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My family and I stood on the Mall on Friday, along with one million others and, amid the Mexican waves, and the periscopes and the flags, joined in a very public act of worship. We sang together, prayed together; there were cheers as William and Kate made their vows. There was hearty hymn singing and we finished Jerusalem a good two lines before the Abbey. In all this there was a tangible sense of Christ’s presence, which might not have been apparent from the television coverage. Jesus came and stood among us in Westminster.
Becoming aware of the presence of Christ in our lives is at the heart of our gospel message today. How do we experience Jesus for ourselves? How does his story take root within us and become the truth by which we live. Our gospel today relays how this happened to a group of very human disciples, no different, no more holy than we are; who struggled to come to terms with what happened at the resurrection and what it meant for their faith. They wrote it down so that their experience might help us as we do the same. As the gospel of St John says:
‘These things 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.’ (Jn 20.32.)
For some people, belief will come through following the tenets and traditions of their inherited faith, seeing the unbroken continuity between their past, present and future: This is like Peter, in our reading from Acts 2 today, telling the Israelites that this Jesus of Nazareth, whom they crucified and killed, is the Messianic heir of their ancestor David. For some, the process of is more complicated – they don’t believe without seeing the evidence, working it out for themselves. This is the story of Thomas in our gospel reading. This is the story of doubt, this is the story of how we must challenge, and be challenged, in our faith in order to encounter the tangible Christ, the Christ we can touch with our hands, and truly believe.
Under what circumstances will you believe?
We see in this closing chapters of John’s gospel four different ways of seeing and believing:
We heard on Easter Day how Mary Magdalene went to the tomb are saw the stone was removed. Peter and the Beloved Disciple came along – the Beloved Disciple looked inside and saw the linen wrappings lying there, and that was enough for him to accept the reality of the resurrection.
Mary, on the other hand, saw all this, she even saw the risen Jesus standing in front of her, but she didn’t recognize him until he called her name. ‘Mary!’ Then she believed.
The disciples, cowering behind locked doors for fear of reprisals on the evening of that first Easter day, saw Jesus appear in the midst of them, and believed.
But Thomas, who wasn’t there, hears the story and refuses to believe, and nothing will convince him.
‘Unless… I put my finger in the mark of
the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe,’ says
Thomas.
So when Jesus appeared again a week later and
offered Thomas the chance to do exactly as he demanded, Thomas is
utterly wrong-footed, but he no longer needs the proof. has
finally believed. Then, into the mouth of the arch-skeptic, is placed
this supreme pronouncement about the divine nature of Jesus Christ: ‘My lord and my God.’
The doubter, the person who has been most
challenged and disturbed by the resurrection, becomes the spokesperson
for the faith of the first Christian community. What place has doubt in your faith?
I think doubt has had rather a bad press in this gospel. There’s an unfortunate tendency to scorn Thomas. I think he’s rather brave.
We sometimes regard doubt as if it’s the antithesis of faith. You cannot doubt, it seems, without a sense of guilt. In this version of the gospel reading, Jesus says to Thomas,
‘Do not doubt but believe’.
But that’s actually a mistranslation. What it
actually says is: ‘do not be
faithless but be faithful.’ Doubt is not the same thing as lack of faith. In his book Doubt, The Way of Growth, the priest and spiritual guide, Martin Israel wrote:
‘Faith without doubt is a dead faith.’
While doubt may be uncomfortable, for us and for
others, it sets us on the path that leads to truth. We all long for
security, certainty, but we cannot have both safety and growth. Thomas
could have gone along with the rest, said he believed, but he didn’t.
He was honest. To expand our experience of Christ, we need to be honest about the what we are struggling with in our faith. If we don’t, we cannot find a faith which we can own.
In a moment we will stand and say the creed. There’s a danger that, after a time, we become able to recite it word for word without thinking very much about what we are saying, let alone believing in it. What does each sentence, each theological concept, mean to us? We need to work it out.
‘It is,’ says Martin Israel, ‘about living life, and coming to terms fully with reality… then you have something real to hold on to and something that is meaningful for you.’ This is what Thomas is doing here: he is forming belief which is credible to him. He is making Christ real.
How do we support each other through this process?
I wonder how the other disciples felt about Thomas. To encounter a doubter is unsettling. They ask hard questions; they challenge us; they demand to put their fingers in the places where our faith really hurts. If God is good why do bad things happen in the world; why did Jesus have to die on the cross? Thomas is the personification of doubt at the heart of the faith community. The grit in the oyster shell from which grows a pearl. Yet, Jesus blessed Thomas in an extraordinary way. He allowed him to doubt. He went along with his doubt. He made Thomas a powerful witness to the reality of the resurrection – more so than the other disciples in that room. If we ignore Thomas, or exclude him, we are denying an opportunity to seek out the presence of Christ in our lives.
It’s interesting to note that the disciples locked the door for fear of the Jews, but the challenge really came from within. This gospel today is an account of how we hold one another through our faith journey, sharing common life, breaking bread, and yet believing differently. When Jesus appeared among his disciples that Easter evening, he said: ‘Peace be with you’ and he sent them out in the power of the Holy Spirit to support one another.
When this gospel talks about forgiving and retaining the sins of others, I sense that it does not mean judging – after all Jesus was never especially judgmental of people, only power and authority. It means releasing one another, lifting burdens, not adding them; offering each other the space and the fellowship to grow in faith. We must encourage people to see and believe in the risen Christ in their own way. And we must, like Jesus with Thomas, support each other to do this.
There are people within our communities, and there is a multitude outside, who are longing, not for certainty, or ready made answers, but for space to explore who God is, and what that means for their lives; to touch Christ and make him tangible in their lives; to share in the joy of Christ’s presence in a loving, supportive community, like that on the Mall.
In his address at the Royal Wedding, the Bishop of London urged the William and Kate to help each other to: ‘become who God meant them to be, their deepest and truest selves.’ This is what it means for us to live in Christ’s fellowship, and this is what it is to ‘have life in his name.’