"Doubting" Thomas
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The closing sentence of today’s Gospel reading contains a very profound truth lying at the center of the Christian teaching. It encapsulates the whole PURPOSE of the Gospel:
These [things that Jesus did] are written [in this book] that YOU may believe that Jesus is the Christ – the Messiah – the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
The purpose of the Gospel is to tell the TRUTH of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. And what God wrought in him, and with him, through him, for him, and by him. The Gospel is most fundamentally the TRUTH of who Jesus is – and this truth contains in itself the life-giving, recreating POWER of God – made perfectly manifest in the resurrection of Jesus Christ – in the fact that THIS MAN who was also the Son of God, who was murdered, CAME BACK TO LIFE, and thus broke the power of death forever – a power which had held everyone until Jesus came and made it otherwise.
These things are written that you may BELIEVE that Jesus is who he says he is, and that believing, you may have LIFE – the same life that he has…. “life in his name.”
The gift that he gives, the gift of “life in his name” is a consequence of his coming to give us everything that he has and everything, in fact, that he IS. “In him was life” (John 1) – so through faith in him, we receive life – the kind of life that is not merely snuffed out by disease or old age or murder.
But we should also notice the other gifts that the Lord gives concomitantly. Two times he says to them: “Peace be with you.” The peace of the Lord is a psychological FACT for those who have “life in his name.” I mean “psychological” in the literal Greek sense of “soulish”. When we come to know ourselves in relation to Jesus – as his disciples, his friends, his brothers – then we will come to know ourselves as HEIRS OF GOD. And as this conviction wakes up in our hearts, then we will have peace – because then we will come to know and to FEEL the truth of what Saint Paul said: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, not anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8.37ff).
It is this coming-to-know Jesus in faith – as our Lord, as our friend, and most intimately, as our BROTHER – that we find peace and life – the kind rooted in love, which doesn’t grow old or wear out, but casts out fear, and brings healing.
And most importantly: Jesus gives the gift of the Holy Spirit – which is shown to be part and parcel of his gift of himself, the outpouring of his own life – because it is given with his breath, which brings to mind the event of the total outpouring of his life. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus’s death is depicted in terms of his breathing: “And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last” (Mark 15.37).
And so we find him here again, having taken up his life again, breathing on the disciples the very inner life of God – the divine breath, the Ruach, the Holy Spirit.
Life, peace, and the Holy Spirit. These gifts we find through faith in Jesus Christ. But this leaves the very practical question of how this WORKS. What is it to have faith in Jesus? How do we get life and peace and the Holy Spirit by faith in Jesus?
In this passage from John, we see in St. Thomas what a response to Jesus IN FAITH looks like. Many people make much of “doubting Thomas” – focusing on Thomas’s incredulity before he had encountered the risen Lord. But in so doing, they risk missing the point. The story is not about Thomas’s doubt before encountering the risen Lord, but about his FAITH AFTER the encounter. Before they saw the risen Lord for themselves, ALL of the disciples experienced the same kind of doubt that Saint Thomas shows here. The notable thing is his faith IN the encounter with Christ. Thomas says “My Lord and my God!” A clear, resounding, unambiguous, and PERSONAL affirmation of the truth of Jesus: Thomas recognizes him to be him whom he claimed to be: both Lord and God.
There are two kinds of responses to the risen Christ depicted in the Bible. When the risen and gloried Christ appears with his wounds having become marks of victory, there is the response of Thomas, on the one hand: where we recognize the victorious actuality of the impossible: that this man in whom we had placed our hope and our trust really is risen, that he really is both Lord and God, that death really has been swallowed up in victory…. Or there is the response of “the tribes of the earth” portrayed in Revelation: Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, everyone who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will WAIL on account of him” (Rev. 1.7). These are the possibilities: The latter, a doleful realization that Christ has conquered, but that I am a child of the darkness and that I’ve been defeated – but the former, the confession of Thomas, is a recognition that he has conquered, but that he is my Lord and God, and that I therefore have conquered with him.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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