A Rising Faith

 

Z. Ling Shu (ShuShuhome)

Propers: The Second Sunday of Easter, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In our tradition, every year, we read the tale of Doubting Thomas on the Second Sunday of Easter. According to John’s Gospel, the risen Christ appeared to the Apostles on the Sunday evening following His Crucifixion—that is, Easter Sunday. The Apostles were still in hiding, trying to make sense of the various reports coming in of an empty tomb and a resurrected Jesus.

And then He appears to them, in the flesh, as it were, but not like He had been. He has not been returned to mortal life, but has been clothed in immortality, so that He can do things like appear unannounced inside of a locked room. But He still has the scars, doesn’t He? The Resurrection has not undone the Crucifixion. It has redeemed it, transfigured it, turned an awful tragedy into our greatest joy. But the scars are still there, signs of victory, signs of triumph, signs of love.

Yet Thomas isn’t there for that first Easter Sunday. He isn’t hidden away in a locked room for fear of the Judeans. Indeed, Thomas has always been one of the boldest and bravest of the Apostles. It was he, you may recall, who said of Jesus’ last journey to Jerusalem, “Let us go also, that we may die with Him.” Made of stern stuff, this Thomas. And because He isn’t there, He cannot quite believe. The others tell him all about it, as others had told them before. But he hasn’t seen with his own eyes, nor touched with his own hands. He’d witnessed the horrors of the Friday Crucifixion. He’d seen the awful finality of that bloody Roman Cross.

Because of this, generations of Christians have known the Apostle Thomas as Doubting Thomas, which to be honest is terribly unfair. Keep in mind that the first witness of the Resurrection was Mary Magdalene, Mary the Tower. Angels had informed Mary of Jesus’ rising—literal angels from heaven—yet she did not believe until she encountered the risen Jesus for herself, and even then she had difficulty recognizing Him for all her grief and tears. He had to call her name.

Mary ran and told the Apostles, His closest disciples and friends, yet neither did they believe. They were excited, they were awe-struck, by what they’d seen and heard, but it isn’t until Jesus shows up in the flesh that they see Him for themselves and they believe. It isn’t Thomas’ fault he wasn’t there. He was out being brave. Mary didn’t believe the angels; the Apostles didn’t believe Mary; and Thomas didn’t believe the Apostles. How could he? How could any of them? Yet for some reason Thomas alone is left bearing the blame. And for what? For needing the same proof, the same experience of Christ, that the others needed before him?

Doubting Thomas indeed! Sensible Thomas, I would say. Faithful, rational Thomas.

Mary didn’t recognize the risen Lord until He said her name. The Apostles in the upper room don’t understand until He breathes upon them His Holy Spirit. The disciples on the road to Emmaus spend most of the day with Jesus, and have no idea who He truly is until He opens the Scriptures and breaks bread with them. And Thomas—Thomas doesn’t believe until he can put his fingers into the marks of the nails, and place his hand within Jesus’ riven side. And then, in His wounds, Thomas becomes the first to proclaim Jesus “My Lord and my God!” It was the wounds that brought him faith. It was the scars.

If the lesson of Doubting Thomas is that we should accept uncritically whatever others tell us about Jesus, then that’s a recipe for some pretty lousy religion. Faith has never been blind, nor has it ever been in conflict with reason, despite the modern myths of the halfway educated.

Religion is about the experience, the intuition, the sense of the God who will not go away, no matter how we try. It is about the inescapable conviction that the world is filled to bursting with meaning and purpose and value; goodness and beauty and truth; consciousness, being, and bliss; justice and mercy and love; and what that then must mean. What it all must mean. And that takes effort. That takes struggle, and commitment, and humility. The very name for God’s people, Israel, means those who wrestle with God. Luther wrote that God’s Word has feet and chases us, hands that grapple us.

Test it, try it, work it with your hands. Someone who is truly seeking God—seeking ultimate, immanent, transcendent, infinite reality—must not be afraid of inquiry and testing and a multiplicity of views. The faithful Christian should doubt: doubt his own convictions; doubt his images of God; doubt that he alone has truth, that he alone is saved. The faithful Christian has no fear of science, philosophy, archaeology, history, literary criticism, or other faiths.

What makes him faithful is the exercise of his mind, the work of his hands, the compassion in his heart, all the while holding fast to the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord. This alone we do not doubt: the love of God in Christ. It’s no accident that modern science, modern criticism, modern secularism, modern atheism, all arose within a Christian context. Faith is all about the liberation of our souls, our Exodus from slavery, the toppling of false idols in our hearts.

I grew up in a congregation that welcomed questions, welcomed inquiry, and treasured thought. It was as much a house of education as it was a house of prayer. And because of that, because that’s the faith on which I was raised, I felt free to study science, to study philosophy, to study other systems of belief. And they shook me up, absolutely. They broke down my religion, to build it up again. And so I learned to see Jesus everywhere; everywhere, if only just in shadow; everywhere, if only as in a glass darkly.

Buddhism made me a better Christian. Genetics made me a better Christian. Comic books made me a better Christian. For once you have that real encounter with Christ, once you’ve heard Him call your name, or give you His Spirit, or break your bread, or open your Bible—or once you’ve looked about and found yourself within His wounds—well, then He’s everywhere. Then He’s real. The risen Christ is risen now or not at all.

And it won’t be the same for everyone. Some will be converted. Some will always know He’s there. But paradoxically, having faith in Jesus Christ frees us to doubt what we think we know; frees us to grow and adventure and explore; frees us from ego and from pride and from the systems of sin which seek to enslave us all. Faith and doubt are not opposites. Indeed, I would argue that each bleeds into the other. Luther wrote that doubt can be the surest sign of faith; if you didn’t have faith, after all, you’d have nothing to doubt in the first place.

It’s an old idea—told in many ways by many cultures, for it always rings out true—that in order to grow, in order to mature, we must have one foot in the known, the stable, the faithful, and the other in the unknown, the shifting, the doubtful. Order and chaos, not just in balance but in flow. For the Christian, faith in Christ, in the ceaseless love of God poured out for all from Jesus’ Cross, is the anchor, the sure and steady rock upon which Christ has built His Church.

And with that anchor, that promise, that indelible revelation of who and what God is, we are free to navigate the wonders of Creation, the miracles of body, mind, and soul; free to live without fear of death and hell; free to love one another as Jesus first loved us, and to go out there, as the risen Christ, to live out our faith in the world. And if we do that, by His grace, we shall find that we begin to recognize the Image of God, the Image of Christ, in every human being, in all of God’s Creation. And we shall meet people in their wounds, which are really His wounds; and call to them by name, and open to them the Scriptures, and break with them our bread.

It is true that Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.” But the whole notion of the Resurrection, of Jesus giving us His Spirit, of Jesus making us His Body, is so that everyone is free to see the face of God in Jesus for themselves. They see Him in us. They know Him in us. For faith is not just in our heads but in our hearts and hands. Faith is about faithfulness, about God’s faithfulness revealed upon the Cross for all of humankind, and what that faith does in us. We find God in Jesus’ wounds; and the world finds God in ours.

What a thing it is to reach and touch, and cry: “My Lord! My God!”

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

In the Name of the Father of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.