Readings: 

Acts 2. 14, 22-32 

Psalm 16 

1 Peter 1. 3-9 

John 20. 19-31 

Hymns/Songs 

All My Hope on God is Founded 

Show Me the Place Leonard Cohen  

Doubting Thomas & Peter the Preacher:

Building an Apostolic Community of Trust.

Sermon preached on the Second Sunday of Easter

19 April 2020 (Low Sunday)

the Rev’d Joshua Paetkau

 

Greetings to all my brothers and sisters in Christ. In the words of our reading from 1 Peter, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!. It is a great joy to be able to join together with you in prayer this evening, in Spirit though not in body and to bear witness together to the great truth of Easter. Our Orthodox brothers and sisters, who calculate the date of Easter according to the Julian calendar are celebrating Easter Sunday. In the spirit of ecumenism, and in the spirit of Easter, let me therefore say, “The Lord is Risen, Alleluia. Alleluia.” He is Risen indeed.

 

Those of us within the Anglican tradition of the Christian faith know this Sunday as the Second Sunday of Easter, traditionally called Low Sunday. In a typical year, the preacher could expect to expound the Word to a much diminished congregation, with many of those who had attended the Easter Mass opting, like St. Thomas in today’s gospel, to stay away from the apostolic gathering for a period of time. This, however, is not a typical year, and in some respects we are brought closer to the experience of the earliest Christian community. We meet, if we meet at all, in the security of our own homes and the apostolic fellowship is marked by some very conspicuous absences. As we read in our Gospel for this evening, when Jesus first appears among the disciples in the post-resurrection world and confers apostolic authority upon them – that is, when he sends them out into the world with the power of the Holy Spirit – Thomas, one of the twelve, is not present in their number.

 

The absence of Thomas is conspicuous, it is noteworthy, and, like the empty tomb itself, it is an absence that signals hope to the community that will come to read, and to believe, this story. Thomas who, for whatever reason, is not present at the initial apostolic gathering, will bring the doubts of the unbelieving world back into the community of the apostles. It is Thomas, among the apostles, who will challenge the apostolic witness of the other disciples in a particular way, which I have always found both fascinating and perplexing. The other disciples, in their ministry to Thomas, say, “We have seen the Lord.” In essence, these other disciples are preaching to St. Thomas. Thomas is one of their number, one of the twelve, and he knows Jesus, but he does not yet know the glorious power of resurrection, for he was not present at the decisive event when the Holy Spirit was conferred upon the gathered community. He must be told, by the others, what they had seen. He was not there, so they told him.

 

Thomas, hearing what they have to say, responds with an expression that can be read as an expression of doubt, but also an expression of desire. “Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands and put my finger in his side, I will not believe.” Thomas, quite reasonably and understandably, wants, perhaps even needs, the fact of the risen Lord to conform to his own ability to comprehend and to experience that fact as a reality in his own life. What has always impressed me, about Thomas, is that he asks to see and to experience the wounded body of Christ, that is, his act of belief is conditional upon the reality of Christ’s suffering. Or, to put it differently, Thomas refuses to believe in the Lordship of the risen Christ until he has been convinced of Christ’s humanity. Thomas poses, for us, the question of belief. This same question is rendered, quite beautifully, by the late Leonard Cohen in his 2012 song Show Me the Place:

 

Show me the place, help me roll away the stone
Show me the place, I can't move this thing alone
Show me the place where the word became a man
Show me the place where the suffering began.

This question of belief, the demand to show me the place where the suffering began, is a necessary counterpoint to the enthusiasm of the preacher who, in his or her desire to display the glorious nature of Christ’s resurrection, might neglect the need that people have to relate to Christ as one who has been wounded as they have been wounded and who has suffered as they have suffered.

 

You will notice, in our first lesson for this evening, taken from the Book of Acts, that the focus of Peter’s preaching to the assembled crowd is focussed on the glorious body of Jesus Christ the holy one of God. Peter, drawing on the words of David the King from Psalm 16, describes Jesus as the holy one of God whose body is not subject to the law of decay, and who has not been abandoned to the realm of the dead. The content of Peter’s preaching is that God has raised Jesus life, though it is equally clear in his preaching that human wickedness had put Jesus to death through the nails of the cross and with the foreknowledge of God.

 

Peter does not, in his preaching, deny the reality of human suffering. It is there in the inescapable figure of the Christ who has been wounded for and by our transgressions. Nailed to the cross, human suffering, pain, and sorrow is present in his preaching, and this is a mark of true Christian preaching. However, Peter also does not fall into the trap of elevating suffering into the meaning of human existence. There is a quote, often mis-attributed to the Buddha, that says, “Life is suffering.” This is not a statement that will be made by Peter, nor by any of the company of Christian preachers. To the demand “show me the place where the suffering began,” the preacher can only stand amidst the great congregation and preach the Word that he or she has been given by the Spirit of God. He, or she, can only bear witness to what he has seen, heard, read, and experienced in the Holy Scriptures.

 

The priest, when the time comes to celebrate the Blessed Sacrament and to experience the body of Christ in a very physical, tangible way, will show us the place where suffering begins, but, like the preacher, they must first call us back to the eternal purposes and promise of God. Those of you who listened to Bishop Bruce’s message this morning will recall that he spoke of the importance of Thomas skepticism in helping us to pursue critical, evidence-based thinking. This is important, and I commend it, but it is also true that Thomas does not issue his confession of faith – My Lord and My God – from a position of doubt. When he speaks those decisive words he has come to a place of faith, and has, in the words of 1 Peter been “given new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that can never spoil, perish, or fade.”

 

Thomas has seen the risen Lord, and has been invited into a participation in the mystical body of Christ. His expression of desire, “Unless I see the marks and put my hands in his side..” has been confirmed by Christ as something possible. It has not been denied to him and we, who read the story, see that Christ meets us in our desire to know him according to his humanity. It is, moreover, no coincidence that this happens within the context of the gathered Christian community. It is in the midst of the apostolic community that Thomas comes to know and to trust Jesus as his Lord and his God. This means that in addition to Thomas having experienced a transformation in his relationship to Jesus the Messiah, the apostolic community – the Church itself – has been transformed into a community of greater trust. One of the things, I think, that we often overlook in the story of the Doubting Thomas, is the relational nature of doubt. Thomas’ disbelief in the fact of Jesus’ resurrection, at the beginning of the story, is not simply the absence of intellectual assent. It shows a lack of trust in his fellow disciples, and his physical absence from the initial Easter Vigil is further evidence of the lack of trust within the apostolic fellowship.

 

The point is not to find fault with Thomas; his lack of trust of the other disciples is based on his experience of them and his experience of reality. He is the kind of person who needs to experience things for himself and, as he demonstrates through the particular character of his request, Thomas’ experience of reality is shaped by woundedness and by an orientation towards death. We see this not only in today’s Gospel, but in the earlier episode of John 11 when, in response to Jesus’ decision to go to Bethany and be with the dead Lazarus and his family, Thomas says, “Let us go, that we may die with him.” Thomas, even prior to his recognition of Jesus’ Lordship and divinity, is what we might call a realist and he is commendable, to some extent, for his loyalty and his stoicism.

 

However, our Lord does chastise Thomas for his lack of faith. Gently, but nevertheless, it is there. “Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

 

This greater blessing that Jesus bestows upon the disciples who are to come is one which we may claim for ourselves. “Though we have not seen, yet we love Jesus, and though we do not see him now we believe in him.” We know Jesus, not through sense-certainty, but by faith and, because of this, we know Jesus in a very sure and certain way. Richard of St. Victor, a medieval theologian, taught that we know reality in three ways: by experience, by reason, and by faith. And, he continued, we do not hold anything more firmly than that which we grasp by a resolute faith. If you do not believe, he wrote, you will not understand. St. Anselm said much the same thing in his motto fides quaerens intellectum faith seeking understanding.”

 

It is on the basis of faith, which is to say on the basis of trusting relationships, that we seek true understanding. This is is true even of secular and temporal realities, where we rely on other people to tell us what is going on in the world, and on the basis of what we are told we formulate our own responses and actions. So, for example, in the present situation we rely on public health authorities to advise us as to what is going on with COVID-19 and, as individuals and as a church community we make decisions about our individual life and our life together on the basis of what we are told. There is an element of faith here, because there are limits to what we can test according to direct experience or even according to the capacities of our own comprehension and reason. For us to even begin to assess the situation according to our experience and according to logic, there needs to be a certain level of trust, that is, faith in the leadership or the messengers – those who convey the information to us.

 

Within the community that claims to speak of truths of an eternal and spiritual nature, the importance of faith is paramount. Hence Peter, in the Pentecostal sermon we read today, appeals to the signs and wonders that God has done through Jesus, and he appeals to the authority of Scripture as two ways of authenticating the testimony of those who speak about Jesus. Jesus, Peter knows, is the source of life and goodness, that is, the grace of God, and the way to actualizing that grace in one’s own life is by faith. As Paul says in Ephesians 2: 8 “It is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves it is the gift of God – not by works so that no one may boast.” Faith is not a work, it is not something that we do, but rather it is the gift and blessing of God and has the effect of working the salvation of our souls, the redemption of our lives.

 

So we, as the community of believers, do not find fault with Thomas, but rather we rejoice that he has seen the risen Lord and we rejoice even more that through his witness the great blessing of faith, the great blessing of belief has been conferred upon us who, through our faith in Jesus Christ, seek to attain a deep spiritual understanding of our individual lives and our common life together.

 

Through the great communion of saints, which include in their number the Doubting Thomas and Peter the Preacher, we have come to know the name of Jesus and to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and through believing to have life in his name. We have been welcomed, with the peace of Christ, into the apostolic fellowship, which is a fellowship of mutual trust and, as we see with Thomas, a place where we can be led beyond the uncertainties of doubt and fear and into the true light of faith where we come to know and to understand that God has eternally purposed to love and care for us as his children according to his great faithfulness. We are called, finally, through the place of suffering and to the place of God's eternal love; beyond suffering and into glory. The preacher and the skeptic, these two saints of the Christian community each in their own way and according to their own weaknesses show us the place where the word became a man, and they give us a name to call that place. 

 

 

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