This is the text of a sermon delivered on the Octave of Easter, April 19, 2020. It was originally given extemporaneously, but it seemed worthwhile to me to bring the content together into a written document. Here it is.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. So conventional wisdom tells us. This is a lesson most of us learn pretty early on in life. We find out that a healthy dose of skepticism goes a long way in protecting us from unwanted outcomes. It really does! “Did that package really fall off the back of a truck?” “Is a man that handsome really interested in a relationship with me?” “Will momma really let me be the one to cut the pieces of cake for me and my brother, so that I can make one as big as I want and one as small as I want?” The unwary buyer often finds out that the bargain isn’t such a bargain. The lonely woman finds out that it’s not a relationship the man is interested in. The unsuspecting child is allowed to cut the cake, only to find out that the sibling gets to choose the first piece. Sometimes it might happen that you’re taken for all you have, and you’re left in terrible circumstances. But even if it’s not that bad, just being swindled is itself painful. It’s embarrassing when people see you get your hopes up, and everyone but you knows it’s in vain. Just the mere fact that someone got the better of you can feel downright humiliating. And the lesson sinks in a bit deeper: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Just a week after everything went wrong, Thomas hears some pretty incredible news. His friends burst into the room, shouting, “Thomas! Thomas! You won’t believe it!” He thinks to himself, you’re probably right. They all get very quiet, and Peter takes the lead, almost whispering: “We have seen the Lord.” This is the first time Thomas hears the Good News. But it doesn’t bring out from him a shout of joy. He doesn’t start dancing, he doesn’t start singing. Just a puzzled look on his face. At first he thinks his friends are playing a joke on him, which makes him furious that they would mess with him about something so painful. But quickly he realizes by the look on their faces that they are entirely serious. Peter says it again: “We have seen the Lord! Jesus is alive. He stood up and walked right out of that tomb. We’ve seen him with our own eyes!”
It might be difficult for us to appreciate the magnitude of what Thomas is hearing. When Thomas met Jesus he just about couldn’t believe it, even then. The old promises that his grandparents had taught him when he was a little boy were coming true right in front of his very eyes. The Creator God who made all things had singled out his own people for a great mission, that through Israel he would rescue his good creation from its present devastation: all things would be restored; everything wrong would be made right. And Thomas let himself believe that Jesus was actually the one who was going to make it happen. Every now and then, he would see Jesus heal yet another sick person, but still he would pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Jesus would gather Thomas and his other friends into a circle to teach them, and the truthfulness of Jesus’s words was so sharp that Thomas would suddenly start laughing with delight. Finally, they were all there in Jerusalem—at this point, it was just two weeks ago. Jesus had made it clear to everyone by his calculated entry into the city that he was indeed the king Israel had been expecting. Thomas is sure he’s on the cusp of all of it finally being fulfilled—the hope that the One who made us would make us again. And then it’s all dashed to the ground. As far as Thomas can tell, Jesus doesn’t restore anything. Instead, he dies shamefully on a cross. It’s all over—except that every time Thomas thinks about it his cheeks still get hot with anger. He feels like a fool. But now his friends are telling him that it’s not over after all, that Jesus is alive again, that Thomas can still dare to hope. He’s not ready, though. I sympathize with Thomas! “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Feeling foolish is hard, and I don’t blame him for not wanting to be made into a fool.
We don’t know how Thomas himself came to learn the lesson about things that sounds too good. Certainly, losing Jesus had brought it home for him. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t his first lesson in healthy skepticism. Maybe he had gone into a bad business deal: he was sure that a certain scheme would set him and his friend up for life, until the partner betrays him and leaves him with a pile of debt instead of a pile of money. Maybe there was a woman: he finally meets a young lady and he thinks she might be the one that he could settle down with; it’s almost like heaven on earth, until it becomes clear that she’s just stringing him along. Or maybe it was a family situation: his father just wasn’t a part of his life, but every now and then his daddy would show up and stick around, maybe for a month, maybe two; then one morning it happens again, when he wakes up to find that his daddy had left their family again. We just don’t know all the things that happened over the years that drilled it in for Thomas that he shouldn’t get his hopes up.
Fortunately for those of us who struggle to have faith, it only takes a mustard seed. Thomas isn’t quite ready to fling open the door of faith, but at least he leaves it cracked open, even just a bit. It turns out that that’s all it takes for Jesus to make his incredible entry into Thomas’s life, thanks be to God. He’s not quite willing to let his friends be his eyes for him. His friends have seen the risen Lord, and they’ve given Thomas their testimony. He’s not willing—maybe because he’s been hurt or whatever the reason—he’s not willing to depend on them in that way. But he’s still there. He’s still hanging out with them a week later. He’s still with the Church, even though he can’t bring himself to believe the way his friends do. There’s a mustard seed. And so it happens that he meets for himself the risen Lord. Jesus confronts him, and says, “Thomas, put your hand in my side. Here are the holes in my hands, right in front you. Put your fingers in my hands.” The faith that had been so hard for him—suddenly he’s able to believe. And believe he does. He’s not “Doubting Thomas.” He’s Saint Thomas. Even after this wonderful day, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to doubt it later—to ask himself, “Was I crazy? Was I just dreaming?” I imagine there probably were days like that. Yet Thomas, the rest of his life, continues to walk, step after step, in faith, even to the point that he will give his life for the Name of Jesus Christ. Thomas believes.
So Thomas meets the resurrected Christ, but when he does, Jesus mentions that there are special blessings in store for those of us who come to believe without seeing for ourselves. If there’s any edge of a rebuke in this for Thomas, it’s only to spur him (and us) to believe yet more boldly. This leaves us with a fairly important question: what is this faith that Jesus is urging us to have? Why should we put ourselves out there? Does Jesus have some interest in us being gullible? And if we are a bit more cautious, a bit more reticent, is it so much the worse for us? It’s important to notice that the faith Jesus urges us to have is unseeing, but it’s not exactly blind. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” It’s not hinging on airtight arguments or irrefutable proofs, but neither is it on the level of superstition or gullibility. People believe all kinds of crazy stuff, but there’s something else that happens in the moment of faith. A person hears the story, and it resonates deeply with something inside them. The Transcendent Creator isn’t just really, really good by some external standard. He is Goodness Himself. And we hear the story about the incredible things that he’s done for us in Jesus Christ, and the story is so good that we recognize the Lord’s fingerprints all over it. We didn’t see it happen ourselves, but when other people come to us with “good tidings of great joy,” we recognize the fragrance of the One who made us. We hear the story and it’s so good that we know, deep in our bones, that it has to be true. The Gospel gets preached, and it sounds to us like home.
There’s a musician I like quite a bit named Gillian Welch. She plays folksy, old-time music. There’s a song she sings called “No One Knows My Name.” It’s about a man passing through town “doin’ things a man will do,” who meets a seventeen-year-old girl, and they have a baby together. The song is sung from the perspective of that little girl, who never met her father. You pick up on it that, eventually, her momma meets another man to help raise the child, but still the girl sings in the chorus of the song: “Ain’t one soul in the whole world knows my name.” She has hope, even given her difficult background, claiming her name is “written up in the sky, and I’ll read it by and by.” But there’s a verse in that song that is particularly striking. She sings,
Now and then there’s a lonesome thought on my mind.
Now and then there’s a lonesome thought on my mind.
And on a crowded street I see a strange face, it looks like me,
Now and then there’s a lonesome thought on my mind.
The girl in the song, who never met her dad, imagines that one day she might be walking down a busy street, and as she walks along the crowded sidewalk a man passes by her in the crowd of people. They lock eyes as they pass, maybe even just for a moment. But the man looks eerily like her. Could it be?
Of course, that would leave her with a decision to make. Should you turn and chase after him? What if you’re mistaken, not him at all? It could be embarrassing. You could look foolish. Or even more importantly, you’ve learned to get on with your life as it is. Should you get your hopes up? Should you let her guard down? But then again, what if you step out on a limb? What if you follow that intuition? What if you go and see?
Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. Christ is alive. The promises are true, and the hope of all things being restored, the promise that our humanity might be rescued—it’s sitting right there in front of us. To respond in faith is to hear that story of the Creator God who would spare no expense to rescue his children, and to have that moment of recognition: Dad? Is that you? To him be all glory in the Risen Christ for ever.
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