John 20:19-31
As most of you know, the problem with doing the things is that then people know you’ll do the things so they ask you to do the other things and it just never ends, like this sentence.
So it was that Holy Week was the same week candidates had to file their petitions to get on the ballot for the November election, and before I had even recovered from Holy Week and holiday guests, it was time to meet with the Citizens Advisory Panel to discuss this year’s Community Development Block Grants, and me being me, I wanted to actually read the applications before voting to fund the programs, which meant I actually had to read the applications and prepare questions.
It is so much easier to just sit on the couch and watch cars drive in a circle.
The process was not too painful. I had to recuse myself once. This is a small town after all. And mostly I knew the programs and the good work they were doing. But there were a couple where I had concerns. The applications included stories, and you know I love stories, but when it comes to money, I want data. And as we were all reminded during the pandemic, anecdote is not data.
So I must say that I sympathize with Thomas. Don’t tell me. Show me.
Hang on to that. We’re gonna be back here in a bit. But first we have to start with a wider lens.
One understanding of Christianity is framed around direct and inerrant revelation, the idea that God spoke directly to the founders, prophets, and priests of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, directly manages the dissemination and translation of that revelation to this day, in every form and every language. This understanding mostly erases humans from the equation, doesn’t actually fit the facts, and is prone to disqualify anyone who does not share that particular orthodoxy.
Yeah. That’s not us, not our understanding of Christianity.
There is another understanding, one most of us embrace in the United Church of Christ, that leaves room for God to be God and humans to be human, which is to say imperfect and amazing, fearful and creative, all at the same time.
That framework sees scripture as a human record of our encounter with holy mystery, a pious and mostly righteous attempt to translate the holy into terms we can understand, to make it actionable in our lives.
We understand that the Word of God, whatever that means, is Christ, not a book. Not that the book doesn’t have some awesome stuff. Paul, authentic Paul, can be a complete knucklehead, but he’s also as close to a feminist as he could have been in his cultural context, and writes some pretty amazing stuff about faith, hope, and love.
Then there is Matthew 25 and Micah 6:8, in the arbitrary system of chapters and verse numbers, texts that, if lived, would create a pretty amazing humankind, with an emphasis on kind.
Even the most difficult portions of scripture, and there are plenty of difficult portions, rest on a strong foundation of expansive and restorative justice, despite our efforts to project our retributive justice onto them.The religious trajectory that starts somewhere around Moses is still around because it resonates with our experience, of ourselves, and of the world.
As that holy and human book was being written and assembled, over a period of more than five centuries, some texts made it in, some got left out, and some simply got lost. One of those texts that got lost was a text known as the Gospel According to Thomas. We have written references to it as early as Origen, who writes against it around 233 C.E., but we did not have a copy of Thomas until 1945. Once that copy, in an ancient language called Coptic and dated from around 340 C.E., was discovered, we were able to connect it to much older previously mysterious scraps of papyrus.
Why, you ask, should we care? And the answer is that this long lost gospel influences, or should influence, how we read today’s gospel lesson, the post-resurrection story portraying Thomas as a doubter.
But let me start with this simple truth. In the competition of ideas and beliefs, humans tend to push back hardest against those who are most like us.
The authors of the gospels don’t have Jesus in constant conflict with the Essenes, who were an influential if not extreme Jewish renewal movement. They don’t depict him railing against the Sadducees, a movement well represented among the elite who were profiting during the Roman occupation. He never mentions the Sicarii, who called for armed resistance to Roman rule.
No, he spends a lot of time attacking the Pharisees, a religious movement that believed in the need to interpret ancient scripture and laws for use in the current context. Jesus believed in the need to interpret ancient scripture and laws for use in the current context.
Early Christians tried to reach agreement on what Jesus meant and how you should follow him. We see some of that in scripture, Paul’s struggle to create a Christianity for non-Jews, an effort that was not only successful, but that unfortunately overwhelmed the much smaller group of Jewish Jesus-followers.
Some of those new Gentile Jesus followers brought along ideas from other cultures, religious and philosophical traditions. One of those was called Gnosticism, a sort of cult/secret-knowledge approach that existed as a sub-movement within many religions of that age. A modern equivalent of a secret knowledge cult might be Scientology, though of course, their secrets are not secret anymore. Thanks be to Xenu!
The Gospel According to Thomas was pretty gnostic. And you know which of the canonical gospels happens to come closest to a gnostic way of thinking? John, the only gospel that has this story about Thomas.
Centuries of Christians have read this as a text celebrating the virtue of blind faith. But what if the text is really mainly about making Thomas look bad so folks wouldn’t be attracted to the large movement associated with him? For there does appear to have been a significant movement associated with Thomas, with gnostic leanings, and possibly also associated with Mary Magdalene, another disciple who is sidelined in the canonical gospels.
Maybe we shouldn’t be freaking out about doubt. Maybe it is okay to ask for the data, touch the wounds. Jesus says in the gospel that even he doesn’t know everything. And he wavers in the Garden of Gethsemane, a human with doubts and fears.
Maybe it isn’t doubt that should worry us. Maybe it is certainty that should terrify us.
The Christian fundamentalist believes without doubt, is absolutely certain that everything humans need to know about God fits into a book that is nearly two thousand years old. But that little god in a book seems pretty small to me, and pretty dead, for life adapts and learns and changes, so how can that book be the same and be a living god? All life adapts and learns and changes. If creation is a reflection of God, if we are a reflection of God, then God tomorrow will not be the exact same as God today.
And though they may wrap themselves in the hubris that calls itself the Enlightenment, the Atheist fundamentalist is just as bad in their certainty that there is no god, though they have absolutely no proof. Their claim does not even meet their own criteria, their own standard for proof, ignores the unfolding wonder as we delve deeper and deeper into the weird and joyous quantum.
No, I’m not willing to make Thomas the bad guy, Thomas who is grieving, Thomas who is probably out buying the milk and bread the first time Jesus shows up and blows Holy Spirit on the apostles, John’s version of Pentecost.
Doubt is not a sin, even if later authors wanted to distance themselves from a way of thinking about Jesus that was attributed to Thomas. Thomas wants data, empirical evidence, but he is also willing to believe, to act on his faith, to leave room for doubt and belief, to adapt and learn and change, as grief becomes shock becomes knowledge of the experience of the holy in a man he saw change lives, made people whole, taught selfless love, and here, here in this closed room, proved that love wins, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
And here we are. And there is certainly evidence to the contrary. Seriously, I talk about it up here most every week. People suck sometimes.
And people are amazing sometimes.
And we learn and change and adapt. I mean, someone figured out how to use mRNA to create vaccines just in time for us to keep a devastating pandemic that killed millions from killing trillions. Someone figured out how to turn sunlight into electricity. Someone figured out digital platforms so you can attend a committee meeting when you are on the road, though no one has yet to figure out how to get rid of committee meetings as long as our best way of governing ourselves and discerning God’s will is democratic, so there’s that.
So Thomas doubts? Cut the man some slack. Doubting isn’t about you being small, about insufficient faith. It is about letting God be God, bigger than our knowing, shocking us out of our grief, unfolding and becoming, this day and always. May it always be so. Amen.