John 20:19-31, from the Second Sunday after Easter
“Because you have seen me, you have believed,” the resurrected Jesus told Thomas, having appeared out of thin air – and in spite of locked doors – to let Thomas inspect the nail holes in Jesus’ hands and the spear wound in Jesus’ side. “Those who believe without seeing are blessed.”
So, are you? Blessed, I mean. Jesus was talking about you, me, and everyone else who has believed without seeing. So, do you feel blessed?
Or do you wish sometimes, as I do, that God would just show himself again, would just give us some irrefutable evidence that the whole fantastic story really is true. These 2,000 years later, we have scientific proof that the Earth orbits the Sun, that bacteria and viruses cause diseases, that space can bend and that light has a speed limit. But with apologies to the apologists, we have nothing like such proof that God is real, and I don’t know about you, but it seems to me sometimes like Jesus got it exactly backwards there at the end of John 20, the Gospel text for this week’s Lectionary. Thomas, staring slack-jawed at Jesus’ post-Resurrection body, seems like the blessed one, and I, on my best days, seem like … the hopeful one.
And sometimes it’s hard even to hope. If you read the papers, you’ll know that, this past Easter Sunday, nine suicide bombers blew themselves up at several churches and hotels across Sri Lanka, a war-ravaged island nation off the coast of India. The dead include a fifth grader from Washington, D.C.; a 31-year-old man on his honeymoon with his new wife, now a widow; a 10-year-old Australian girl and her mother; a Sri Lankan father and husband who died keeping a bomber out of a packed sanctuary at one of the targeted churches; and all five members of one family, the youngest of whom was just a baby.
If Jesus’ resurrection defeated sin and death, why are we still dealing with so much of both? It’s a point critics of the faith make all the time. A television interviewer recently asked British comedian and atheist Stephen Fry what Fry would say to God if Fry ended up standing before God at the pearly gates. “I’ll say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you!” Fry replied.
Theologians have wrestled with the problem, too. “The portrait the Gospels paint,” Robert Capon writes, “is that of a lifeguard who leaps into the surf, swims to the drowning girl, and then, instead of doing a cross-chest carry, drowns with her, revives three days later, and walks off the beach with assurances that everything, including the apparently still-dead girl, is hunky-dory. You don’t like that? Neither do I. But I submit that it is – unless we are prepared to ignore both the Gospels and the ensuing two thousand years’ worth of tombstones with bodies still under them – very much like what the Man actually said and did.”
So despite what Jesus said, there are times when I’d trade places with Thomas in a heartbeat. Two thousand years’ worth of brutality, suffering and death can seem less like a blessing than like a bunch of reasons for doubting whether Easter made any difference at all, or perhaps even happened.
But I hope you still believe in Easter. I do.
Understanding why I do begins with understanding the true purpose of living a Christian life. That purpose is not just about preparing myself to go to heaven after I die, nor is it just about preparing others to go to heaven after they die. All who believe will go to heaven, of course, and settling those arrangements before death is critically important. But if we take seriously Paul’s assertion in Romans 1:17 that faith, alone, does the job, unaided by good deeds or self improvement or anything else, we’re as ready as we ever will be the moment we believe. So what’s the point of our hanging around in a world as damaged as this one is? And what kind of God would die on a cross to open an escape route from such a miserable world, only to leave us stranded in it for a lifetime, let alone for 2,000-plus years’ worth of lifetimes?
Page to the end of the Book of Revelation, and you’ll see that the last scene of the Bible doesn’t depict our making the ultimate escape to heaven. It depicts God bringing heaven back here, back to an Earth remade into what it should have been all along. And if you are skeptical of Revelation, stuffed as it is with John’s trippy visions about scrolls and pale horsemen and Armageddon, feel free to look at more familiar passages. Both Jesus and John the Baptist described the kingdom of God as “at hand,” or “near,” and Jesus even told one inquisitive Pharisee, “the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:21). Jesus taught his disciples in Luke 11 to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” not “To thy kingdom may we go.” And in Acts 1, as the crowd gawks at the sky that the risen Jesus has just ascended into, two angels appear and ask, “Why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” The clear implication: You’ve got stuff to do. Get busy doing it.
What all of this means is that God remains at work in the world, and the purpose of a Christian life is to join him in that work. The fact that work remains to be done should come as no surprise to us. Jesus warned his disciples, and us, that life as his followers would be tough (Luke 6:22, John 15:18, etc.). Nor should the fact that where work remains, so do bombers and bone cancer and drowned girls and all other manner of sin, suffering and death. What else would God be working to eradicate?
I wish Easter had finished the job. But it plainly didn’t. Rather, it seems to have begun the work, or, more likely, accomplished something critical, without which the work could not have continued. Jesus has crushed the serpent’s head, just like Genesis 3:15 foretold. But the serpent still writhes, still strikes. And sometimes, nobody can take care of those whom it bites better than those who know firsthand what it feels like to be bitten. That’s harsh, I know, especially if your bite is still fresh. It may not help for me to point out that Jesus knows what it feels like, too. But he does. He volunteered to learn.
Believing without seeing means being saddled with this work, and as blessings go, it may not look like much of one. Not, at least, until you start doing it. Ever tried it? If you have, you know what I’m talking about. If not, how about keeping your eyes open for the next opportunity? It might not seem like that big of a deal. Maybe just a lonely kid sitting beside an empty seat, or somebody who needs what you happen to have a surplus of, or an opportunity to choose forgiveness over retribution. Whatever it is, it will be a chance to eradicate a bit of evil with a bit of Easter power.
I dare you to give it a go, then pretend you didn’t feel at least a hint of the blessing Jesus was talking about.
Introducing the thesis of his book, “The day the revolution began,” N.T. Wright writes about the apparent hopelessness of Jesus’ death on the cross, and how – improbably – his followers quickly came to see it something entirely otherwise.
“YOUNG HERO WINS HEARTS.” Had there been newspapers in Jerusalem in the year we now call AD 33, this was the headline you would not have seen. When Jesus of Nazareth died the horrible death of crucifixion at the hands of the Roman army, nobody thought him a hero. Nobody was saying, as they hurriedly laid his body in a tomb, that his death had been a splendid victory, a heroic martyrdom. His movement, which had in any case been something of a ragtag group of followers, was over. Nothing had changed. Another young leader had been brutally liquidated. This was the sort of thing that Rome did best. Caesar was on his throne. Death, as usual, had the last word.
“Except that in this case it didn’t. As Jesus’s followers looked back on that day in the light of what happened soon afterward, they came up with the shocking, scandalous, nonsensical claim that his death had launched a revolution. That something had happened that afternoon that had changed the world. That by six o’clock on that dark Friday evening the world was a different place.”
Wright goes on to argue that the world is still becoming that different place – that God is remaking it, and that you, here and now, are part of that remaking. Don’t just stand there gazing into Heaven. Jesus is coming back, and you’ve got work to do.
