Worcester College
On this First Sunday After Easter, alias Mercy Sunday, I can do no better than repost, with her permission and my gratitude, today's sermon by my priestly daughter, now Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
Thomas
On this Sunday after Easter, we are offered some
remarkable stories about discipleship and it seems like a good opportunity to
use them to reflect on our own journeys of faith.
The first, and most obvious story is that of
Thomas. There is a method of spiritual reading of the Bible which encourages us
to imagine ourselves as one of the characters in the narrative and really live
the event from their point of view. During Holy Week and Easter, it is almost
impossible not to do this. The characters are so full of life and the narrative
is so vivid that we are drawn inexorably into the way of the cross as we tread
the path with Jesus. Sometimes we are Mary, watching and waiting as the event
unfolds. Sometimes Peter, denying we are followers of Jesus at all. Sometimes
the accuser, sometimes the soldiers, sometimes the women laying his precious
body to rest.
The beauty of the narrative is that it invites this
kind of reading. The author of the Gospel of John is explicit when he says that
he has written everything ‘so that we might believe.’ There is a profound
interplay here between the written word and the way it speaks to our faith in
God. John is writing the Gospel so that everyone who reads it and hears it
might believe that Jesus is the Son of God. If you believe that this is the
case, John is convinced of two things: that you will have found a way to have,
as Jesus puts it ‘life in all its fullness’ and that this abundance of life
will not end with death. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son,
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’
(John 3.16)
When I was a school Chaplain, I was lucky enough to
meet a man from the Gideons who told me about his mission to prisoners. He
would take the small red New Testaments into prison and distribute them with
words of encouragement. One day a man came to tell him that the thin pages were
the perfect size for cigarette paper and he had indeed smoked his way through
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. By the time he got to Acts, he felt that perhaps
he should read the pages before smoking them. He was converted by Peter’s
speech on the resurrection of Jesus and had come to ask my friend for a new
copy of the Bible.
These words on cigarette-thin paper were written
‘so that you might believe’. They are words to comfort and to heal. Words to
challenge and to inspire. Words which echo across centuries and reach into your
heart today.
The story of doubting Thomas plays its part in this
conversation between us and God. The resurrected Jesus meets his friends for
the first time and knowing exactly the level of their fear and anxiety, his
first words to them are ‘peace be with you.’ He says it twice. He understands.
Peace. We know what it feels like. The sunshine
reminds us of it. A feeling of calm. Of beauty. Of ease. Those times in life when
we are aligned with the world, in tune with the basso continuo of life. No
worries to niggle us. No stress to unsettle us. No sadness to drag us down.
Imagine how deeply sad the disciples must have
been. Imagine the weight of their grief. Not only their beloved friend, but
their longest running snap-chat streak, the one they spoke to every day and who
settled them and made sense of life; not only this but also the leader of their
community, their purpose, their reason to live. All this died in them when he
died. The locked doors are not only factual in John’s story. They are symbolic.
In the face of grief, we lock down.
And into this, the risen life of Christ walks.
Through the locked doors, breathing peace into the fear. ‘Peace be with you.’
Thomas was not part of it and the disciples are not
good at explaining. They don’t really know what has happened and they are not
making a lot of sense to Thomas. He needs to see, feel, hold, touch the man who
made sense of his life.
And Jesus gets this. He holds out his hands and he
invites Thomas to touch. This is no ghost, no apparition or wish fulfilment.
This is real. Thomas gets it.
‘My Lord and My God.’
Our readings today have important things to teach
us about the practical life of a follower of Jesus. John’s Gospel reminds us
that we have the power of forgiveness, each one of us and there is enough in a
single verse of the Gospel to give us food for prayer for the rest of the week
as we reflect on our own ability to forgive. Jesus considers forgiveness to be
the gift of the Holy Spirit, and it is so central to his message about how we
should live that it has a central role in the prayer we say every day: ‘forgive
us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’
The book of Acts, the one which converted our
smoking friend in prison, gives us a really remarkable reading in chapter 4
about how we should live as a community: sharing and giving up our own wealth
so that our neighbours in Christ might be cared for, ‘there was not a needy
person among them.’ (4.34) This earliest group of Christians were characterised
by two things, we are told. Verse 32 says ‘now the whole group of those who
believed were of one heart and soul.’ And the following verse tells us that
‘great grace was upon them all.’
This is a powerful image of the possibilities of
living the resurrection life and the church should hold on to it with joy and
hope. But today’s readings highlight the contrast between this and the
immediate aftermath of the crucifixion. This transformed, grace-filled life
begins behind the locked doors of the upper room. And it takes doubt as its
starting point.
It is not hard to inhabit the character of Thomas,
because doubt is part of the journey of faith: particularly in the empiricist
world in which we now live. And what our readings tell us this morning is that
God knows. God knows that doubt is part of the human condition and God responds
to it at the level we need: ‘reach our your hand and put it into my wounds’
(John 20.27).
God does not love us less, if we doubt. God is
always reaching out to us. Continually. But at some point, we have to reach
back towards God and we must trust that it is true. ‘My Lord and My God.’
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