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The Second Sunday Of Easter
Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery hast established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ's Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Scripture citation(s): John 20:19-31
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
John 20:19-31
✛
The Eyes of Faith
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One of the pleasures of Eastertide that is unique to parishioners of any church named Saint Thomas is the fact that our patron saint is featured prominently in the gospel every year on the Sunday after Easter Day. Whether you worship at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue or elsewhere, you get to hear the crucial scenes of Jesus’ appearances and Thomas’s famous response.
It is ironic, and I would say unfortunate, that he is known in popular usage as “Doubting Thomas”—as if his most important attribute was his doubting, as if the others didn’t doubt also, as if, if you’re going to doubt, the resurrection isn’t an understandable object of said doubt. It wasn’t Jesus whom Thomas doubted, after all, not directly, and not more than any of the others. It was the veracity of the witnesses that he wasn’t so sure about. And who knows? Maybe he had good reason for it; he knew them better than we do.
His popular nickname could just as well be “Thomas the Confessor,” since his confession of faith is a much more significant fact about him. Having seen Jesus Christ in his resurrected, bodily, form, it is Thomas whom the Gospel of John records as making that final, crucial, step of faith: “My Lord and my God.”
I do not think it is too much to say that the confession of Thomas is the climax of the gospel of John. “Lord” is a term relevant to human relationships. Some of our friends across the Atlantic have lords and ladies galore (Lord So-and-so of Such-and-such). To say that Jesus is Lord is to acknowledge his authority over one’s affairs.
But to say that Jesus of Nazareth is God is another thing altogether. For those Jewish disciples, the name “God” was reserved for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was not a term to ever be applied to any human being—until Jesus Christ. It is this recognition that marks Thomas’s confession, as he identifies these two things together in Jesus, the divine and the human, the place where creator and creation meet.
It was the Italian painter Caravaggio who gave us the graphic image of a bent-over, incredulous, Thomas, his finger inserted into the gaping wound on Jesus’ side. Perhaps. In our own depiction of the moment that follows, captured in stone there above the high altar, Thomas is on his knees, looking up into the face of this Jesus of Nazareth, whom he now sees and knows, as if for the first time.
We speculate about his bodily posture, of course, including what he was doing with his hands, but kneeling seems like a reasonable guess. At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow. Not only at his human name, but at the divine name. The name that God reveals to Moses as the divine name is the unspeakable name given to Jesus as well. To recognize that this person Jesus of Nazareth, whom Thomas has known for some time now, bears the name of the creator—well, falling to one’s knees seems a reasonable response.
Of course, how the divine and human are present in Jesus was not Thomas’s first concern; the finer points of Trinitarian doctrine were not at issue there in the locked room. But in an unrefined form, they appeared on Thomas’s lips: that this resurrected Jesus was in some mysterious way the incarnation of God himself, sharing the name that is above every name, of one substance with the Father.
It is a remarkable confession, and it is not the only remarkable aspect of this section of John chapter 20. After all, the confession of Thomas is given in response to the antecedent instruction of Jesus himself. When Jesus sees Thomas, he greets him in peace, and then says, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.” He invites Thomas to touch him, to feel the nail marks on his hands, to reach into the gaping flesh that had been torn by the spear. Reach out and touch me, Jesus says. Touch me here, and here.
For a certain kind of reader, however, this instruction may stick in the craw. After all, it was only eight days earlier that Jesus had been resurrected; eight days earlier that the tomb had been found empty; eight days earlier that Jesus had appeared to Mary Magdalene; and eight days earlier that she herself had received a sharp command to the contrary from her risen Lord: “Touch me not,” he had said to her. At this moment of tension and high drama, a moment of cosmic significance, when something new is breaking into the world, Jesus says to her, “Touch me not.” She was told that she could not touch him because he had not yet ascended to the Father, but of course after the ascension she no longer would have been able to see Jesus of Nazareth, much less touch him. Not in this life, at least.
“Touch me not,” he says to Mary Magdalene. “Reach out and touch me,” he says to Thomas.
This discrepancy is not explained within the text, but surely it is purposeful and relevant. There is something important happening in John, between Mary Magdalene and Thomas, between the relationship of sight and touch, and that of knowledge and faith. Mary could not touch Jesus; Thomas was invited to. Mary was present in the garden when other people were absent; Thomas was absent in the house when other people were present. Mary had seen Jesus and not recognized him; Thomas saw him and recognized him. Mary calls Jesus “Rabbouni, which means Teacher”; Thomas refers to Jesus as Lord and God. There is something happening with these two characters as they circle each other in this chapter, point and counterpoint, similar and different, both. Different people with different roles, and different relationships with the risen Jesus.
We might even say that Mary Magdalene is Thomas’ narrative sister here. Thomas, after all, is referred to as Thomas “the twin” three times (Thomas “Didymus,” the twin) but his other half is never named, his identity left to the imaginations of extra-canonical writers. Perhaps this absent twin can be found not in biological form, but in this woman Mary who is his mirror image, both members of the human family that has been drawn together by Jesus, a brother and a sister who have been “reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s body.”
The two of them, together, as narrative twins, similar and different, illustrate for us something of the dynamics of relationship with Jesus. What Mary and Thomas had in common was seeing Jesus and, by whatever means it took them, they were thus able to believe in his name. They each met the resurrected Jesus face to face, met the one through whom they were reconciled one to another, through whom they were reconciled to the triune God.
The kind of face-to-face vision they had may not be an option for us, not yet. Our vision is limited, as we see now only as through a glass darkly, as Saint Paul says. But one day, like both of them, we will see our resurrected savior face to face as well—see him and know him. “He cometh with clouds,” our reading from Revelation said, “and every eye shall see him.” Every brother and sister will see the one who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
In the present day we may have only partial sight, and only partial knowledge. But one day we will see, and know, in full, just as we ourselves are seen and known, today, in full, by the one who loves us: Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God.
