The Trauma of St Thomas

Propers: The Second Sunday of Easter, AD 2022 C

Homily:

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

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

A little over 500 years ago, the Portuguese—who more or less single-handedly kicked off the Age of Exploration—arrived in southern India. And they got off their ships and proclaimed with joy to the native peoples: “We bring you Christ!” To which the bishop of the southern Indians politely replied, “We have Christ. Would you care to come join us for worship?”

The European missionaries, rather taken aback, then asked: “Well, who taught you about Jesus?” And the Indians answered them: “Thomas.” As in, the Apostle Thomas. It ends up that not only had Christianity beaten the Portuguese to India, but the Indian Christians in question had in fact converted well over 1000 years before Portugal. To this day they still call themselves Thomas Christians.

The truth is that we don’t often give Thomas his due. He’s one of the bravest of the Apostles. When Jesus determined to return to Jerusalem, knowing the dangers that posed to Him, it was Thomas who said, “Then let us go and die with Him.” In John’s Gospel, it is Thomas who first realizes, and confesses aloud, what John had confided to his readers from the beginning: that Christ is both our Lord and God. Thomas’ confession is the climax of John’s Gospel, the very fruit of resurrection.

So I always wince a little when we call him “Doubting Thomas”—like he should’ve known better, like he should’ve had faith in things unseen. But to be clear: Thomas doesn’t ask for anything that the others didn’t need.

Angels tell the women at the empty tomb that Christ is risen. The women don’t believe them—they do not believe actual angels—until they witness Jesus for themselves. The women then tell the Apostles that Christ is risen, and likewise the men do not believe the women, not until they see Him for themselves. But Thomas wasn’t there on that first Easter Sunday. Thomas wasn’t in the room when Jesus then showed up.

Why not? Well, because he’s the brave one, isn’t he? The others are all holed up in the upper room behind locked doors—all the men, anyway—while Thomas is out and about, knowing full well that followers of Jesus might yet suffer Jesus’ fate. Thomas then returns from risking his life—for food, for intelligence, for what have you—and everybody’s talking crazy talk. Jesus, alive? What are you, nuts? We saw what happened to Him. We saw the lash, the thorns, the nails, the spear.

We saw Him up there on that Cross; we saw Him die. And then we literally saw His heart split open, and the blood and water, the peritoneal fluid, gushing forth. No, Thomas says, Jesus died. I was there. It’s burned into my brain. I can’t just get past that. I can’t just deny that. The only way I could possibly believe that Christ is back from the dead, is if I see and touch Him for myself—touch the wounds, touch the scars. Only that could match the viscerality of crucifixion.

See, Thomas is traumatized. They all are. Indeed, how could they not be? Three and a half years they followed around Jesus, left everything for Him, pinned upon Him all their hopes and dreams and wonder. They saw Him do impossible things: cast out demons, heal the sick, raise the dead; but moreover they saw Him defy the rich and the violent and the powerful in favor of the poor and the broken and the humble—just by His word, just by His voice.

He was their friend, their master, their rabbi, and more: a king perhaps; a god, perhaps. And they watched Him get shredded like old newspaper. Not just murdered, but tortured slowly to death in the must humiliating and dehumanizing of ways. And that leaves scars. That leaves wounds. For Thomas this was all two days ago, Friday last. You want to tell me that all of that’s undone? You want to tell me how? No, I don’t think so. You say you saw Jesus for yourself; well, that’s what I need.

I need the living Jesus, Thomas says, to overcome the dead one that I saw.

You and I, dear Christians, we know a little something about trauma, don’t we? Not that we’ve seen a man crucified lately, nor been thrown to any lions. And not that our sufferings are in any way comparable to those of the people of Yemen or Ukraine. But we have suffered, haven’t we? 20 years of unwinnable war, followed by four years of the most divisive presidency of our lives, followed by two years of a once-in-a-century global pandemic peppered with racial injustice and unrest, followed now by war in Europe, supply chain breakdown, runaway inflation, and bills we cannot pay.

We are struggling: as a town, as a people, as a nation. We are hurting, we are lonely, we are anxious. And yes, of course, there are people who have it worse; there are always those whose suffering exceeds our own. But that does not invalidate your pain. I really think that there is now, just beneath the veneer of civilization, a volatility that we do not know how to healthfully address; and it is the sum total of political anxiety and economic hardship and the social inequalities they’ve exposed. That’s trauma.

“Wretched man that I am!” called out St Paul in his distress. “Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” We need a body of life to deliver us from this body of death. We need a resurrection that undoes and overcomes and even glorifies the Cross. If we just have Jesus with us, if we could just see Him with our eyes and touch Him with our hands, and place our fingers in His wounds, then we could believe. Then we could have faith. And with that faith, the power to overcome all this world.

Nowhere in the Gospels, mind you, in the Resurrection accounts, is there any indication that we are to profess that Christ is risen apart from experiencing Him for ourselves. Nowhere does it say, “You just gotta take my word for it.” The risen Christ is with us; Jesus is with us; and the Resurrection stories tell us how. Mary encounters Jesus in her grief and at the grave. Cleopas meets with Jesus as a stranger on the road. Paul collides with Jesus when suddenly he’s struck blind.

Christ is revealed to His people—according to the Gospels—in the reading of the Scriptures, in the breaking of the bread, in the fellowship on Sunday. He is also revealed in their vocations as they fish, in their pain as the mourn, in their wonder as they seek. Christ is with us, in our neighbor, every step of the way.

And Thomas here meets Jesus in His wounds, by literally entering into the holes in His hands and the gash in His side. Where was God when Thomas suffered? Where was God in all that loss? He was right there, on that Cross, through it all. He loved us unto death and even death upon a Cross. And thereby did He conquer! Thereby did He overcome. Thereby did He trample down death by death. Even this, all of this, could not separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.

And when Thomas sees that, when Thomas touches the wounds and understands what Christ has done and won for him, for all of those who suffer, he is overwhelmed by a love that defies all death, and he cries aloud, “My Lord and my God!” For this is not a story of a strong man, a powerful man, a rich man, a king. This is the story of a love divine beyond power, beyond violence, beyond vengeance or justice or death. This is a love that undoes hell, both here and so hereafter.

And to know that—to know that the Lord of Love is with you, beside you, within you, in all that you have suffered, in all that you have known—to experience Jesus for yourself, and the peace of God that passeth all understanding—is already to possess eternal life in the here and now. The way of Jesus Christ frees us from fear, from force, to live with abandon, to love without limit, to give and not to count the cost, so that every man is my brother and every woman my sister and every good thing we encounter a gift from the Father of all! Such is the Way of Jesus Christ, the Living and Crucified God.

Resurrection doesn’t just mean that Jesus rose from the dead Once Upon a Time. He is us now; we are Him. We find Him in prayer, in worship, in Word and in Sacrament, in water and the Spirit. We find Him in the need of our neighbor and in the love of our community. This is the mysticism at the heart of Christian experience. Because He is with us, because He is in us, we shall not despair, shall not be afraid, shall hold nothing back anymore. For we are Easter people. And alleluia is our song.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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