Thomas And The Gift

Thomas and The Gift

John 20:19-31
April 15, 2007

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house
where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood
among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his
hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to
them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he
had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you
forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are
retained.” But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them
when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he
said to them, “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.”

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them.
Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be
with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out
your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My
Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did
many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But
these are written so 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.

I want to begin this sermon with a story about something that happened a couple of
years ago in my life, something that has forever changed the way I think about certain
things. Let me begin with telling you about a close friend of mine, whom I will call Gary,
someone I had known for some years, and who experienced the death of his mother,
who lived in South Georgia when both Gary and I lived in Atlanta. He asked me to be at
the funeral, so I drove down to his hometown to be with him during this painful time.
When the day of the funeral came, the people who had gathered at the graveside,
including myself, found ourselves listening to the family minister, a preacher whose
focus, it seemed, was not really on the death of the one who lay before us, nor really
even on the family who was now grieving the loss of someone they loved dearly. You
see, he seemed to have put aside their pain and vulnerability, and, instead, decided to
use this funeral as an opportunity to make sure that his listening audience would have
the opportunity to turn from our sin, and become “saved”—he wanted to make sure we
had an opportunity to turn from our unbelief and become Christians, and for him that
meant saying a set of words that is familiar to those of us who grew up in the
evangelical tradition—“I accept Jesus Christ into my heart and I make him Lord of my
life.” On and on, he went, telling us not to grieve too deeply, for this mother, this wife,
this daughter, was in a far better place now, in heaven, because, you see, she was
now outside of her body, in heaven now. Her body, he went on, was only a vessel for
what was really important, which was her eternal soul—the body was simply a house for
what God really cared about, which was that part of Gary’s mother that was eternal, her
soul. I remember standing there and being—in all honesty, shocked—by what he was
saying. I mean, I could understand some of the reasons why he might say what he
said—she had died from fairly rapid brain cancer, which had filled her last days with
tremendous pain, and so I suspect he was trying to comfort the family by sort of
disconnecting her essence from her body—now, she was no longer in pain and no
longer suffering from the cancer. But I also suspect that this minister really believed
that the body of this woman was really was meaningless—I suspect that he really did
believe that we were all better off without our bodies, without the physical shell that
carried that part of us that God supposedly cares most about, our eternal soul. And I
have to admit that there is a sense in which that he had some scriptural justification,
especially from a few passages from the Paul’s letters to the churches.

I mean, there is a good reason why many people have accused Christianity of being a
body-hating religion. And I would fathom to guess that many of us have struggled with
our bodies—we were told that our body was our enemy, that being too attached to the
pleasures we find in being embodied selves would bring us to ruin. We were also told
that we had to reign in our bodies, as if they were some out of control beast that we
had to chain up. Us and our bodies, forever struggling with each other, as if the body
was something that was not really part of us—or shouldn’t be—a part of who we are. It
is out of this mixture of reasons—theological and cultural—that this preacher says what
he says about the body of Gary’s mother. It is from these beliefs that he can dismiss
her body in favor of her soul. But, in all honesty, I think he is wrong to dismiss the body
of Gary’s mother—now, imagine that—one preacher disagreeing with another. And
much of the reason I disagree with him is because of stories like the one we have
before us this morning. This is a story about Jesus and his body and the gift he gives
of his body to Thomas. It is also about Thomas—we often call him “doubting Thomas”
but mistakenly so, I think—and Thomas’s need for Jesus to be real, his need for Jesus
to be solid, his need for Jesus to be flesh and blood. I think that Thomas has gotten a
bum rap over the centuries when he is portrayed as someone who didn’t have any faith
and had to be confronted by Jesus about his doubt. The story, I think, doesn’t seem to
say that, but I am jumping ahead of myself—let’s start at the beginning of the story.

In John’s Gospel, Mary discovers the empty tomb, and she runs to tell Peter and the
other disciples. The disciples go to check out the tomb, find only a linen cloth, go
home, probably fairly scared at that point, and leave Mary at the grave. Mary is then
confronted by a stranger as she weeps and finally comes to recognize the stranger
only when he calls her by name—“Mary!” he says to her.
She runs to tell the disciples, who are hold up in a room somewhere, scared to death of
the Romans, and tells them that she has seen Christ alive. Yet, still, they have their
doubts, it seems, because in the passage today, we find them locked inside a room, still
scared to death. Mary believes because she has seen Christ in flesh and blood…and
you know what…it seems as if the disciples needed that experience as well—they too
needed the experience of seeing the Christ in flesh and blood—before they could act
on their faith, like Mary had. They too needed the gift of Jesus’ resurrected presence,
his body, to have the faith to walk out of that locked room. And in response to their
need, Jesus gives them the gift of his body. He appears to them in that locked room
and he shows them his hands and sides, the scars given to him in his crucifixation . It
is in seeing this body, perhaps even touching the scars on his body, that they come to
know that this Christ really is alive. They have been given what they needed in order to
have faith. And then Thomas arrives and his fellow disciples tell him about their
encounter with Christ in that locked room. But he won’t take their words on it—he
basically says that “If I do not see him, if I cannot touch him and his wounds, I will not
believe.” The other disciples words are not enough for him—he demands the same
proof, the same experience the other disciples have had.

You see, Thomas needs more than their word on something like this…just as Mary
needed more than an empty tomb in order to believe that Christ had risen, and just as
the disciples needed more than Mary’s word in order to believe, Thomas too needs
more than witness of others to believe that Christ has risen from the dead. And you
know what? Jesus gives Thomas exactly what he needs in order to believe—an
experience with the Christ, wounds and all. And what Thomas says in response to that
gift are probably the most powerful words we have recorded in the Gospels—“MY
LORD AND MY GOD!” Isn’t it ironic that the one disciple who is most often labeled as a
doubter says some of the most powerful words recorded in the Gospels!? But more
important than this irony is a very clear fact: EVERYONE in the 20th chapter of John
comes to believe through the gift of Jesus’ body. It underscores the fundamental truth
of Christianity—that God so loved us so much that God became one of us, in this Jesus
of Nazareth. We have a God who has met us in flesh and blood, a God who knows the
joys of being human—of having friends, of laughing, of loving. We also have a God
who knows the real pain of being human—of losing loved ones to the grave, a God who
knows fear and betrayal, a God who knows of death.

This embodiment of God we have in Christ, is, I think a powerful affirmation of who we
are as bodied selves, that the God of the universe, that this God comes to live among
us AS ONE OF US, as flesh and blood. And even more important for the subject at
hand—the very fact that Jesus is resurrected, that he comes back to us in his body, full
of scars and nail prints—this fact should makes us aware that Jesus honors what it
means to be a bodied self in this world. A few days before he meets his death, a
woman takes a jar of perfume and pours it on his feet and she uses her own hair to dry
off his now clean feet. Christ doesn’t recoil from such a beautiful gift, and, you know
what? He actually tells his disciples off for implying that the perfume could have been
sold and been used for holier purposes. This is a God who fully experienced what it
meant to be human, and God affirmed the gift of being human. The simple fact that
God has lived within a bodied self, affirms for us what it means to be a bodied self.
Jesus has enjoyed the many gifts of what it means to be human, one of which is to be
able to smell the many beautiful things of this world, one of which is perfume, and, the
other in this case, is the gift of touch, as this woman expresses her gratitude to him
when she uses her hands and hair to clean his worn, dirty, and tired feet.

So, in looking at all this, it should come to no surprise to us that Jesus comes to his
disciples in his own body! He doesn’t come to them in their dreams or as some ghost.
When Thomas, like Mary and the other disciples, need to experience Jesus in flesh and
blood, it shouldn’t be a surprise to us. They have lived with his body for the past three
years—they have walked with him, and they have bathed with him in the rivers of Israel,
and the have slept in his company, and they have lived with his breathing, as they slept
underneath the Galilean and Judean night skies, during their many travels together.

Even more important than the particularity of Jesus’ body is the fundamental truth that
all you and I will ever know of each other is through our bodies—through our skin, and
our hands and eyes and noses and our ears. It is in fact the only way we really ever
know each other, this experience of being a bodied self with each other. It is the only
way that Gary, my friend I mentioned earlier, has ever known his mother as well. You
know, God had the option of creating us as spirits without bodies, but God chose not
to…God gave us the gift of being creatures of clay, forever filtering what we know of
love and loss, joy and pain, through the experience of what it means to be flesh and
blood, through the experience of being a bodied self. Thomas needs Jesus’ body in
order to believe. He needs the nail prints, the scars, in order to believe that the Christ
he loves is really alive. A ghost simply will not do.

But where does that leave us? Hey, it’s great that Mary, the disciples, and Thomas all
had this gift of seeing Christ’s body, but where does that leave us? How do we live our
lives without seemingly having this gift? We will probably never have the chance to
experience Christ like the people in this chapter from John experienced Jesus, at least
not in this life. Still, I do think there is a way that we still encounter Christ, not like
Thomas did, but in a different way, a way that still gives us the chance to say with him,
“My Lord and My God!”

Let me explain what I mean about having one of these Thomas moments. Paul does a
lot of writing about what the church, to the various communities he wrote to in the first
century. In these letters, he tells the Church over and over again, that they are the
body of Christ. You and I, Paul says, we are the resurrected Christ given flesh and
blood. I suspect that this is a big clue to the puzzle we have before us—how can you
and I see and touch Christ without actually being in his particular physical presence? I
believe that the only way we are going to be given the gift of faith like Thomas, the only
way we can still experience the resurrected Christ IS THROUGH EACH OTHER, the
Church, the body of Christ. Every time we reach out to hold each other’s hand, every
time we give each other a hug, every time we simply offer each other our presence, we
become the resurrected Christ to each other. And every time we show our scars as a
way of telling of our own resurrections, we become the resurrected Christ to each
other.

You know, the minister at that funeral was wrong, I think, because he forgot that the
only way we know of God’s love is through each other, that it is through human
experience of love in community and the human experience of love with and through
individuals that we catch a glimpse of the God who loves us so much as to meet us in
flesh and blood, and then forever after, promises to meet us in each other. Honor the
gift you have in your body. Honor it as a wondrous gift God has given to us humans to
use to know who God is. Your soul tells the story of your body—it tells the story of how
you and God have met in this world, through this vessel of clay. Like Gary, we too must
stop and honor the loss of particular bodies. We must never dismiss the grief we have
in losing someone to the grave, especially by dismissing the body as a shell for what is
really important. In fact, one the strains of Scripture says that we will spend eternity in
a new body—that is what the whole idea of the resurrection of the dead in the last days
is all about. Yes, there is more to the story than the grave, no doubt about that, but
our bodies always remain important because God has met us in our bodies and God
has formed our souls THROUGH our bodies. And as much as we need to honor the
body of our loved one by grieving the loss of the only way we’ve known them, it’s also
as important to celebrate our own bodies as a way that God has met you and I in this
good and wonderful world. Celebrate your body, this vessel of clay, because God has
met you and me in our bodies and God has met us in the beautiful bodies of others.
Amen.