Believing and Blessed

John 20:19-31

This gospel’s resurrection story begins on Sunday morning.  Mary Magdalene finds the stone rolled away and runs back to tell the others.  Peter and John hear Magdalene’s report about the tomb and race to see if it’s true.  When she comes comes back to the tomb, she encounters the risen Jesus.  She mistakes him for the gardner, but then he speaks her name and she sees him.  

We have no record of Sunday afternoon.  Did they go to brunch as planned?  Did they hold a party to celebrate?  Schedule a parade in Jerusalem to get the good news out?  No, they were hiding.

By evening, Jesus’ disciples were hiding in a house in Jerusalem behind locked doors because they were afraid.  Maybe they had been hiding since Friday.  If the crowds execute your leader, they might come for you next.  Or maybe they were hiding specifically because of Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Lord.  Those who wanted Jesus silenced certainly wouldn’t want to allow rumors to spread that he had somehow come back to life.

“Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you” (v. 19).  Two things surprise us at this point.  First, the door was locked and Jesus appears in their midst.  We are left here in wonder.  What is this gloriously resurrected body of Jesus?  How is it that he is fully himself, so that Magdalene can recognize him and fall and grasp his feet?  And how can it be that this same resurrected body is not limited by locked doors?

Second, and more importantly, Jesus’ first words to his followers are “Peace be with you.”  He was executed on Friday.  Handed over by his own people.  Betrayed and abandoned by his closest followers.  He was humiliatingly tortured and mocked by the Roman political authorities.  And taunted as a failure while he hung dying.  And his first words to his followers is, “Peace be with you.”

Then he showed them his hands and his side.  In Mark and Luke he shows them his hands and his feet.  But John’s crucifixion scene focuses on the spear thrust into Jesus side.  So he shows them his hands and his side.  Did he know they would want to see his wounds?  Did he show them his wounds to prove that it’s really him, and not someone else?  Did he show them his wounds so that they would know that he will bear these wounds eternally as the glorified and risen Lord?  Regardless, “they rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”  They didn’t rejoice in the wounds.  They rejoiced that the one who was wounded has risen and will continue to lead them.

But their rejoicing is interrupted when Jesus commissions his disciples with a project.  “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  The Father had sent Jesus into the world to love the unlovely, to heal the sick, to help the poor, to serve the least, to reclaim what’s been lost, to forgive sinners.  And now Jesus sends all of us on that same mission.  

Do you not feel up to the task?  Does it seem too burdensome or outlandish for regular people like us?  (I’ve had dreams where I have to pitch for the Yankees in a big playoff game and I’m there on the mound the whole night, thinking, “I haven’t played since High School!”  In other dreams I stand gripping a podium, looking at the expectant crowd, thinking, “But I don’t know anything about nuclear physics!”).  Jesus “breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’.”  The risen Jesus sends us into the world to love, heal, help, serve, and forgive, and he gives us the Holy Spirit to empower us to do this work together.

What Jesus says next may surprise you.  “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (v. 23).  We have a rather low and casual view of ourselves as Jesus’ followers.  We are a church and as such we know that we are part of a long tradition of churches that are obviously messy and often times harmful to people.  Yet Jesus sends us out with great confidence that communities of his follower can act as God’s true representatives in the world.  Of course we don’t forgive people’s sins.  We announce God’s forgiveness, won in Jesus Christ, so that others can hear and experience it.  This responsibility to act in God’s name and on God’s behalf might make us nervous.  Yet it’s true, most people experience God’s forgiveness in the context of a loving, caring community.

On that first Sunday night, when Jesus appeared to his followers, breathed the Spirit on them and sent them out to forgive others in God’s name, one disciple, Thomas, wasn’t there.  We don’t know where he was.  And John’s gospel doesn’t even suggest an answer.  There is no attempt to condemn Thomas for not being there.

Just as Mary Magdalene reported to the group, “I have seen the Lord.”  So too now the disciples report to Thomas, “We have seen the Lord.”  But Thomas does not settle for their collective report.  Granted, all of them are in agreement.  But Thomas can’t get his mind around what they’re saying.  “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” (v. 25).  What do you make of Thomas’ demands?  What he wants is to experience the risen Jesus for himself, with his own eyes and hands.  He has heard the report from his friends, of course.  And no doubt he trusts them as generally reliable people.  But given the amazing and mind-boggling nature of their report, he wants to register this for himself.  He wants to actually place his fingers in those nail marks, wants to run his hand over the wound in Jesus side where the spear went in.  

You might think Thomas is being too cynical or skeptical here.  But when this gospel was written and read in the late first century, Thomas’ desire to see and to touch the risen Jesus was shared by many of Jesus’ followers.  They were just a generation or two removed from the first disciples.  But there is an enormous difference between being an eyewitness and being one who later only hears the report.  And we, of course, are in that same situation.  We wish we could see and touch.  But we only have the report by those first witnesses.  And we worry, are we missing out on something vital being so far removed?  Would our faith be more vivid, would our passion be more fiery, would our faith be more certain, if we could have seen and touched the risen Jesus?

One week later, the disciples were shut behind doors again and this time Thomas was with them.  For a full week he has been living with these questions.  For a full week the disciples have been living with his skepticism, his refusal to give himself fully to this resurrection report.  Then Jesus stands among them and says again, “Peace be with you.”  Jesus doesn’t confront Thomas with anger.  He doesn’t lecture him.  He offers him what he wanted.  “Put your finger on my wounded hands.  Put your hand on my wounded side.  Do not doubt but believe.”  

In Homer’s poem Odysseus makes his way back home after 20 years at sea.  He’s been gone so long most doubted he’d ever return.  His wife Penelope was fending off a steady stream of suitors who were vying to take Odysseus’ place as her husband.  When he does return from his voyage he does so incognito.  He poses as a stranger.  Euryclea, his nurse since birth, offers to wash this stranger’s feet.  And as she’s washing she sees and touches the scar on his thigh.  She identifies him by his wound.  But Odysseus hasn’t come home to pronounce peace.  He comes for revenge against those who are courting his wife.  Jesus returns from the grave with his wounds, and he is not angry.  He shows his wounds, and says, “peace.”

I want to end by reflecting a bit more specifically on Thomas’ doubt and Jesus’ wounds:

Doubt

We have to imagine the scene where Thomas places his hands on Jesus’ wounds.  How long did Thomas touch Jesus’ wounds?  Did the others also join in?  What we are given is Thomas’ confession after seeing and touching: “My Lord and my God!”  This is the only place in all the gospels where Jesus is addressed directly as bearing the full presence of God.  And this confession comes from Thomas, with his hands on Jesus’ wounds.  This is not “doubting Thomas,” but “believing Thomas.”

Jesus uses the encounter with Thomas to pronounce a blessing on us.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (v. 29).  The scene is not recorded at the end of this gospel to rebuke Thomas.  Rather, it is meant to address those of us who will receive these gospel reports of Jesus’ resurrection many years later.  And Jesus blesses those of us who must live on trust.  Those of us who wish we had more certainty.  Those of us who want to see and touch but cannot. 

We have given our lives and loyalty to one whom we cannot see, cannot touch.  We experience his loving presence to us only occasionally, if at all.  We are a long way off from those original eye witnesses.  It is tempting to cope with these difficulties by taking on the posture of certainty.  This posture brings along with it a whole host of problems.  But today I want to mention just one.  Christian churches that traffic in certainty are churches that make it difficult for people to talk openly and honestly about their struggles and doubts.  Churches that traffic in proofs and evidence do not want to deal with the ambiguity and difficulties of Scripture.  They have a hard time dealing with the frustration that comes from an experience of God’s absence.  Often times - the need to run a smoothly operating church business makes it difficult to welcome people who are caught between their desire to believe and the counter-evidence that haunts them.  Incarnation is a community of Christians who are called to practice hospitality towards those who find belief difficult.  We are all called to bear one another’s burdens.  And one particular calling of this community is to bear the burdens of those who come to Jesus Christ with great difficulty.  This calling and responsibility makes our task messy, and requires enormous patience.  But what a wonderful opportunity to serve Jesus Christ.  We extend God’s welcome to people who wrestle with God’s absence and with the church’s frequent failures to be good news in the world.  Here we are engaged in a kind of therapy.  This is the work of listening and loving, asking good questions and giving people space and time to rest in God’s goodness.  To have our hearts reshaped by God’s love.  To have our desires redirected towards compassion and service.  And to have our imaginations inspired by the language of Scripture and by the rhythms of prayer.

Wounds

Jesus’ wounds are often overlooked in the resurrection story.  They represent the violent harm of Friday that refuses to go away on Easter Sunday, when all is to be new.  Jesus is raised into newness but he is not completely new.  He still bears his wounds, and, we assume, his memory of being wounded, and his memory of those who wounded him, and the pain of that wounding.  Of course it was not the physical wounds alone that caused him pain, but the feeling of abandonment by God, separation from God, the weight of bearing our sin and evil in his perfect life.  What’s new about Jesus’ resurrected body is not the absence of wounds but the absence of angry revenge.  He comes and says, “Peace.”  Here is one who bears forever the marks of our wounding.  And he ascends with these wounds, taking them into God’s own life eternally.

Of course our bodies are marked with scars as well.  We ran a 5k yesterday and a friend and I were comparing our knee surgery scars.  We have the scars of past operations.  The bent fingers from accidents.  My wife was recently looking at a blog devoted to pictures of women’s stretch marks!  In some sense, our wounds are what make us who we are.  They’re part of our story.  I mentioned that Odysseus’ had a scar on his thigh.  When his nurse Euryclea sees the scar and recognizes him, immediately we are thrown into a long flashback of the hunting scene in Odysseus’ boyhood when his thigh is torn open by the tusk of a wild boar.  

Remove our woundedness and you remove our personal stories.  We are who we are by means of the birth to death stories of what happens to us and how we respond to what happens.  Those who have been abused or harmed will be the first to tell you, they don’t want to be reduced to their wounds.  We want to be more than just “victims”.  And in the gospel we have been promised healing and newness.  

Whether the scars of healed wounds will be with us eternally like they were for Jesus, or whether they will be somehow erased, I do not know.  On the one hand, God has promised to raise us from death into new life in which all suffering is ended.  In Rev. 21:3-4 we read: “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes.  Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away’.”

On the other hand, Jesus was raised into new life with his wounds.  When God renews creation and raises up from death those who belong to Jesus Christ, it is an act of God’s forgiving us.  But it is not enough that each of us individually will find peace with God.  We will need peace with each other.  There will have to be some great act of collective forgiveness, in which we all forgive one another for the wrongs done, the pain caused, the wounds inflicted.  Perhaps then our wounds no longer be an embarrassment.  They will be scars that are part of our story but not the end of the story.

Whether we will have our wounds in the great resurrection I can only guess.  But what we know is that Jesus breathes the Spirit on us and sends us into the world to forgive.  We have all been wounded of course.  And the pain of those wounds tempts us to live defensively.  We are tempted to avoid further wounding at all costs.  And we’re frustrated with the wounds we already have - they’re painful and sap our energies.  And yet, we are wounded people sent out into the world by the gloriously wounded Jesus to love others.  We are sent into a world of wounds to begin the work of healing, forgiveness, and love.  In Henri Nouwen’s beautiful phrase, we are sent out, like Jesus himself, as “wounded healers.”