Audacious Invitation

J

ohn the Evangelist is crystal clear about his purpose in telling the story of the Apostle Thomas’ first encounter with the Risen Christ.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” refers to you, to me, and to John’s audience.  It is likely that the Gospel of John circulated in its present form somewhere between the years 90 and 120.  There is some evidence and some opinion that it is based on much older material, but in all likelihood neither John nor any of the canonical gospels was written until 40-50 years after Jesus.   By that time, hosts of people had come into the Christian fold, none of whom had had direct contact with Jesus of Nazareth.  By the decade of the 60’s, it is likely that most if not all of the original band of disciples had been martyred or had otherwise died.  Believing without seeing was clearly an existential issue, not a moral or theological one in the main.  How can one stake one’s life on a man who died a criminal’s death and whose supposed resurrection from the dead was quite possibly, to quote the words of Luke, “an idle tale,” that couldn’t reasonably be believed?  During the decades in which the gospels were most likely written there were several waves of horrible persecutions.  So “staking one’s life” literally was not a matter of quietly joining a community dedicated to personal growth and moral improvement but rather identifying with a very vulnerable movement whose members daily risked being murdered atrociously.

Icon of St. Thomas and the Risen Christ

The adjective that has stuck with Thomas is “doubting.”  “Doubting Thomas” has long carried the implication that somehow Thomas ought to have believed without doubting.  Personally I believe that to be utter rubbish.  Not because we mustn’t of necessity get past the need for physically observing the Risen Jesus before we can believe in him, but because doubt is not an enemy of faith but a necessary component of faith.  If we never doubt, question, probe, examine, test the faith that we have as little children, we can never grow up and own that faith as mature adults.  In fact, we run the terrible risk of never realizing some of Jesus’ greatest challenges if we allow ourselves to remain stuck at the first stage of faith development.  Faith in Jesus is very much a relationship, and like all relationships if it is to grow and last, it must shed the illusion that it can do so without changing over time.  It should and it must, or else it will atrophy, wither, and become utterly useless.

But there is another outcome of this story of so-called “Doubting Thomas” that has been disastrous for the Church.  And that is a great misunderstanding of what belief is in the first place.  In our world, belief generally means to give assent to, to accept something as factually true.  Do you believe what you read?  If you do, that means that you accept as factual and provable what you read.   Do you believe that 2 + 2 = 4?  If you do, it means that you not only trust the information that someone taught you years ago that two and two did make four, but you have experienced that mathematical equation every day of your life.  Do you believe what you hear on a given news outlet or on  an internet site?  Ah, there’s a different question.  If you do, you are quite likely believing that source on the basis of someone else’s authority, or on the basis of your own philosophy or opinions, not things that are easily verifiable. 

So the question that we need urgently to ask is what does belief mean. At the risk of getting a bit teachy here, I invite you to look carefully at some words used in the telling of this story.  First, the word that John uses to mean “belief” or “to have faith” or with the addition of one letter “not to believe” or “to be faithless” is a word [πιστευω] that comes from an old root from which we get words like abide, awaiting, persuading, confiding, trusting. It is the same root out of which grow words like faith, fiancé, and confident.  That tells us a good deal about belief.  Almost nothing in those words has much to do with giving intellectual assent to a proposition in our heads, our minds.  But almost every one of them indicates an action that has to do with an attraction of one person in relation to another.  Take fiancé, for example.  The minute that word is said in English we immediately know that we are talking about a relationship, indeed a relationship we assume to be loving.  We also know that it suggests a future in which two persons are going to be married and thus share a life.  Keep that in mind as we look at another text.

In a few minutes we are corporately going to use the words “We believe” as we state the words of the Nicene Creed.  The English word “believe” comes from another old root from which spring words in various languages meaning caring, desiring, loving.  From the same root come words meaning things like pleasing, pleasant, and pleasure.  See how far that is from a notion that in saying the Creed we are reciting a string of things that we simply agree are factually true, historically accurate?  It is more a matter of saying we are committing ourselves to a life characterized by desiring, loving, giving and receiving pleasure.  Now that might suggest a quite different experience when you’re saying the Creed besides running down a checklist of impossible things that somebody said you ought to think are true.  Try thinking of the Creed as the marriage vows between you and your Creator-Lover!

And speaking of “creed,” let’s take a look at that word also.  In Latin the verb for “I believe is credo.  Let’s take a look at that for a moment.  Its ancient root is kerd, from which we get in lots of languages words like “heart, cardiac, cordial, credence, credit.”  It also produced words that point to the idea of putting trust in someone or something.

Now we are ready to return to the story of Thomas with a little more clarity about what it and in the larger scheme of things the Gospel of John means by “believing.”  Believing is giving one’s heart to someone, being or becoming engaged and married to someone, trusting wholeheartedly in someone.  And that someone is one with whom one has a relationship of love and pleasure.  That, I think you’ll agree, is a far cry from thinking in the abstract that something is true.  Granted, truth is something we expect in a love relationship—truth, not lies, not pretense or sleight of hand.  Truth, like trust, is an essential component of love among beings, without which no viable community can exist, let alone function. 

When Jesus says to Thomas, “Be no longer unbelieving, but believing,” he is saying in effect, “Put your trust in me. Place your confidence in me. Give me your heart, Thomas.”

Then—then—how powerful an image becomes of Jesus’ invitation to Thomas:  “Put your finger here and see my hands.  Reach out your hand and thrust it into my side.”  Interestingly, the text does not say whether Thomas actually does these things, and you can imagine it either way.  But the invitation of Jesus is clear:  Touch me; don’t hang back. I invite you to be in a love relationship with me that exceeds even all that we have experienced in the old life: my pain, my death, my resurrection, my scars.   Be one with me.” 

"Place your hand here in my side..."

It is interesting to compare this story with the one that precedes it in the same chapter.  When Mary Magdalene stands weeping outside the tomb and recognizes Jesus when he calls her by name, he says, “Do not hold on to me.”  In the Latin text he says, “Nolo me tangere,” or “don’t touch me, for I have not yet ascended.”  Remember that these are stories told to convey messages, not a historical record meant to be consistent.  Each gives us a piece of truth.  One gives us the imperative not to try to possess Jesus, not to hold on to the past, but to embrace the future instead.  The other gives us the joyful invitation to enter into nothing less than a passionate union with the Risen Lord, emboldened with the words, take your body and place it in mine.  You can live in me and I in you.  It takes us a lifetime perhaps to mull over these two messages.  Both amount to, “Trust me, love me, be one with me.” 

I asserted a few minutes ago that the common understanding of the story of Thomas with the message that doubt is dangerously opposed to faith has been disastrous for the Church.  I now assert even more strongly that the message to become one with Jesus is for human beings truly to be saved: saved from despair, saved for  the healing not only of ourselves but of the world. It all fits together:  without death there is no resurrection, without resurrection life has nowhere to go but to death.  The risen Lord comes among his followers who, far from understanding what is happening, hear him saying, “Peace to you.”  Shalom, salvation, wholeness, healing, sanity, wellness, balance, health, the mending of brokenness, the awakening of bodily pleasure, the fulfillment of hope. 

It is a gift.  We can accept it or turn it down.   But the Risen Lord has amply demonstrated that he won’t go away, except to come among us again and again.  And each time he comes, the invitation is renewed, “Come unto me.  Put your finger here.  Feel my wounds, see my scars, thrust your hand into my body. Unite with me.  I want to live in you. And I want you to be a part of me.”

"... that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us."

A sermon for The Second Sunday of Easter, based on John 20:19-31.

photo at left:  Still Life with Bread and Wine, Abraham Guntz, Romania

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019

Left Out?

John 20:19-31

            Thirty or so years ago, I still pretty much cared what people thought about me in that post-adolescent sort of way.  I secretly pondered in my heart the awful question if I really had many friends.  I could go for months without thinking about these matters until I was in a group of friends.  At the time I belonged to a rather large diocese with hundreds of clergy.  When we would be together, vested, waiting for a diocesan convention to begin or an ordination or some other grand affair, I would find myself talking with a gaggle of clergy.  The signal would be given for us to get in line.  Suddenly, everyone in the group would have a partner to walk with but me.  I got a little self-conscious about that.  I started surreptitiously staying quite near to someone—anyone—thinking that I would have a natural partner to walk with when time came.  Never once did it help.  Later I would simply come through the front door and ask, “Would you walk with me in procession?”  a question that raised eyebrows and furrowed foreheads. 

            At some point the issue vanished from my awareness, but not quite.  It came to embody for me what I suspect all the energy around the symbol of “heaven” is about.  It was my deep craving to be included, not to be left out.  It was no big thing, indeed nothing anyone else would have paid any attention to.  I just needed to be included.  Simply included.

            So I have great sympathy for Thomas the disciple who happened not to be with the others when Jesus made his first appearance to the Eleven.  I suspect that he was out of the room tending to personal needs as people are wont to do, or on an errand for this bunch locked behind closed doors, such as fetching some pita bread or olives for the evening meal.  Whatever the case, Thomas, I fancy, felt a little on the left-out side when he returned.  Most folks are preoccupied with his hesitation to believe what the others report, which is, of course, John’s point in telling the story.  When we want to be included but find that we are not or were not, the most natural reaction is to replay our favorite response to stress or threat.  “You guys are putting me on, right?  He never came.  You’re just trying to fool me.”  Or, “C’mon.  I know Jesus better than that.  He and I were tight.  He’d never show up just when I was out.”  Or, “Well, he may have shown up, but what’s it to me?  I had other things to do.  Next subject.”  Thomas had his own defenses, which are on full display in Chapter 19 of John’s gospel.  And I have mine and you have yours.

            The interesting thing about this story is that it reverberates far beyond the Easter evening scene itself, far even beyond the issue of Jesus’ appearance and the consequent challenge of believing in him without having seen him.  It touches on something that we only rarely seem to look at, and that is how human beings are always looking for a community to be a part of.  On no level is that search more apparent than when we feel suddenly like outsiders looking in on those who already belong to what we feel detached from.  They know the scoop, the news, the story.  We don’t.  And that poses a crisis for us.

            I saw just this week a photograph of young Filipino boys carrying weapons in the service of the Taliban.  I wondered what the appeal of the Taliban was to them.  I suspect that few of them could discuss many of the political or religious notions of the Taliban beyond parroting what they might have been told or taught.  But I can promise one thing:  a deep need to belong to something important is answered for them by that group.  One can say the same thing about many movements, groups, and configurations in human societies the world over.  We need to belong.  We are communal animals. 

            Now the interesting thing is that there are far more options for belonging to a group with an old story than there are options for inventing or discovering new stories.  Did you never wonder how it is that the same animosities, the same rivalries, the same partisan politics, the same religious divisions maintain their power and their hold on people decade after decade, century after century, age after age?  Look at how many folks identify with a story, let’s say Protestant Christianity, for example, or Roman Catholicism, for that matter, simply because that is the story of their tribe.  Many of these folk could tell you nothing much about the religious battles of the sixteenth century, but they are fiercely attached to a tradition that keeps old arguments alive.  Not long ago I heard from a neighborhood boy I grew up with in Conway, South Carolina.  His family, like mine, were just average middle-middle class people, with no pretension whatsoever to money or prestige.  But he has become a dedicated Confederate participant in Civil War battle re-enactments, and appears on Facebook with a bearded face in a Confederate cap, the Stars and Bars waving behind him.  I wonder how he imagines that the powers that started the Civil War ever had anything much to offer him.  But I’ll bet he could tell you plenty of reasons why that particular story has become the one that he most passionately identifies with.  And so it goes. 

            By the end of the first century when, in all probability, the Gospel of John appeared, this crisis had penetrated the Christian community.  On the one hand, there were folks who had come to be Christian because their parents were or because it was the thing to do.  Christian instruction being what it was in those days, it is unlikely that people would have been ignorant about the general story of Jesus, his death and resurrection; but knowing the story line, even identifying with it, was a good deal different from being deeply invested in it.  Bear in mind that the external pressure upon the young Church was enormous.  Persecutions came in waves.  And persecution always presents the inevitable result that a great many people would rather renounce their faith than die for it.  But there were other issues as well.  The first and perhaps even the second generation of witnesses had died out.  There were lots more Thomases around, people who had not been there when it all happened.  Other communities with stories more credible, more dazzling perhaps, less risky maybe, were available to those Thomases.  With more power, pull, and punch, those stories, even some that were corruptions of the Jesus story, proved fierce competitors with the apostolic tradition.

            Now you can begin to see how it is that the Church was caught in a double bind.  Not only was its story under attack from without and in danger of irrelevancy within, it had not only to convince the Thomases that they could in fact believe without having actually seen, but that the story of the Christianity was indeed true, and that those Thomases could not only believe it but give their lives to it and for it.  That is what we see going on in Chapter 19 of John.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”   And believing, such a central issue for this gospel, is not giving intellectual assent alone, but giving one’s heart, falling in love with, giving one’s allegiance to the crucified and risen Lord.

            Yet it is not simply believing that is a problem for the Thomases.  It is belonging as well.  So this story about the resurrected Jesus is a story about the founding and charging of the beloved community.  Jesus appears to the disciples and breathes on them.  This is John’s account of what, following Luke-Acts, we call “Pentecost.”  Jesus gives the spirit to his community, empowering them with the life that he lives as the risen Christ.  They, in effect, share his own priestly vocation, forgiving sins (or not).  But what does all this do for Thomas and his misfortune of missing the first appearance?  The story shows that Thomas stands in contrast to “the Beloved Disciple,” the model disciple in John’s account, who, when looking into the empty tomb earlier that morning, had “seen and believed.”  Thomas’ insistence sets him apart not only from the Beloved Disciple but sets him apart from the community as well.

           

            Since our own age has more than its share of problems with believing without physical evidence, we would very much like for Thomas to be excused.  I would.  Were I writing the story, I would definitely cut Thomas some slack.  John will have none of that.  Jesus very clearly criticizes Thomas:  “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  And yet, even before he says that, he invites Thomas to examine his wounds.  Thomas apparently does not need to go quite that far, as he exclaims (first among the disciples to do so!) “My Lord and my God!”  There is no doubt that there is a place for Thomas in this community.  And there is not the slightest suggestion that there needs to be a remedial breathing of the Holy Spirit for Thomas because he missed the first go-round.  He belongs fully. 

            It is not too much of a stretch to see that, of all stories in the gospel, this one has your name on it.  John says as much.  “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.”  You get to decide, as always, exactly what you will do with that.  Two things are nearly always at stake for us humans.  One is that we are so constructed to be creators and tellers of stories that we will always be seeking one that gives our lives meaning.  It may be political or philosophical or just a simple collection of family folk tales.  It may even be a story that justifies our addictive or self-destructive behavior or rationalizes our guilt or self-absorption.  But the story of the Risen Lord breathing his New Life into a community that dares to live as he lived, serve as he served, a liberating, healing, forgiving life stands as a beacon to all who would find their way by losing their lives and who save their lives by giving them away.  You have that option.  The other thing that you need on some level is what I was jittery about as I awaited the great processions wondering who would walk beside me.  And that is a way of belonging to a community in which you are unquestionably valued.  You are welcome in this community of Christ not in spite of who you are but precisely because of who you are.  There are no outcasts, not even those who miss the point or the Spirit or the resurrection appearance when it happens.  Just stay connected.  Be a part of the fellowship.  Live in community.  For in this same gospel, the Jesus who was raised from the dead promises to you and to all his disciples that you need have no fear of abandonment, for “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013