Searching, Like Thomas

Easter 2, Year B
April 15, 2012
John 20:19-31

There was a letter to the editor yesterday that warmed my heart.  It was from a woman who would fit right into St. Aidan’s.  She was responding to a column that I hadn’t read and talking about how she believes that doubt and faith are intertwined and that both seem to be necessary parts of a spiritual journey, pointing to Thomas, from our Gospel story this morning, as a great example.  I couldn’t agree more.

I wasn’t here when they came up with the name “St. Aidan’s” for this place, and I don’t know enough about the history of this church to know why Aidan was chosen for this special honor.  I really don’t know much about St. Aidan beyond what you can read on Wikipedia.  I’m sure he was a fine fellow and a good role model.  But, if I were choosing a name for this church -- this church that is more open to thoughtful wondering than any other Episcopal church I have ever encountered, more respectful of doubt and theological questions -- I’d have gone with St. Thomas.  

We get poor Thomas’ most notorious story this morning. 

It was Easter evening.  Only a few hours before, the disciples had heard Mary Magdalene’s wild report of seeing the two angels at the tomb and embracing the risen Jesus that very morning.  “I have seen the Lord!” Mary announced to them, breathless and glowing.  It’s hard to tell whether the disciples believed Mary’s story, but they certainly weren’t doing much with it because there they were all (all but Thomas, anyway) cowering in a locked room in fear and confusion.  

It’s an odd thing, those locked doors -- such a small detail, and yet it tells us so much about the disciples.  They were still living on the other end of Easter.  They were afraid and helpless, trying to shut the world out and themselves in.  Trying to create for themselves a place of safety and comfort, a place where things made sense.  I think if we’re honest with ourselves we’ll find that we are living behind closed doors still, most of the time.  It isn’t easy to live into the reality of Easter.  But no matter what doors we close, no matter how tightly we lock them, they don’t keep Jesus out. 

Suddenly there Jesus was with them in that sealed room.  Offering peace, breathing the Holy Spirit upon them, commissioning them for their work in the world.  The story doesn’t say where Thomas was during the disciples’ encounter.  With family?  Off fishing?  Doing reconnaissance at the tomb?  Hiding somewhere by himself, hopeless and afraid?  Soon, the rest of the disciples echo Mary’s apostolic words as they announce to Thomas, “We have seen the Lord!”  Thomas is understandably dubious.  “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.”  Thomas has gotten a hard time for this unbelief from the Church ever since, and has been saddled with his nickname, “Doubting Thomas”.  

I can relate to Thomas in his doubt; I imagine we all can.  If we are paying attention to the Christian story of a God who becomes human and walks among us, a God who lives and dies as one of us, a God who is killed and rises from the dead, a God who continues to encounter us at unexpected moments in our daily lives – if we are really paying attention, really taking this seriously, how can we not have questions, doubts, uncertainties?

And so Thomas seems like a great representative for the skeptic that hides inside each of us, the questioner in us that resists easy answers to hard questions of faith.  Like us, he is one who was not initially present to see for himself the risen Lord.  He wants a little extra reassurance.  For that reason alone, he’d be worth naming a Church after, as we struggle thousands of years later to believe the Bible’s Easter pronouncement of the risen Lord.  But he’s also a great fore-bearer in faith for us in what he does with his doubt.  He doesn’t hide his questions or his uncertainty.  He doesn’t just go his own way and blow off what he can’t understand or appreciate.  Instead, he stays with the community and starts a conversation with them about the doubts that plague him.

And so on this second Sunday of Easter, the Sunday when we always get this Gospel reading, I propose a name change for poor Thomas – let’s remember him instead as “searching Thomas”. 

The great news of this story is how Jesus responds to Thomas’ searching.  Jesus’ answer to Thomas’ skepticism isn’t to dismiss him or upbraid him, or even to argue with him or try convince him.  Jesus’ answer is just to come to Thomas where he is and be with him.  Jesus is determined to reach Thomas, whom no one else is able to convince.  And so he comes back and repeats pretty much verbatim his first encounter with the other disciples, only this time with an invitation for Thomas, too.  Just like Jesus originally found the other disciples in their fearfulness and gave them joy and hope, now Jesus does the same for Thomas.  Locked doors and stubborn doubt don’t keep Jesus away. 

And that’s not all.  It turns out that those very doubts of Thomas’s lead him to his very best insight about Jesus: “My Lord and my God!”, he exclaims.  He seems to have been the first among those who knew Jesus to really understand that the human Jesus that he had known and walked with and learned so much from was somehow also God.

And the whole time Jesus is there talking to Thomas, loving Thomas in and through and under his searching -- that whole time, Jesus is also speaking over Thomas’ shoulder to the rest of us.  The Gospel of John was written at the end of the first century – even then, almost everyone who knew Jesus was dead and gone.  The Christians in John’s community were relying on second and third-hand accounts.  And so the assurance this Gospel story gave them is for us, too.  Jesus comes to meet Thomas – and comes to meet us – wherever we are, whatever doubts are weighing us down, whether we’ve forgotten how to believe or never quite gotten there to begin with.

That’s great news for all of us to hear, no matter how far along this journey we might be.  On any given day, we might not be able to state with perfect certainty the doctrines we believe about Jesus.  (In just a minute a number of us might find ourselves holding our breath or crossing our fingers during parts of the Nicene Creed.)  But we can keep committing, and recommitting, ourselves to this relationship with the One who loves us so much that he bursts through locked doors to come to us.  We can undertake, like Thomas, to keep on searching.  And who knows where that might lead us on our journey!  Amen.