The Wounded Word

Demiurge, by AlvaroFernaG

Propers: The Second Sunday of Easter (Thomas Sunday), AD 2025 C

Homily:

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

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

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

“My Lord and my God.”

I find the figure of Thomas, as presented in John’s Gospel, deeply appealing. There’s a grittiness to him, a hardboiled resolve. When Jesus insists on returning to Jerusalem, despite the clear and present danger to His life, Thomas replies, “Let us also go and die with Him.” On the day of Resurrection, when the Apostles furtively discuss reports of the risen Christ behind locked doors, it is Thomas who is out and about in the city, risking his life. To call him Doubting Thomas remains for me an historical injustice.

When angels told the women at the tomb that Christ had risen, Mary did not believe until she had seen Him for herself. When she told the Apostles, no-one then believed her, until they encountered Him themselves. Thomas asks for nothing else than what the others had: a personal experience of Jesus. For this we ought to laud him: sensible Thomas, reasonable Thomas, Thomas who had seen his Master murdered, empaled, embalmed, and entombed. He’s going to need some proof.

Christians should not simply accept someone else’s word for it. We should not merely appeal to authority, to dogma, to fiat. Blind faith isn’t any sort of faith at all. The point of religion, the point of Christianity, is to encounter God for ourselves, to encounter Him in the mystery of Christ; in Spirit and Word and Sacrament; in His chosen Body the Church. We might not see Him, touch Him, hear Him, in the way that Thomas did. But He is here among us, within us. We are called, together, to experience Him here and now.

And we shouldn’t settle for less. We shouldn’t just believe because our mom and dad believed. We should believe because He’s real, He is risen, He’s alive. See, faith isn’t just raw intellectual assent. It isn’t about giving the right answers or checking the right boxes. Faith, at heart, is trust. That’s all it is: trust that God is good; trust, in other words, that God is God, that His very nature is creation and redemption and salvation. Faith is a relationship, not a pop quiz. And faith is always communal; we live our faith together. Even hermits in their caves heard the Good News from someone.

One of the greatest myths of our own day and age is that reason and faith contradict. This betrays a deep societal misunderstanding both of reason and of faith. There is no faith without reason; trust always has a reason. And there is no reason without faith. Even the simplest logical syllogism must begin with givens, with things we must take upon faith. Reason is an engine, and faith provides the fuel. They only work together.

Moreover, the Lutheran tradition places surprising value on doubt; on returning to the sources; on learning for ourselves; on using plain reason to address our Scriptures in faith. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Rather, doubt proves you have a faith with which to wrestle. So, yes, for the love of God, learn, study, question, strive to experience Jesus for yourselves. “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” That’s Christianity.

Thomas touches the wounds of Christ. He places his fingers in the holes in Jesus’ wrists, his hand in the gash at Jesus’ side. He sees that death is not denied but has been overcome. And Thomas’ response, as spontaneous as it is scandalous, is to cry aloud, “My Lord and my God!”—or, more accurately, “The Lord of me and the God of me!” This confession merits exploration.

At the time of the New Testament, Jews, Christians, and pagans alike shared a conceptual world. They all affirmed the reality, however interpreted, of heavens above and hells beneath. They all accepted the existence of a host of powerful spirits, vast intellects beyond all human ken, who shape and uphold the celestial order of the cosmos. Greeks called these gods, while Jews knew them as angels: same basic concept, different names.

But they also all believed in a single unified source and ground of all reality; infinite, eternal, and unchanging; transcendent yet integral to all things. This was not a god, but the God of gods, the God beyond all gods. In English, we would use a capital G. The small-g gods were powerful yet limited spirits; they always had an origin and often frightening flaws. The big-G God, however, was by definition all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere present, and absolutely good. Indeed, the God was Goodness and Beauty and Truth itself, the Three in One.

Small-g gods, or angels, were creatures, as are we; though perhaps as far removed from us as galaxies are from quarks. The One God alone was our Creator, who births all things, sustains all things, redeems all things; in whom we all live and move and have our being. No matter how great a creature might grow, it could never become the Creator. No number, however large, is closer to infinity. The Bible understands this distinction between gods and the God, though it takes it a while to get there. Revelation unfolds over time.

The first-century Greek of the New Testament had as yet no lowercase letters. In order to distinguish between finite spirits and the infinite Holy Spirit, the Gospel had to utilize articles. Thus there’s all the difference in the world between a god and the God. You might be able to bargain with a god. But you can only know the God if He deigns to come to you. We cannot bridge the depthless gulf betwixt Creator and Creation; He will always be higher, always be greater, always be more. God must stoop to speak to us.

And so, Jews and Christians and pagans alike affirmed the Word of God. The Word, the λόγος, was God’s self-revelation, God coming down to us when we could not go up to Him. The Word alone could bridge the gap between Creator and Creation, making us one in Him. But now there was debate. Was the Word of God the God, God Himself? Or was the Word an angel, an emanation, a subordinate divinity or demiurge, sent from God above?

John appears to throw his hat in the ring right off the bat. “In the beginning,” John’s Gospel begins, “was the Word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Seems pretty clear in English, doesn’t it? But in Greek it’s a stickier wicket. Because what John says is, “the Word was with the God and the Word was god”—not a god or the God but just god. It’s ambiguous. Is Jesus the God, the one true God, or is He just a god?

We know He’s from heaven. We know He’s from God. But we don’t know what He is, not yet. John keeps us hanging, John tantalizes us, throughout the life and ministry of Jesus. That is, until today; until this precise moment, when Thomas places his hand into the wounds of the Risen Christ, the very scars of Resurrection. Then at last he understands just who and what Christ is: “The Lord of me, and the God of me”—definite article, “the God.”

No more uncertainty. No more ambiguity. The God whom Thomas touches is the infinite Lord of all. He is the Good and the True and the Beautiful. He is the One in whom we all are one. Christ is both the creature and Creator, both the one true God and the one true Man. God did not send a subordinate. God did not delegate a demiurge. God came down Himself, fully, truly, utterly in the life of Jesus Christ. Here He took on our flesh, our mortality, our weakness. Here He became a mewling Babe and a Corpse upon a Cross.

The infinite gulf between us and our God has been filled up by His Blood; for the Word that God has given to us is all of God Himself. Everything we know of God is Jesus Christ our Lord. He is the face of the Father, the visible Image of the invisible Creator. There is no diminution, no abbreviation, no God hiding beyond or above or behind this Man. It’s just Him. It’s all Him. Apart from this Man, we have no God.

Christians do not put our faith in a God we cannot see. We put our faith in Jesus; trusting not simply that He is like God, but that God is like Him; that God is Him. Otherwise the Resurrection doesn’t mean a thing! The truth of Easter isn’t that God sent a man to die. The truth is that our God has gone to hell and back for you—for love of you.

That’s the God whom Thomas touched within the wounds of Christ. That’s the God in whom we shall forever place our faith.

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

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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