Jesus comes in peace, not cured, not perfect, not totally destroyed, not undead, zombied, but alive, with the scars to show the kind of death he suffered. He arrives to the disciples, who are scared, confused, alone, and he brings them peace.
Thomas and the Challenge of Fear
Easter 2C | John 20:19-31
There are four parts to this story before Thomas even enters the picture. We often focus on Thomas, but important stuff happens before Thomas shows up.
1. Locked in
The disciples have locked themselves in a room in fear. Fear of the Jewish leaders. Fear of their neighbors and friends. Fear of the outside world. Fear that what has happened to Jesus will happen to them. The disciples are afraid and they have locked themselves away. They are hoping to protect themselves. Hoping to avoid…condemnation and death, I suppose.
That seems like the only teaching that has hit home with them: that they will suffer like Jesus claimed he would and they would.
2. Jesus comes offering peace
Even though the door is locked and they are hiding themselves, Jesus comes anyway. This would be creepy if you and I somehow managed to do this, but this is really only half about the physicality. Jesus finds us, even when we don’t want to be found. Jesus comes regardless of whether or not we’re ready. Jesus is the bringer of peace–and it is the world which brings violence. Remember that dichotomy.
3. Jesus shows them the scars
We treat the wounds like proof and Jesus walking among them as if this were simply about demonstrating the resurrection, but this is not about cosmic Jesus in a struggle for forever with a powerful evil, this is Jesus, the one who comes to heal and save from fear and despair and he comes with scars; he comes, not only with proof of his humanity, but of what people do to one another.
He comes proving violence and suffering. He comes proving alienation and hatred. He comes proving the fear and evil the world engenders and the salvation and healing that he embodies.
He comes, not in perfect flesh, but resurrected flesh. That’s a huge difference.
4. Sent in peace
Jesus says to them:
“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
Jesus comes in peace, not cured, not perfect, not totally destroyed, not undead, zombied, but alive, with the scars to show the kind of death he suffered. He arrives to the disciples, who are scared, confused, alone, and he brings them peace.
Then he reminds them that they are peacemakers, peacebringers. They are sent to bring peace to humanity as GOD has sent Jesus to bring peace to them.
The disciples have locked themselves away rather than carry the cross. They are afraid of what will happen to them and yet Jesus comes and frees them from their self-imposed prison of fear and denial and shares with them how messed up the world really is–this isn’t some fantasyland. But it is GOD’s world and we have spent centuries upon centuries trashing the place and all it contains.
We have destroyed our forests and poisoned our water. We have stolen pretty stones from the ground and killed one another to possess them. We enslave our neighbors to create the wealth and power we consume and we abuse them in word and violence and indifference as we put our families and our lives and our convenience first.
The perfection of Jesus, the perfection of all creation is punctured by human hands and human will and human fear. And Jesus came to reveal all of that dysfunction and tells them what? To bring peace.
Thomas Enters
We tend to make a lot out of Thomas wanting what the others had. If only he had been there, we say. But do we stop and wonder where he was?
Where was Thomas?
When all the rest have locked themselves away, where was he?
When all the rest were huddling in the upper room, afraid, where was Thomas?
We don’t know, and I don’t think we need to know because the one place Thomas wasn’t was locked in that room. The one place Thomas was not was huddled with his friends in fear.
When Jesus came to them, the frightened, unscarred disciples, he found them together in a locked room and Thomas wasn’t with them. That is enough of a clue to his whereabouts that we need.
We don’t need to know where Thomas was; just where he was not.
He wasn’t hiding. He wasn’t afraid when the bringer of peace came to them. He wasn’t in need of that peace. He was free. Even if it were just free enough to get them dinner. He was free.
But when he comes back and rejoins the team, they tell him about this amazing visit with Jesus and he is jealous. He throws himself into a different kind of prison: not fear, exactly. More like jealousy. He wants that experience, too. He wants to have what they had: to see Jesus again.
But not simply out of love; but out of devotion. For what does he say 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.”
We hear this as Thomas’s full faith being contingent on his touching a resurrected Jesus, but I don’t think that’s it. Or at least all of it. And I don’t think he only hates that he missed out. I think he’s saying he needs the witness to the mission. He needs to not only see Jesus, but to see the scars.
He wants to see that GOD didn’t make Jesus into a ghost or in a perfect body, but a resurrected body. He needed the scars, the witness to violence and pain. He needed to see and touch and know that Jesus’s pain was endured and that GOD did something more profound than all our theologies and Christologies and atonement theories. That GOD made the dead live. And he left it scarred. As a testament. As a witness. As a teaching.
For these scars come from violence and betray the violence of empire and the violence of indifference. It is to prove the seduction of power and the corruption of the authorities. It is to show the pain and the suffering endured by countless people throughout history at the hands of brutality and violence.
It is to show that our violence and the evil in our hearts that it all has consequences. That we are not responsible for the killing of Jesus; we didn’t crucify him; but we crucify Jesus every day on our streets and in our courts and in our prisons. We crucify Jesus every day through homelessness and making healthcare into a business.
The scars are reminders for all of the ways we keep killing Jesus.
And that they are only scars reminds us that GOD can overcome our violence and abuse.
Blessed to Believe
The church has long mistreated Thomas and what his witness was revealing. We remember that he was the one ready to face Rome in battle, to go ahead to die with Jesus. And now, I suspect, is the one out on the streets, following in the footsteps of his liberator, free of fear and given new life. His is a witness to responding to Jesus’s words, to his teaching, to his revelation of GOD’s Different World.
Jesus loves Thomas; unique in his listening and devotion. The only one who really heard him. To have listened enough to want, to ask, to doubt his friends; those who were enslaved to fear. To have heard the call to action and moved his body in response.
And then at the end, that blessing: where it says
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
it is not a slam. That is a blessing. That blessing is ours.
For we haven’t seen a resurrected Jesus in that flesh, and yet we believe. But I say that we all have seen the scars of resurrection; the scars of new life; the scars of flesh reborn. Because we have all followed a rabbi and we have all seen crucifixions and we have all weeped at the empty tomb and we have all hid in the upper room out of fear.
And many of us are scarred. We bear the marks in our hands and in our sides. We reveal the risen Christ, through the scars borne upon us in violence and hatred and indifference and intolerance, but we are being healed every single day by a liberator freeing us from that pain and we are being brought back from death by a lover who gives himself. And we have the scars to prove it. Some of us many.
And some of us are at the tomb while the men are all hiding and we get to see and we get to speak and we get to proclaim that the dead is raised.
And some of us are jerks who need help; persecutors who need to be redeemed; kicked in the head only to fall on our knees and beg to be saved.
This is our witness. Not the power or the fanciness or the beauty in our voices, but in standing up in the midst of such evil and despair and outright fear (of the world, of change, of the future…) and we proclaim that our GOD is good. This world is good. Our Savior and Liberator is good.
There is nothing that can change that. Not even death. Not even torture. Not even doubt. Nothing. Because the scars prove how wrong all of that is–and how good GOD is.
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