Sermon - 2d Sunday of Easter (4/19/2020)
Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31
I don’t know if you can remember back, before all this lockdown began, when we used to have to drive to work every day? And when we did, sometimes there was a lot of traffic — for those of you who are still going to work, you may not remember traffic, but sometimes there was a lot of traffic because there had been an accident. And even if the crash had been moved out of the road, there would still be bad traffic because people would slow down to take a look. What is so fascinating about the suffering of someone else? Why do we want to look? What need does it satisfy to see somebody else’s bad luck – does it make us feel better about our good luck, so far?
Yet when it comes to our own traumas, we do not want people to see. We do not like to be seen when we are vulnerable. Because we don’t like to be vulnerable, we don’t like to be reminded of times when we were vulnerable and hurting, we don’t want to be known and seen in our worst moments.
On Easter night, the risen Jesus comes to the apostles gathered in the upper room. He comes to those who abandoned and denied him offering peace. He breathes into them the spirit of new Easter life, as God breathed the spirit of life into Adam, as God breathed the spirit of life into the valley of the dry bones in the vision of Ezekiel we read a few weeks ago. He comes as the victorious conqueror of death itself, bringing gifts and pardons and inviting others to share in the joy of victory.
Most of the apostles were there when Jesus arrived in power and victory. But Thomas, for some reason, was not. We don’t know where he was. He doesn’t seem to have abandoned the group, he kept coming back, he was there again the following Sunday. So it’s not like he had gone out to work on his resumé. Maybe he was buying supplies for the group, maybe he was trying to get the news to find out what people were saying, maybe he had just gone to the bathroom. Maybe he was one of those people who just needed to be alone and take a long walk to clear his head. But he wasn’t there, and he might have legitimately asked why Jesus had chosen to come at that particular moment, and left him out.
So Thomas doesn’t refuse to believe – he doesn’t walk away, he is not the Doubting Thomas people always talk about. But he wants to see for himself. He wants to be sure: he wants to see the marks, the nail prints in the hands, the wound in the side. He says that he wants to see the wounds.
When Jesus shows up, two things in the story fascinate me. One is the total openness of Jesus to show Thomas his wounds. No shame, no fear. Jesus may be a triumphant victor over death but at the same time Jesus is not ashamed to reveal God’s vulnerability. That God, the almighty creator of heaven and earth, came to us not like the powerful lords of this world, but as flesh that bleeds and suffers and dies. And it is only as divinely vulnerable that Jesus is the source of new life to the wounded and hurting Thomas.
The other is that, when Jesus appears, we are not told that Thomas actually does what he said he needed to do: put his fingers in and test the wounds. He confesses Jesus as Lord and God, something the other apostles are not recorded as doing when they saw the risen Jesus the week before. And with this confession the evangelist can bring the gospel of John to its conclusion: these signs have been written down so that you, too, may find life in what Thomas confesses: that flesh that is wounded and bleeding and that dies can still live with the presence of God.
Most of the time the apostles spent locked in together in the upper room in the days and weeks after Easter, they didn’t see Jesus. Most of the time they were alone, with their own weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And with each other’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and recent experience suggests that their days and weeks in close quarters probably brought out those weaknesses rather clearly. And yet when they experienced the presence of the living Christ, it was the presence of the Jesus who suffered, the Jesus with wounds and scars and yet was not ashamed, the Jesus who met them not when they had worked everything out and had polished off their rough edges, but exactly as the hurting and vulnerable people that they were.
It’s the same for us. We’re all a little hurting and frazzled these days. Many of us were a little hurting and frazzled before all this started, and it hasn’t gotten better over these last five weeks. But none of that makes us any less acceptable to God. Not to the God revealed in Jesus Christ, who comes among us crucified yet alive, wounded yet forgiving, disfigured yet unashamed, rejected yet accepting.
And when the time comes for us to come out from behind our locked doors, I pray that we will all have a bit more compassion and respect for the fragile, earthen vessels that all of us are. May we all have the courage to know that, despite our flaws and weaknesses, despite our wounds and scars, we are fragile clay into which God has breathed the breath of life, and the Holy Spirit of new life that never dies.