You may recall last week’s gospel reading, in which Mary and Mary (Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James and Joseph; Matthew 27:61n) came across the open tomb. They encountered Jesus on the road after that, and he told them, “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” You might then imagine the apostles’ reactions to what Mary and Mary would have told them. It’s not in Matthew’s gospel, but John spells it out in the verse just before this week’s gospel reading. Mary Magdelene announces to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). With this, John foreshadows them telling Thomas, but even John doesn’t write the disciples’ response to Mary. Do we really believe they accepted Mary’s statement without question? Or do we believe they needed Jesus to appear to them—because that’s exactly what happens next.
While Episcopalians rarely, if ever, go through the process in which Roman Catholics select a patron saint, I suspect that--after a fashion--my patron saint might have been the apostle Thomas. Orthodox Christians call the second Sunday of Pascha, “Thomas Sunday,” in remembrance of the main supporting actor in this gospel episode, and they understand Thomas’ doubt as a blessing, since it leads to the truth which Jesus brings. Thomas is as close as we see in the Holy Scriptures to a scientist, and it’s easy to see him as the eternal skeptic. Nearly every time Thomas is mentioned in the gospels, he is the person who says he does not understand or who questions Jesus so that Jesus can explain some cosmic truth. This is a scientist--always asking, always questioning—and this is why I like him. But there is something deeper at stake here in Thomas’ actions today.
Thomas gets a bad rap when we call him--as we often call him--"Doubting Thomas". Thomas questions and admits his lack of understanding. Here, though, we find what I believe to be the core reason why we call him Doubting Thomas. Jesus appears to the rest of the disciples the first time, and Thomas is not with them. What would you say if you had missed church last Sunday, came back this Sunday, and people started telling you that Jesus Christ had appeared bodily last week in church? Madness, you'd say. You would dismiss these claims as decisively as Thomas did when the other disciples told him that Jesus had appeared to them. That Thomas asks to see the wounds of Christ tells us how decisive his dismissal was. But we have the benefit of two thousand years of hindsight!
It's also interesting that in this passage Thomas does not believe, while in earlier passages we find the other apostles failed to believe when Mary and Mary tell them that Christ is risen. It is only when Jesus appears to the apostles and shows them his wounds that they truly believe Mary’s account. Susan Hylan, a New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt University, suggests that the other disciples were similarly untransformed by their first experience with the risen Lord. She writes that the disciples’ proclamation to Thomas that they have seen the Lord “suggest[s] their belief in the resurrection. However, a week later they are still hidden away in the same house and with the doors locked. Whatever belief the disciples have found does not appear to be immediately transformative.” Whatever the case, the disciples are not terribly convincing, and their actions betray their fear.
Here we have quite a few things going on in this passage near the end of John's gospel account. The first appearance of Jesus parallels his appearance in the other gospels. In particular, we see John's version of the great commissioning, in which Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, in the same way that God breathed the Spirit to grant life to Adam. At the end of Matthew's gospel, the apostles are given the Holy Spirit and sent forth, as Jesus says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Here, John boils the commissioning down to what he probably saw as its mystical core--after all, John's gospel has the reputation of being the most mystical of the gospels, and it is the most different from the other gospels. Here, John finds two things of primary concern in the commissioning: the granting of the Holy Spirit, or the breathing of life into the disciples, and the "keys to the kingdom" (v. 23) that in other gospels Jesus gives to Peter. This is the statement about forgiving or retaining sins.
But why doesn’t Thomas believe the disciples’ testimony? Why would any of us believe or disbelieve? Thomas probably wasn’t afraid in the way we might think, since John gives us an account of Thomas as one of the braver apostles. When Lazarus died in John 11, it was Thomas who spoke up: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” In that passage, Thomas’ rallying call is almost a stand-alone statement in the middle of the tale of Lazarus, but it speaks of Thomas’ character that he is not afraid to die for the right reasons. Orthodox scholar Lawrence Farley gives us another possible answer: Like the other disciples, Thomas had been so close to Jesus that he was emotionally scarred by Jesus’ death on the cross. Like the other disciples, Thomas really didn’t know what to do next, or what to believe, since the gospel to this point tells us that none of the disciples really understood Jesus at the time. And like the other disciples, Thomas didn’t want to believe so deeply again without seeing for himself the risen Lord. Thomas was not afraid to die. But he was hurt, and he was afraid to believe.
We see in this passage, as we often see with Thomas, that Thomas questions at first, but once he gets an answer he follows wholeheartedly. He doesn't believe it when the other disciples tell him, "We have seen the Lord." Madness, he probably says, though John finds it sufficient to say that Thomas doesn't buy it. Then Jesus appears the second time and offers Thomas an answer. Once he gets his answer, what does Thomas say? Not madness, but "My Lord and my God!" Even Jesus' appearance is enough of an answer to convince Thomas, and then he is so fully on board that he issues perhaps the strongest statement of faith about Jesus. And as usual, Thomas’ questioning of Jesus provides the window through which we see Jesus once again revealing cosmic truth.
We also have near the end of this passage the last of the Beatitudes. You probably know of the famous Beatitudes we find in the Sermon on the Mount, early in Matthew's gospel. These are the famous "Blessed are they that..." statements. Well, in this passage we find Jesus issuing one final Beatitude, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." This Beatitude is unlike those we find in the other gospels in that, as biblical scholar Michael Coogan points out, this is a blessing of belief rather than of suffering or action. Here John gives us the mystical approach; for him, belief is what’s important.
I'd like to think that this Beatitude is aimed at us. I don't want to speak for anyone else in the room, but I have not seen Jesus manifest, or appear bodily, in front of me and offer to let me stick my finger in his wound. But I have come to believe, as I am sure all of you have come--or are coming--to believe. Part of this is about the journey with our belief, but blessed are we who take this journey with the risen Lord, for as John writes, through believing we have life in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
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