Sermon by the Rev. Dr AKM Adam

Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.

+ In the Name of God Almighty, the Blessed Trinity on High— Amen.

This morning, all around the world, more or less patient congregations will hear hundreds of thousands of sermons, most of which will expatiate on one of two themes. The first sort will scold Thomas for being such a faithless skeptic, to whom nonetheless our gracious Lord offered the irrefutable evidence of having risen from death. The second sort will hold Thomas up as an example of the kind of searching, critical mind that modern people ought to have when confronted with mythical claims about dead people walking through locked doors.

I think that both sorts of sermon miss the point — both the point John tries to make as he tells the gospel story and (more importantly) the point of the whole glorious gospel account of our redemption and salvation. St John has been busy preparing us for this scene all through his gospel. Over and over again, he describes occasions in Jesus’ work when crowds saw (or even just heard about) one of Jesus’ miracles, so that they concluded that somebody who could feed a multitude, who could change water into wine, who could restore sight to a man born blind, who could even raise to life a man who’d been dead for three days — someone so amazing must be a uniquely special person.

That’s part of John’s particular way of telling the Gospel; Matthew and Mark and Luke think that belief based on miracles is vulgar, that real believing doesn’t involve such stagecraft. Their version of Jesus says, “A wicked and adulterous generation demands a sign, but no sign shall be given to it”.

John looks at these stories just the opposite way. Surely, he thinks, if miraculous signs were a confusing, misleading aspect of Jesus” ministry, Jesus simply wouldn’t do them. On the contrary, says John; sings are a trademark of Jesus’ divine ministry. Throughout his gospel, John insists that there’s nothing wrong with the miraculous signs. He brings them to the foreground: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee”; “this was the second sign that Jesus did”, and so on. Indeed, when God comes into the human world — when the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us, full of grace and truth — under those circumstances, we probably ought to expect that extraordinary things might happen. And Jesus says “If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works.” Believe, says John, because of the signs; and in the closing words of today’s gospel lesson, he tells us “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

So when St Thomas tells the other disciples that unless he puts his finger into Jesus’ wounds he won’t believe, he’s not asking for anything that Jesus didn’t already offer the other disciples the first time Jesus appeared to them. And when we recall that the other disciples had already betrayed Jesus, denied Jesus, and run away in fear, it’s a little unfair to Thomas to say he ought to have just believed whatever they told him. The Thomas in this morning’s gospel lesson isn’t a hard-edged doubter who requires more convincing than those other credulous disciples. He’s not an example of the modern critical mind that won’t take anything without ironclad evidence. He’s just like the other characters in the story; once he sees the signs, he believes.

But if St Thomas isn’t the patron saint of modern sceptics, neither is he the sinful example of heretical incredulity. Just as the other disciples believed once Jesus appeared to them (and not before), so Thomas also worshipped Jesus when he encountered his resurrected Lord. His disclaimer doesn’t set him apart from the others as either a sinner or a hero; it associates him with everyone who’s ever thought that somebody rising from death is a pretty improbable proposition. We read in the red-tops that people go around saying “Elvis Presley is alive, we saw him down the chip shop”, but we don’t simply believe them. We would need to meet this alleged Elvis, to see his bona fides, listen to him sing “Jailhouse Rock” before we agreed to such an unprecedented claim. Even then, we’d expect to hear that his death and funeral were faked, not that he had somehow survived clinical death, autopsy, and burial.

Part of the point of the resurrection, after all, involves its impossibility. If people were being raised from the dead every month or so — if it were known that Elizabeth Taylor had been quite demonstrably dead for three days, then she nipped in at the pub to console some of the regulars who had been raising a glass in her honour — and that more or less the same thing had happened in Portugal last year, and twice in Sweden the year before — then “resurrection” wouldn’t imply anything noteworthy about them, nor would it any longer differentiate Jesus from King David, or from Elizabeth Taylor, or Elvis. The resurrection signifies something important about Jesus distinctly because it doesn’t happen to anybody else. In order for the resurrection to tell us that Jesus was one of a kind, he experienced something that nobody ever before or after has experienced.

If we pay close attention to the way John tells the story, Jesus doesn’t expect Thomas or us or anybody else to believe in the resurrection as a sort of qualifying exam for entering the Kingdom of Heaven. The resurrection tells us the truth about Jesus, and many of us understand and affirm that truth without the slightest reservation. Blessed, as John reminds us, are those like us who have not seen and yet have come to believe. But God doesn’t measure the degree of our blessedness with a belief-o-meter before deciding whether we’re fervent enough in our faith to pass muster at the Pearly Gates.

Neither does God commend us for being suspicious, or for refusing to believe. God doesn’t need our believing; God will manage fine without us, if we must be stubborn about such things. But if we hope to attain a state of eternal beatitude, we will have to overcome any predilection towards mistrusting that might impel us to deny the unique life-giving divine power that embraces us, protects us, and loves us into our imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance of salvation.

We don’t advance the cause of believing (for our sisters and brothers outwith the church, or even for ourselves within) if we treat this morning’s gospel lesson as an illustration of Thomas initially failing to put the right tick in the necessary box to get Jesus’ approval. Great and important as our faith in the resurrection of our Lord surely is, God sets us in a world where we can express faith in the resurrection in a myriad of ways — not solely, nor even most decisively, by furrowing our brows and saying, “Though I have not seen, I really do believe”. We can afford to let go of tired old partisan banners that relegate Thomas to the sinners or drag him into the seminars of the sceptical.

Encouraged by the Holy Spirit that we receive from Christ, nourished by the sacraments, we go out into the world a graceful confidence that life reaches far beyond the limits of frail flesh, and by our patience and love and gladness we may show neighbours and friends, enemies and all the whole world the indescribable glorious joy of our faith by actually living radiantly, as dead men come to inextinguishable life, as dead women clothed anew in imperishable spiritual bodies, as children of the resurrection raised this morning — and forever — into the risen life of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen