Time travel has been a major feature in fiction, from novels to film, since H.G. Wells introduced his “Time Machine” in 1895. It accounts for literally billions of dollars in content.
The climax of the 23 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Avengers:Endgame,” includes time travel as the central plot device, and brought in $2.8 billion dollars at the box office worldwide. That was for that single film.
Time travel features in mega-franchises like Back to the Future, Outlander, and Lost, is on Disney Channel and Netflix, and is the central premise of a television franchise that premiered when I was an infant, the BBC classic Doctor Who. That premiere came the day after JFK was assassinated, which caused a delayed start and low viewership, so the series might have never gone anywhere, an alternate timeline many of us would prefer not to imagine. As it was, the series caught on, running until 1989, then rebooting in 2005 and still going strong.
The Doctor, “Who” is not his last name, it is only just the Doctor, is part of a species of time traveling extraterrestrials called Time Lords. They also have the ability to regenerate into new bodies, convenient for a series approaching sixty years running with one main character, Since 2017, the Doctor has been played by Jodie Whittaker, the first woman in the role. Oh, and the Doctor is unambiguously good, though sometimes flawed. I guess even time traveling extraterrestrials have their baggage.
In today’s first reading, one of the Doctor’s time traveling companions, the completely human Amy Pond, has made the decision to travel through time to be with the man she loves. She gets a message to the Doctor through her daughter, and asks him, for the Doctor was a him at that point, to travel back in time and tell her younger self a story, one filled with hope, one promising adventure.
This totally messes with the rules of time travel, of which there appear to be three, though they get broken all the time. The first is that you should never meet another version of yourself. The second is that you should never use time travel for personal gain. This is how you tell the heroes from the villains in these things. And the last is that any change you make in the past can have unexpected and sometimes catastrophic consequences in the future, including eliminating your personal future.
The Doctor does visit young Amy Pond, and the power of the story prepares her for her future adventures.
Today’s gospel reading is also about the power of story, potentially opening us up to an alternate future for Christianity and therefore all of history, for it involves the early struggles of the church to figure out what Jesus meant.
Just as “Who” is not the Doctor’s name, Thomas is not the name of the disciple. In full, the disciple is known as Judas Didymus Thomas, Didymus meaning twin in Aramaic, Thomas meaning twin in Koine Greek. So the character in today’s story is Judas the Twin. There is also a Jude or Judas listed among the brothers of Jesus, which could be the same character.
For almost two thousand years, the story of “Doubting” Thomas has been interpreted as being about belief, specifically belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus. Though Jesus appears in a locked room, so apparently he can beam in and beam out in Star Trek fashion. As I explained last week, I am happily squishy on the details of the whole resurrection thing.
And that is how it might have stayed, Thomas and the importance of blind belief, until an amazing thing happened.
There were ancient references to a Gospel According to Thomas, but there were no surviving copies. This isn’t as rare as you think. There are even references in the Bible to texts that no longer exist.
Then, in the 1940’s, an Egyptian boy dug up an ancient library. The story is weird and not entirely credible, and his mother supposedly used some texts as fuel, but what survived are authentic ancient texts, including a copy of the Gospel According to Thomas written in an ancient Egyptian language called Coptic. Once scholars had that in hand, they realized that some other strange papyrus fragments they had in Koine were, in fact, from this long lost and re-discovered gospel.
The Gospel According to Thomas is a sayings gospel, with no narrative action. Some of the sayings are familiar, others downright weird. There is the saying that says “Blessed is the lion that a person will eat and the lion will become human. And anathema is the person whom a lion will eat and the lion will become human.” Yeah weird. Lion steak, anyone?
It is considered a gnostic text, with secret knowledge and rituals, more fraternity or cult than what we would come to know as Christianity. Mary Magdalene is another name associated with Gnosticism. John leans heavily to the gnostic side of things, which may be precisely why John is the one who gives us this story, for all too often it is those with the most similarities that generate the greatest antagonism.
Story has power, and this reading is story as a weapon, portraying Judas Didymus Thomas in a negative light to remind early Christians that competing interpretations of Jesus were wrong.
If you don’t think story has power, consider this. There were many Hebrew sects in the time of Jesus. His teachings were most closely aligned with those of the Pharisees. You know, the same group he is in constant conflict with in the gospels.
Now part of this is likely the same phenomenon I just mentioned, that we push back hardest against those that are most like us. The thing is Jesus has followers who are Pharisees, people like Nicodemus. But there is way more to it than that, stuff they didn’t teach you in Sunday School.
In 66 C.E., a group of Jews rebelled against the Roman occupation. Rome was still at its peak, and the rebellion was eventually crushed, and the Second Temple was destroyed, though infighting between Jewish factions played as much of a role as Roman power.
As you would expect, the movements that promoted violent rebellion against Rome didn’t come out of the Jewish Wars particularly well. Neither did the Sadducees, the wealthy Hebrew elite who were most closely associated with the Temple and the priesthood. But the Pharisees, with their emphasis on the Oral Torah and the local synagogue, survived, arguably becoming the pivotal players in the formation of what we know as Judaism today, Rabbinic Judaism in all of its forms. And as part of that reorganization of Hebrew religious observance, they expelled all of the other sects from the synagogue, including the followers of Jesus.
The story of conflict between Jesus and his followers and those in the Pharisaic movement seems to be as much about these events after the Jewish War as about the real tension between Jesus and Pharisees during his lifetime. And the story has fueled centuries of antisemitism.
Do stories have power? I have one word for you: Auschwitz.
The followers of what would become orthodox forms of Christianity wanted to marginalize those associated with heterodox forms, figures like Judas Didymus Thomas and Mary Magdalene. And though some have tried to blame the treatment of Mary Magdalene on patriarchy, the accepted forms of Christianity also had women in positions of leadership in the early church, so that feels like a stretch.
The Magdalene and the Twin are positioned as they are in scripture and in the early church because their credibility would promote the credibility of movements associated with their names, and those movements would have produced a different religion, one that had “insider” status. It might have retained the egalitarian nature of early Christianity, crossing socio-economic and ethnic boundaries, defying traditional gender restrictions, but there would always be a sense of hubris, those who had received the secret knowledge, been initiated, would have had reason, in that context, to feel superior. A Christianity in this form would be the opposite of the radically open Christianity we claim, the Christianity we celebrate here at Park, the open table, open hearts, and open minds. And, I believe, it is a Christianity that would have withered and died.
So, you know, if you happen to find a time machine, let’s not go back and change things. Our Christianity may not be perfect. But it can certainly be worse.
Tell good stories, stories with hope and courage. There is a little Amy Pond out there somewhere. She needs to hear a story that helps her believe, that good wins in the end, that the universe is amazing and full of adventure, that she is precious and loved by the same Divine Mystery that loves you and loves me, that sings us into being in a river of song.
Amen.