A Love Unto Death

Whenever we first propose a principle to ourselves, feeling our way through life (or the life of the mind), and then we encounter a decisive event that overturns that principle, we do not say, "Now, here is a surprise!" No. We say, "I did not really understand this at all!" Isn't this what we face with the principle called "Doubting Thomas"?

Remember, the Holy Scripture itself, the Gospel of St John, does not propose the label, "Doubting Thomas." This is an appraisal that readers of Scripture have nominated. And when Jesus issues the famous dictum,

the question we should ask is, "Which belief?" The Church is still coalescing into a teaching authority, and the general gift of the Holy Spirit, Who "will guide you into all truth" (Jn 16:13), has not yet come. Surely, Thomas does not doubt the Lord Jesus.

There is much to consider here, much to reflect on. We cannot say one moment that the Apostle Thomas is faithless and the very next moment declare that his kneeing obeisance, his most extreme veneration, even his worship of the Lord Jesus as God is the highest commitment to Jesus' Divinity found in Scripture. Instead, we must ask ourselves, "What is it here that we do not understand?"

We must pause to note that Thomas does not say, "Son of God" as Peter had done near the head waters of the Jordan River. "Son of God" is a title also enjoyed by angels (Gen 6:2, Job 38:7). And in this vein we must recall that an early conception of Jesus was that He were an angel. Wouldn't this make sense, after all? Recall the confusion in the tomb: "Where is Jesus? Are you Jesus?" Wouldn't this conform to events already revealed? Figures such as Zechariah and the twelve-year-old Ever-Virgin Mary had encountered, not God, but angels.

Angels are spiritual beings, to be sure, not physical ones. But anyone who believes that spiritual beings are thin, airy specters, easily distinguished from living flesh and blood, has never encountered one. It is no simple matter for humans to distinguish spiritual beings from physical ones. Moreover, the Risen Christ passes through walls and heavy, bolted doors.

But Jesus is not a spiritual being exclusively, of course. The Evangelist's narrative insists upon His physical reality. We are invited into his muscle, bones, sinew, nerves lain open to us. We are invited to touch the biological machinery of the human. Jesus asks for something to eat affirming both His mortal hunger (among His last words on the Cross were, "I thirst") and the continuation of His bodily functions. That is to say, the Disciples cannot be sure what they have seen. And surely nowhere in Scripture do we read that Thomas actually touched these wounds.

Without touching, this most faithful Disciple alone among the Eleven knows What he sees, God, and who he is, a man granted the hitherto unknown privilege of seeing and kneeling before his God.

In all of this — seeing his most devout faithfulness, hearing his bold declarations — are we not brought back to an earlier scene where he had also dissented from the group? A scene of division and conflict among the Disciples that played out only some weeks earlier in the region of the Transjordan? News of Lazarus' death had just reached Jesus' ears. He declares that He will return to Judea (Jn 11:8). "Judea?!" the Disciples respond. "Surely, we will all be killed in Judea!" They approach Him diplomatically,

It is Thomas alone, alone, who rejects the timid opinion of great majority; he is the lone dissenter:

Remembering all this, what do we say about Thomas' absence from the group on Sunday evening when the Risen Christ appears to the others? That Thomas should feel alienated from the group is no surprise. Yet he continues to feel the obligations of fraternal ties. After all, no one has been given to see what has been shown to them. No one has been given to hear what the Lord Jesus has disclosed to them.

What is Thomas to do? Walk away from the Disciples? Pretend he never met them? Yet he does not trust them, does not trust their impulses or opinions. For he is bold, and they are timid. He is passionate, and they are calculating. He is a man of action, and they are plodders, more inclined to "wait and see" than to do .... and hiding behind locked doors for fear of the Jews (Jn 20:19). The women, by contrast, are not so faint-hearted.

We can easily picture that Thomas has not the stomach for their nervous fretting. And it is in this context that we hear his famous challenge:

You see, Thomas is not voicing unbelief in the Lord. We may well imagine that for three years, he has been ever-serviceable at the Lord's side, ready to spring to action. No. He is voicing his unbelief in the fearful imaginings, natterings, and perhaps fabrications of his brethren. While they have been crouching in the corner of a locked room, he has been walking in the wide, public square. Shall he now believe their fantastic inventions? For such would be the appearance of things.

Of course, the question of Jesus' identity is always near to the heart of Christian experience. At His mysterious birth, provoking the inexplicable desperation of a fearful king, and, wondrously, provoking the pilgrimage of wise men from the Far East, we are bidden to ask, "Who is This?" At his feeding the multitudes, raising the dead, and ruling the winds and the seas, we are bidden to ask, "Who then is This?" (Mk 4:41). With the sudden onslaught of rain and lightning and earthquake, the Roman Centurion declares, "This man truly was the Son of God" (Mt 27:54), and we are bidden to ask, "Who can This Be?" The Lord Jesus Christ ever suspends the master question before all who would draw near: "Who do you say that I Am."

If we, this morning, take this question as our starting point, then, I propose, we will get at the heart of this remarkable scene in the upper room on that first Sunday evening. An important element of the scene is Jesus' stagecraft. The extremes which are presented to us — hard-bitten skepticism on side set beside the most extreme profession of faith in Scripture on the other — help us to frame the design of the scene. We have seen Jesus do this before. It has been a central component of other great revelations. Let us recall, for example, Jesus' revelation that His salvation will be to all the Earth, to all peoples of the world, which by the way, is echoed in our Gospel lesson at Matins this morning:

The scene is set as Jesus encounters a "woman of the land." The Twelve see her and cringe. "Oh no, she is walking this way! She will make us unclean!" they think. They can smell her perfume. They can hear the bangles on her arms and ankles. They can hear the bells on her toes. They can see her painted face.

Seeing this dramatic tension, Jesus unfolds His art:

So effective are Jesus' skills that they took in the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Frank Griswold. I sat in a chapel at Yale University some decades ago hearing this distinguished visitor preach on this passage. Griswold commented to a packed house, "You see, even Jesus falls into racism."

"Good heavens!" I thought to myself. "And this is the Primate of the Episcopal Church?!"

No. Jesus was not a racist. But He was a superb dramatist. For He sees the scene taking shape before Him: He sees the revulsion of the Disciples; He sees the sincere heart and humility of the Canaanite woman; and He combines the convergence of these things to announce a very great revelation, a principle on which our own salvation will depend. But He does this not in passing. He does it on the high and prominent stage of His own dramatic direction, of his own making. We can only imagine the profound silence that followed this exchange. And we are in like measure deeply touched by the denouement which follows this climax:

As this scene is reported in the Gospel of St Matthew, not of St John (our Gospel today), we are able to measure something important: this technique is not a trademark of a particular Evangelist; rather, it is a hallmark of the Master Himself, who, after all, orchestrates much more than stagecraft on the Earth — winds and tempests, lightning and earthquakes.

In this morning's scene, He addresses the basic elements of the human heart on the subject of faith. He uses the many differences, colors, and shades — timidity, skepticism, half-hearted reflection, indecisiveness, bold commitment .... even unto death. It is this last quality, by the way, that we find so prominently displayed in Thomas: his boldness, his courage, his passion. He alone among the Apostles went far afield from the Roman Empire is in Apostolic journeys, even unto India and thence to China and back again (attested by the way by modern scholars) raising the perambulations of the Great Commission to an epic scale. He is the Odysseus among the Apostles. He is the Ulysses.

No figure from Homer, nor any other source in Antiquity, rivals this scope and magnitude. He will journey to Egypt as Jesus had. He will cross the Red Sea as the nation Israel had. He will ride the winds of monsoons across the Arabian Sea (what we now call the Indian Ocean) recalling the tempests ruled by the Master. And he will found an ancient Church in the heart of "furthest Inde" thence to China and back to India again, where his death would be that of an Achilles or a Hector, defying a king and converting his wife, the queen's son, and other members of his court. "Let us go and die with Him!" he had cried out to his brethren in the Transjordan. And he would. And he did.

Let us celebrate today this most heroic heart! Let us give thanks for the heroes among us, for we shall all be lost without them, spiritually dying in the dark corners of locked rooms .... for fear of being cancelled. Let us not fail to stand up when they enter a room, or say, "Hear, hear!" when they speak. Our own survival depends upon these brave hearts: the ones who are bold without counting the cost, the ones who will die for the faith, the ones who will inspire all of us to remember who and Whose we are.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.