the wounds to mind. When we think we know who God likes and who God hates, we have to consider the scourging. When we are indifferent to those who are starving, we have to call to mind the vinegar that was given to Jesus.
Jesus does not show the wounds to Thomas as an accusation. He makes no suggestion that Thomas or anyone else should feel bad because of his wounds.
The wounds remind us that Jesus is Lord and savior of the poor, the injured, the wounded, the sorrowful, the powerless, as well as everyone else. This is the God we worship. The wounds help us get on with living our baptized life. We can not know Jesus without knowing his wounds.
Brother Scott Wesley Borden, OHC
BCP – Easter 2 B - Sunday 23 April 2006
I’m not sure Thomas gets a particularly fair deal in history. For two millennia he has been, more or less, the poster child for doubt: Doubting Thomas - an archetype that has entered the mainstream psyche. All generations will call Mary blessed... and apparently all generations will call Thomas doubting... I’m thinking Thomas needed a better public relations plan...
This is one of those stories that we’ve heard so many times we almost don’t hear it at all anymore. We just hear the echo of it. The echo in my mind is of a belligerent Thomas confronting Jesus - show me the wounds or I won’t believe its you. And of a gentle Jesus showing him the wounds and then almost taunting him - you see and believe, more blessed are those who believe without seeing...
That, of course, isn’t really the story. When Jesus arrives at the home where the disciples are huddled the first thing he does is show everyone his hands and his feet. But Thomas is not there. So when Thomas says he needs to see the wounds, he’s just saying he needs to see what everyone else has already seen. But he doesn’t say this to Jesus. He says it to the other disciples.
When Thomas next meets Jesus, Jesus invites him to look at, to touch, the wounds. Jesus knows Thomas’s heart and knows that Thomas is dying to get a peek. And it seems as though Jesus is as interested in showing the wounds as Thomas is in seeing them.
What strikes me is that maybe doubt is not the point of the story. Maybe this is not a story about overcoming doubt or about having faith. I’m beginning to understand it as being a story about the wounds. The story of Wounded Jesus rather than of Doubting Thomas...
Doubt is no big deal. I have doubts. We all have doubts. It would be a bigger story if Thomas had no doubts. After all, he knew for a fact that Jesus was dead. He should have had a hard time believing Jesus was walking among them again in the flesh. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want some proof.
But what strange proof Thomas seems to want. Show me the puncture wounds, the stab wounds. Its strangely intimate and pretty gory all at the same time. Surely there are other more beautiful and appealing ways that Thomas could have had his doubts allayed.
Jesus does nothing to provide any alternatives to coming face to face, finger to gash, with the wounds. Surely Jesus could have given another sign, or just talked to them, or changed some water into wine... Instead he seems to be saying here I am, look at my wounds, look at my hands and my side.
But as I say, I’m beginning to understand that the wounds may be the central part of this story.
What if Thomas had not been so honest? What if he had said “I have no doubts... I don’t need proof. I have faith.” What if he lied?
Those doubts would still have been there and they would have worked on Thomas. One way or the other he would have been looking for proof. What type of proof might he have sought?
What are some of the ways we seek to prove that we know God?
Some people see proof of God in disasters. A hurricane strikes the Gulf Coast and the City of New Orleans is devastated. Some see this as proof of the hand of God. Not any old God, but a really angry God; and isn’t it convenient that this God is angry at the same folks we’re angry at...
But this is not what Thomas sought. The hand of this angry God has no nail holes in it. This God knows no crucifixion. This angry and punishing God causes suffering. Jesus, with his wounds takes on the world’s suffering.
I’d love to be smug and say I don’t look for this proof - I don’t worship this angry God... but when bad things happen to people I don’t like, somewhere in the back of my mind I want to see the hand of God... How much more healthy to be like Thomas...
Some people see proof of God in unexpected rewards. I suspect many who have won the lottery have felt that they won not by chance alone, but by divine intervention. I know if I ever win the lottery I will thank God... and at some level I might suspect that God stuck a hand in that machine that picks the winning numbers... that the divine fix was in...
But again, this is not the God that Thomas was seeking to know. This God’s hands have no nail holes either. This is the hand of a God who rewards a few and forgets about the rest, rather than a God who died so that all might have abundant life.
Thomas is refreshingly direct about his doubts. He doesn’t require God to destroy his enemies or make him rich. He just needs to see the wounds. He needs to see the loving, sacrificing God who died for all... who wants to punish nobody... who extends grace to everybody.
Jesus does not seem too bothered by Thomas’s doubts. There is no condemnation is the way he talks to Thomas. He is very willing to show the wounds, to even have Thomas touch them. Everybody gets to look at the wounds. Do not doubt but believe. That’s what Jesus says.
Two things happen when Jesus does this. He relieves the disciples doubts and he fixes the wounds permanently in their memories. They can never remember Jesus without remembering that he was crucified... that he was wounded. Those nail holes and gashes will never be separated in their minds from Jesus.
That’s why I think this story is more about the wounds than the doubts. I think this story is Jesus way of saying to us, two millennia later, “remember I was crucified.” We can’t know Jesus without knowing the wounds. Jesus has managed to fix those nail holes and gashes in our minds as well.
The point in remembering the wounds is not sentimental. We are not meant to feel sorry for Jesus or for ourselves. There is not a trace of self-pity in Jesus in this story - or in any story for that matter.
The point in remembering the wounds in not to place blame; though clearly we Christians have been tempted, and have sometimes given into that temptation with horrible consequences, to blame somebody for wounding Jesus. The truth is we are all responsible for wounding Jesus. More importantly, Jesus’ wounds are for all of us. There is no guilt or blame in this story.
Remembering the wounds changes our entire relationship with God. Saint Paul said we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to some and foolishness to others. Our relationship to a crucified God can’t be rational and intellectual, because it doesn’t make sense. Our relationship to a crucified God can’t be based on demonstrations of great might, because a mighty God would not have been crucified.
When we want a God who will smite our enemies we only have to remember the nail holes in the hands. When we want a God who will make us rich, we only have bring the wounds to mind. When we think we know who God likes and who God hates, we have to consider the scourging. When we are indifferent to those who are starving, we have to call to mind the vinegar that was given to Jesus.
Jesus does not show the wounds to Thomas as an accusation. He makes no suggestion that Thomas or anyone else should feel bad because of his wounds.
The wounds remind us that Jesus is Lord and savior of the poor, the injured, the wounded, the sorrowful, the powerless, as well as everyone else. This is the God we worship. The wounds help us get on with living our baptized life. We can not know Jesus without knowing his wounds.
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