Second Sunday of Easter
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Readings at 8 am: Acts 5: 27-32 and John 20: 19-end
For those of us who have been so immersed in the run-up to Easter, with the intensity of Holy Week, and the glory and joy of Easter Day, the Second Sunday of Easter, often known as ‘Low Sunday’ can seem a bit flat in comparison. Somebody has compared it to the feelings of a mother who has devoted a year of her life to preparing for her daughter’s wedding. Now it is the day after the wedding: the happy couple are off on honeymoon; the wedding guests have gone, and life suddenly seems empty.
As the story of Jesus’ life on earth draws to a close, so in the final chapters of John’s gospel we start to see the story of the Christian community beginning to take shape. It’s a time of sad endings and of uncertain beginnings that has a ‘where to start?’ or ‘what next?’ feel to it. The bewildered but happy disciples receive the Holy Spirit and Jesus’ commission to carry on his work, which ultimately leads to us, here and now, considering the story all over again.
It’s perhaps in and through the experience of Thomas that we really get a glimpse of how the story of Jesus, crucified and risen, takes off from the first century and weaves its way right into the 21st. We’re very familiar with the story of so-called ‘Doubting Thomas.’
Jesus’ encounter with Thomas is all about a challenge to believe. In fact, this is the whole purpose of John’s gospel – the writer telling us so in the closing verse of today’s passage. He says that these verses are written ‘so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.’ We shouldn’t forget that John’s gospel was probably the last to be written, maybe 80 to 100 years after the events described. The communities being addressed did believe, but needed encouragement. Maybe the sheer implausibility of the resurrection viewed from the distance of 80 or 100 years was getting to them. So Jesus said to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen me and yet believe.” This would certainly have been a great encouragement to that 2nd-century community, as it is to us. It might also have been a sharp prod to some who were tempted to take Thomas’s line.
Now every Christian community is a mixed bunch of people. We may get together regularly and affirm our faith in the risen Christ; but the fact is, that when you scratch beneath the surface, there will undoubtedly be a huge range of belief and unbelief, certainty and confusion. Jesus does challenge us to believe, but not without recognising the reality of our differences, and not without recognising the difficulties each of us has to face.
And what about this word ‘doubt’? Tennyson said, in his great poem In Memoriam, ‘that there lives more faith in honest doubt …. than in half the creeds.’ We tend to see Thomas’s words and his doubting as a failing, or as his failure. But the very fact that the incident has been recorded, and Jesus’ words to Thomas enshrined in scripture, should cause us to consider that Thomas had not committed the worst crime in the book.
Doubt – what Tennyson called ‘honest doubt’ is not wrong, not unreasonable, nor a sign of weakness. Doubt is normal; we all have doubts about something or other, and surely no-one has got the Christian faith completely sewn-up. Just when we think we may have done, something happens to unsettle us again. To doubt is to ask questions. The insight of Tennyson’s In Memoriam is that intellectual uncertainty and religious commitment are not incompatible. Doubt and faith can and do co-exist, but we may be left in an uncomfortable place.
An important Christian attribute is a willingness to be vulnerable; to be in that uncomfortable place. Jesus made himself totally vulnerable, even issuing that apparent cry of despair on the cross ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ If Jesus was truly human, surely there would have been a moment of doubt, that perhaps this wasn’t God’s true plan after all.
So Thomas can be our role model about faith and doubt. Maybe he stood for many more in that second-century community to whom the gospel of John was written – those many decades after the time of Jesus on earth. Could it really be true? Jesus said to Thomas, ‘Reach here and see; try me out.’ He didn’t condemn Thomas for his doubting, but showed him something better.
In his doubting, Thomas found the risen Lord Jesus, after the Lord’s challenge to believe. Jesus doesn’t want us just to accept what others have said, but to have explored the questions for ourselves, so that our faith will be stronger for that.
Sometimes faith requires us to trust more than might seem sensible from the evidence. Maybe it’s a spiritual case of speculating to accumulate. But the accumulating will allow us to say ‘My Lord and my God’ – having found Jesus in our lives, with us, alongside us. Then, too, we shall hear his reassurance ‘Peace be with you’ and his commission to us – ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’