Second Sunday of Easter 2017

Acts 2:14a, 22-32 and 1 Peter 1:3-9 and John 20:19-31

This sermon was given as visiting preacher at St Nicholas’ Church, Hedworth.

I wonder whether you have ever felt that you have been misrepresented? And if so, I wonder how that felt? I would suggest that many of the characters we meet in the Gospels have been misrepresented by assumptions made about them down the centuries, and this is certainly true of Thomas. Thomas has been saddled with the title, Doubting Thomas. In fact, the Gospels tell us that all of the disciples doubted: that they doubted the testimony of the women; that they doubted the reliability of their own eyes when presented with the risen Jesus; that their joy was mixed with understandable disbelief at the too-good-to-be-true; that their tentative steps towards worshipping Jesus had to negotiate their doubt that this is what God would want of monotheists. But nowhere do the Gospels single Thomas out as capital-letter-D Doubting.

Instead, the gospel names him Thomas, the Hebrew for ‘Twin’ – and translates the name into Greek – Didymus – for the benefit of Gentile hearers. What is unclear is whether Thomas is his name, or, like the Peter of Simon Peter, a nickname. After all, why would the parents of twins name one of them, Twin? There is a school of thought that claims he was called the Twin because he so closely reflected the person and actions of Jesus. You may remember the moment when Jesus decides to go to Lazarus, and his disciples question his sanity: we came away from there because the religious leaders were trying to stone you; and you’re going back? But Thomas declares, Let us go with him, that we may die too. Or, I’d rather be dead with Jesus than alive without him. Thomas is loyal, and brave.

When Jesus first appears to his disciples, Thomas is not present. And he is not prepared to settle for a second-hand account, to be around on the grounds of other people’s faith. He needs to know that Jesus is risen for himself. A week later, Jesus answers his prayer. And Jesus invites Thomas to move from a place of doubting to a place of believing something new. I don’t think Jesus has a one-time step in mind: rather, I think that Jesus is showing us the process we are being invited into. Doubt is the necessary starting-point in order to believe something new. Unless we have doubts about where we are, we will never go anywhere; unless we doubt our perspective, we’ll never see the world from a different point-of-view.

In fact, this process has already been demonstrated by Thomas, so we might say that – far from chastising him – Jesus is affirming him. Of all the disciples hiding behind a locked door, Thomas was not there. Thomas doubted that they would get very far unless someone was prepared to go out, to contact friends, to return with bread, and wine. Perhaps he doubted that any of the others would be the one to go: after all, it will involve genuine risk, and Thomas has shown that he is not afraid to die. At some point, his doubts are enough to move him beyond the door.

It is doubt that opens us up to move beyond the known, and belief that opens up a whole new territory to us. When he puts his hand in Jesus’ spear-torn side, Thomas steps into a newly-opened space, understanding for the first time that Jesus is his Lord and his God. This same process will carry him beyond the familiar, all the way to the south of India, taking the good news of Jesus Christ to the very end of the world.

And these things are written in order 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.

In order that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah – the one sent by God to save us – and the Son of God – and therefore our Lord. That you may believe that Jesus is your Saviour and your Lord: the one who has set you free, and the one whom you have been set free to live for. Because it is in knowing that Jesus is both our Saviour and our Lord that we enter-into, and continue to move further and further into, the fullness of life God hopes for you to know.

The starting place is doubt: is coming to doubt the story of your self-sufficiency, the story in which you are the heroic centre-of-the-universe, the story in which you are the Author of your own Destiny. Such doubt is not the same thing as believing that you, beloved child of God, are worthless: Jesus embraced and defeated death because of your infinite worth in God’s eyes. But it is doubt that moves us to long to see Jesus, if not bodily, in Scripture and prayer, in the bread and the wine; to know him more fully than we have known him before. Doubt, opening into belief; and doubt, opening into belief; and doubt, opening into belief; until the day when, with Thomas, we do see Jesus face-to-face. Indeed, it is this faith-full doubting that you have exercised and continue to exercise in seeing what might come of Messy Church and Café Church. So come: don’t let your doubts hold you back; but, instead, let them take you on an adventure with Jesus. Who knows where you might go together?