Trusting Resurrection
John 20:19-29
Emmanuel Baptist Church
April 19, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/SGmd93Lusu0.
Ask people about the disciple named Thomas and they will likely say, “Oh, you mean Doubting Thomas? ” Even though the word doubt doesn’t appear anywhere in the story when you read it in the Greek.
Thomas gets dubbed The Doubter as if that title distinguishes him from the rest of Jesus’ followers, as if what he does is different from any of the others. Remember back to last week. As John tells the story, Mary Magdalene saw the empty tomb first. Then she fetched Peter and the mysteriously unnamed Beloved Disciple. When the Beloved Disciple went inside the tomb and saw the graveclothes, he believed. One scholar suggests that Lazarus might be the Beloved Disciple, because Lazarus knows something about God interrupting the death and burial process. But Peter doesn’t believe then and neither does May. Mary only comes to believe when Jesus calls her by name and she recognizes him for herself.
Then, Mary goes and reports to the others that Jesus is alive, that she has seen him and touched him and talked with him. But that same night, they are hiding in a locked room. They are afraid. I suppose they could be afraid because they believe the resurrection. That is a life-altering reality with its own kind of fear.
But, I think the implication is that they are fearful because they don’t yet believe resurrection. That only changes after they see Jesus for themselves. It seems that hearing the Beloved Disciple’s experience and Mary’s experience was not compelling for them. They only valued their own experience.
Thomas missed all this. He wasn’t at the empty tomb. He wasn’t with the others on that evening when Jesus appeared. And so, he is the one who gets called The Doubter, but none of them believed without first-hand experiences.
Eugene Peterson is a pastor and author, now retired. You might know him as the creator of the Message Bible. He says, “It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.[1]
None of us here received first-hand experiences of Jesus’ resurrection. So how did we come to believe? In Peterson’s terms, how did we get the sense of being there and being engaged?
Most us came to believe in Jesus when we were children. Before we learned to question, before we formed critical thinking skills, before we became skeptics, this belief and trust was formed. Many of us also went through a time later when that belief had to be re-examined and re-formed.
Often, the faith that developed from that re-examination process was different from what came earlier, but the later form was built on the earlier form, which began when we were very young, perhaps when wonder and trust came more easily.
Now that is not true for all of us. Some of us became Christians, that is we put our trust in Jesus, as adults. I am always fascinated by hearing those stories. For me, people who come to faith in adulthood really are those that Jesus describes then he says ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
When Thomas finally does see Jesus, Jesus invites him to see his wounded hands, to touch his side. And Jesus says to him “Do not be unbelieving but believing.” In many translations, it reads “do not doubt, but believe,” but as I said earlier, the word ‘doubt’ is not there in Greek.
In contemporary English, the word “believe” has come to mean something that we regard as true in an intellectual sense, but Jesus is asking more than that of Thomas.
In medieval English, to believe meant to prize, treasure or hold dear and it came from the same root as the word for love. To believe meant to give your heart.[2]
We might also translate Jesus’ words as “do not be faithless, but faith-full”. Jesus is asking Thomas for his confidence, his loyalty, his heart.
An Ohio grandfather was driving through Pennsylvania Dutch Country with his 7-year-old grandson. When they passed an Amish horse and buggy, the grandson was curious.
“Why do they use horses instead of cars?” he asked.
His grandfather explained that the Amish don’t believe in automobiles.
After a few minutes, the boy said, “But can’t they see them?”
Of course Amish people can see cars. They believe that cars exist, but they trust horses, they put their confidence in horses.
Diana Butler Bass says, “the point isn’t that you believe in the resurrection. Any fool can believe in a resurrection from the dead. The point is that you trust in the resurrection. And that’s much, much harder to do.”
What Jesus asks of Thomas, and of us, is not that we weigh the evidence and make an intellectual choice to believe. Jesus is asking that we actively place our trust in the Risen One.
I think about some time in the future when we will be told that it is safe to leave our homes, to go out and about in the world. When that word comes, we may believe it or not. We will know how much we trust it when we are willing to take off our masks, when we have the confidence to let another person get closer than 6 feet, when we are comfortable going into a restaurant or a movie theater. When we take concrete actions based on what we believe -- that is faith.
Fleming Rutledge is an Episcopal priest. In one of her Easter sermons, she wondered why so few people are usually in church on the Sunday after Easter as compared with Easter Day. She said, “As I thought about this, it occurred to me that the reason people don’t come back on the Sunday after Easter is that they don’t really believe that anything unusual has taken place. Something nice, maybe; something cheerful and uplifting; but not an honest-to-God resurrection from the dead.”[3]
Well, today is the Sunday after Easter and we are here. So perhaps we do believe that something unusual took place. Maybe we do trust in the resurrection.
I’m coming to a new respect for Jesus’ first followers, those who were faithful, those who put their confidence in resurrection. They had a before and after experience. Before Jesus, life was ordinary, normal, even good. They were fishermen or they studied with John the Baptist or they were women of means. That was before. And then there was after. After learning from Jesus, after his crucifixion and resurrection. After – life could be different. But it didn’t have to be. They could have pretended that nothing unusual had happened. They could have retreated in fear, gone back to being normal, but they didn’t.
A number of people are talking now about our before and after. Before pandemic, before lockdown and after.
Sonya Renee Taylor is a poet and activist who focuses on issues like racial justice, police brutality and mental health. In the last week or so, she said this, “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment.”
Some people love that statement. Some find it depressing. I happen to agree with a lot of it. I found myself wondering if others agreed. I wondered if those who wanted to stitch a new garment, to live in different ways after pandemic would find each other and find ways to do so. I thought about how hard that might be, because I expect a whole lot of people will just want life to go back to normal, to what it was before. Even if it means greed, exhaustion, extraction, hoarding and hatred, a lot of people will choose that, I think, because change is fearful and hard. And with so many other people choosing to go back to normal, how hard will it be for a few to live as if something else, something new is possible?
That is what Jesus’ first followers did. They lived into something new, something radically unheard of. There weren’t many of them. And there was enormous pressure to go back to the ordinary before. There still is. They did not just believe the resurrection. They trusted it, trusted it enough to be changed by it, to live differently afterwards. They gave their hearts to Jesus. They committed themselves to the Risen One.
May it be so, for you and for me. Amen.
[1] Eugene Peterson, Living the Resurrection: The Risen Christ in Everyday Life (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006), p.13
[2] Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of the Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (New York: HarperCollins, 2012). p. 117
[3] Fleming Rutledge, The Undoing of Death: Sermons for Holy Week and Easter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2002) p.300