Doubting Thomas

John 20: 19-31

Second Sunday in Easter

In the Spring of 2006 the Lutheran Church lost a great servant in Robert Smith and Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary lost an amazing faculty member. As he was dying of cancer Dr. Smith wrote about the story of Thomas in a new, deeply intelligent and throughly touching way. Dr. Smith concluded that: “The Easter Jesus still bears in his hands and side the marks of his cruel wounding. Indeed the wounds will never go away. The Thomas story announces that the universe is upheld in wounded hands of unimaginably deep love and compassion.” This was the witness of a dying man.

Sermon For Doubting Thomas Sunday:

Poor Thomas.

This day is the Sunday that the church marks as doubting Thomas Sunday.

The Glorious first Sunday after Easter, the Sunday of the appearance of our Lord to his disciples, the Sunday of when Jesus finds his way into a locked room filled with terrified people and tells them, The peace of the Lord is with you, now get out of here and start letting the people of the world know that I am risen, that peace is theirs and that all of their sins are forgiven.

The Sunday when Jesus appears to Thomas wounds and all and Thomas is heard to proclaim with all the clarity in the world, my Lord and My God.

This Sunday we call “doubting Thomas Sunday” and everyone inside the church or out hears something familiar. “Don’t be a doubting Thomas” that is the lesson we are meant to take with us form this Sunday right?

Well I hope that today you come away with the message: Go ahead, be a doubting Thomas!

Thomas wasn’t so bad. I’m not even sure that Thomas had a crisis of faith. I wonder if the problem with Thomas was that he had the right kind of faith. Thomas had the kind of faith that knew Jesus to be the kind of Lord who would still bear the wounds.

What we forget when we ridicule poor Thomas and hold him up as an example of poor faith is that Jesus had appeared to everyone else in the story already. Of course they didn’t doubt because they has already seen.

First Jesus appeared to Mary who was weeping and yelling at the Tomb angry that something had happened to the dead body of Jesus. She wanted the body back. Her heart was broken and all she could do was accuse the people around her. But Jesus appeared to her. He gave her proof. For Mary the proof was in the calling of her name. She recognized her name when it was called by Jesus and so she knew it was him and she was freed to spread the message. Peace has come, Jesus has risen. And she said nothing about Jesus’ wounds

After we hear this story we see the disciples. They are afraid and hiding in an upper room. The poor disciples could think only of the danger posed to them by the same forces who had put Jesus to death. They thought “if we dare say a thing we will be next, they will crucify us, they will kill us”. So confused and full of pain and anger and great, great fear they had gone back to the upper room to hide in pain and fear.

This is where we find them today, well some of them, not all of them, someone is missing. Thomas is missing.

When he finally returns to the upper room. The place where everyone else was cowering in fear. He finds out that they had seen Jesus there as well. But there was no mention of the wounds.

There was something bothering Thomas about these accounts and we assume that he is unable to believe that Jesus was raised without seeing it. Maybe the proof that Thomas needed was that Jesus had been wounded and then raised. He wanted to see the wounds.

This proof came for Thomas in just one week. Jesus shows up while everyone is gathered in the upper room and he shows Thomas the wounds. And Thomas is ready. He looks at Jesus with utmost awe an joy and says “My Lord and My God” he calls Jesus what none of the other disciples had called him.

Why did Thomas need to see Jesus’ wounds in order to make this confession of Jesus as Lord? Why did he want to see wounds that had lost their power?

For Thomas Jesus needed to do something new, something different. He needed to show his vulnerability. So Jesus appeared wounds and all and held his pierced hands out to Thomas who had doubted. It was in the wounds of Jesus that Thomas found comfort.

The wounds of Christ comfort us

I’m not sure that we ever see anything good in wounds. For the most part we try to hide our own wounds. And I think that we can all agree that wounds are bad. That is unfair and painful to live in the world with sickness, with death, with war with anger, and divorce, with fear and shame. We are ashamed of our wounds so most of the time we hide them.

What we forget is that these wounds are the force that binds creation together. Wounds are what prove and test our humanity. Through wounds the brokenness of Humanity was overcome. Though wounds the healing work of Christ commenced.

Through wounds the healing work of Christ continues. Humanity is famously good at acknowledging difference. But also famously good at understanding suffering at feeling the pain of other people’s wounds.

Wounds, while we hide them and deny them are true signs of our humanity. God’s power to overcome the wounds of Christ for our sake is a true sign of God’s gracious love for us

Working with youth and living in close quarters with a great number of soon to be ministers I have a vast knowledge of servant work that has been done by youth groups across the country. This work almost always stems from the desire to heal some wound. A friend of mine recently went on a servant trip to Mississippi to help some of the people who had been hardest hit by Katrina. She went into the work angry that not enough people were helping, that not enough was being done by the government, that the media was focused on New Orleans and Louisiana when all of these people in Mississippi had lost everything as well.

She told me one story of a man whose home was destroyed. He was not allowed back in because his health was poor and the mold was thick. The frame of the house was really all that was salvageable. The cleaning crew cried as they tore down and threw out rotting pictures of his deceased wife and then even the very wall that held the pictures.

When the house was finally gutted they brought in a table and he was excited to provide dinner for them. Albeit it was ordered in, because there was no kitchen to prepare it. As they ate he told them stories of his home, now simply beams and foundation that had housed his new marriage, his children, their first dates, his wife as she had died, the life of an entire family all of which the crew had seen evidence of that they had to throw out.

He shed a few tears as he spoke because the wounds were still there. His healing wouldn’t be easy in this new place that used to be his home but because others understood what it was to be wounded and what it meant to live as servants of a wounded Christ his first memory in this new, old place was of Christian fellowship and powerful healing.

Christ’s wounds heal us

Thomas needed to see Jesus’ wounds in order to know that he still bore them. So that he could know that through God, Jesus was still and is always tied to wounded humanity. And we are blessed by Thomas’ doubt because through him we too have been assured that the world is held tenderly in wounded hands, Hands that still teach us how to heal and how to love.

Hands that still work assurance in our hearts and minds that peace, hope and healing are with us. This is Good news.

Amen