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Lucky You !
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
April 19, 2009
The Second Sunday of Easter
John 20: 19-31
On the calendar of the Christian year, this day is
usually referred to as the Second Sunday of Easter, which can be confusing for
those people who are not familiar with the Christian calendar. “What do you
mean the second Sunday of Easter?” they ask. “Is that like a second Easter
Sunday in case Jesus doesn’t rise from the dead the first time? An emergency
backup Easter?” Palm Sunday they can understand. Easter Sunday they can
understand. But what is this “Second Sunday of Easter,” and what will they say
next week when it’s the “Third Sunday”? So, I sometimes explain that on the
Christian calendar Easter is not just a day, but a season that lasts a full
fifty days. It’s Luke who tells us that in the forty days after his
resurrection Jesus appeared to his disciples with “many convincing proofs,” and
then ascended into heaven (Acts 1:3). Ten days after that, on Pentecost, the
disciples received the gift of the Holy Spirit he had promised to send them
(Acts 2:4). Forty plus ten equals fifty, and so we talk about the “great fifty
days” between Easter and Pentecost, when we celebrate the presence of the risen
Lord and anticipate the coming of the Holy Spirit.
But in a way those people are right who suspect
that the “Second Sunday of Easter” is a kind of “emergency backup Easter.”
According to John, Jesus appeared to his disciples on Easter Sunday, when they
were all gathered together in one place. Appeared to all of them, that is,
except Thomas, who may have been out buying groceries at the time. So, when he
got back to that room the disciples all said, “We have seen the Lord!” But
Thomas wouldn’t buy it. Easter has always been a little too close to April
Fool’s Day. He said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,
and put my finger in the marks, and put my hand in his side, I will not
believe.” And so, on the following Sunday, when all the disciples were gathered
again in that same room and Thomas was right there with them, here came Jesus,
making a special appearance just for Thomas’s sake. It was a kind of
“emergency backup” Easter, if you will, and the emergency was that Thomas could
not believe. “Come here, Thomas,” Jesus said. “Come look at my hands, and put
your finger in the marks, and put your hand in my side. Don’t be faithless any
more. Be faith-full. Be a believer.” And Thomas said:
“My Lord and my God!”
Can you imagine how different John’s Easter story
would be if it weren’t for Thomas? Take a look at the first few verses of our
Gospel reading for today: it was evening on that first day of the week, that
Sunday. The disciples were all gathered together in one place and the doors
were locked because they were afraid that the same people who had come for Jesus
would come for them. But suddenly there is Jesus standing in their midst,
holding up his wounded hand and saying, “Shalom! Peace be with you.” It’s kind
of spooky, isn’t it? Evening. A locked room. A ghostly visitor. Jesus shows
them his hands and his side as a way of identifying himself to them, and then,
John says, “the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” Jesus breathes on
them and tells them to receive the Holy Spirit. He sends them as the Father has
sent him. He gives them the power to forgive or retain sins. And then, just as
suddenly and surprisingly as has come, he goes, leaving them wondering if any of
it happened at all.
If it weren’t for Thomas, this is what we would
have, this brief, written account of an unearthly, ethereal visit from the
so-called risen Lord. It might have been anything: wishful thinking on the part
of the disciples; the ghost of Jesus walking through walls; some sort of
primitive 3-D holographic image. “There,” John would say, tearing the page out
of his notebook and handing it over. “Take that. See if you can make a
religion out of it.” But what kind of religion would it be? Just the kind that
some of its detractors say it is already: nothing more than the projection of
our fondest wishes, the institutionalization of our hope for immortality, a
holographic image of the risen Jesus, shimmering in empty air. And that’s where
Thomas comes to the rescue of the Christian faith, saying, “Uh-uh. I’m not
buying it. Not unless I see and hear and touch the risen Lord.” It’s
not just his faith that’s hanging in the balance; it’s our faith, too. And so
Jesus returns to that locked room the following Sunday in an emergency backup
Easter appearance that leaves Thomas gasping, “My Lord and my God!”
Lucky him.
I don’t know how it is for you but there are a lot
of people who have trouble believing in the Resurrection. They have never seen
a dead person get up out of the grave or climb up out of a casket. They don’t
have any experience of such a thing. And yet they are supposed to believe that
once upon a time, for one particular person, it happened. The rules of science
were suspended, all natural processes were reversed, and the dead body of Jesus
came striding forth from the tomb. Really? They try to believe it.
They try hard. They do what we do when we read fairy tales or go to the
theatre: they suspend their disbelief. They haul it up over their heads on the
trembling thread of their faith. They tie it off on the sturdy cleat of
Christian doctrine. But there it is anyway, their disbelief—hanging there like
a dead body, ready to come crashing down on them at any moment. “Lucky you,
Thomas,” they whisper. “You got to see him. You got to hear him. He offered
to let you put your finger in the marks in his hands!” Can you imagine what a
difference it would make to their faith if they could have an experience like
that? Can you imagine what a difference it would make to your own faith?
I’ve tried to imagine it. If I stood in the
presence of the risen Jesus; if I saw him with my own eyes and heard him with my
own ears; if I put my fingers into the marks in his hands and my hand into his
side—what would it do for my faith? I think it would do at least two things.
On the one hand it would confirm it. Standing there in the presence of the
risen Lord I could say, “Well, look at that! Everything I’ve believed all these
years, all those Easter sermons I’ve preached—it’s all been true!” It would be
a wonderful moment, wouldn’t it? Not unlike that moment I anticipate at the end
of my life when I will stand in the presence of the risen Lord and say, “It’s
all been true!” It would confirm my faith, but on the other hand it would
cancel it out. If faith is “the evidence of things unseen,” as the writer of
Hebrews puts it (11:1), then what happens when the evidence is seen, when
you’re standing right there looking at the risen Lord? Well, you don’t have to
have faith any more. You have proof. And as much as any of us would like to
have that kind of proof I think we could find it strangely . . . limiting.
If you have seen the risen Lord, what happens when
you don’t see him? What then? Can you trust his love and presence in times
like those or do you need to see him again just to be sure? Do you ask for his
phone number, his e-mail address? Do you go by his house in the middle of the
night when you’re wrestling with some big problem and make him come downstairs
in his bathrobe? If, like Thomas, you can’t believe unless you see him and hear
him and touch him, then what do you do the rest of the time? If we walk by
sight we stumble in the dark. And maybe this is why Jesus follows up Thomas’s
astonishing confession of faith by asking, “Have you believed because you have
seen, Thomas? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.” The word
John uses is the Greek word makarios, which is most often translated
“blessed,” but can also be translated, “how happy,” “how fortunate,” or even
“how lucky are those who have not seen, and yet believe.”
And that would be us.
Here we are, nearly two thousand years after the
Resurrection, most of us claiming to believe in the risen Lord. Have we seen
him? Of course not. We wish that we had. It would make it so much easier!
And yet Jesus says to us on this day, “Lucky you! How fortunate you are—how
blessed, how happy—if you can believe without seeing.” Which makes me think he
has in mind something much bigger than believing that dead people can come back
to life again. When Thomas said that he couldn’t believe until he saw the marks
in Jesus’ hands, and put his finger in those marks, and put his hand in Jesus’
side, he was saying that he couldn’t believe in the resurrection of the body
until he saw the body of Jesus standing before him, living and breathing. But
did you notice that when he was presented with that proof, when Jesus invited
him to come and do just what he had insisted upon, Thomas didn’t do it? He
didn’t put his finger in the marks of the nails. He didn’t put his hand in
Jesus’ side. He just confessed his faith.
“My Lord and my God!”
He wouldn’t have done that for just anybody. If
the town drunk had risen from the dead Thomas might have believed in
resurrection, but he wouldn’t have believed in the town drunk. His confession
of faith doesn’t come from what he has learned about resurrection, but from what
he has learned about Jesus. He had followed him for months, maybe years. In
that time he had come to trust Jesus completely. I’ve often had the hunch that
Thomas wasn’t with the disciples on that Easter evening not because he was out
buying groceries but because he was still so devastated by the death of Jesus
that he wasn’t ready to be with anyone yet. It’s only later, when he walks in
with his bloodshot eyes and tearstained cheeks that they gather around and say,
“We’ve seen the Lord, Thomas. We’ve seen the Lord!” And Thomas answers like
you might answer in a similar situation. “I don’t believe it. I won’t
believe it! I can’t afford to have my heart broken again.” But then Jesus
showed up the next Sunday, and Thomas felt his broken heart healed in an
instant, his dead hope brought back to life.
“My Lord and my God!”
How lucky you are if you don’t have to see Jesus to
believe in him. Then your faith isn’t limited by sensory experience, by sight
or sound or even by time and space; it is limited only by the depth and breadth
and height of love; in other words, it is unlimited. It is the kind of faith
Jesus wanted from his disciples in the first place: not some sort of abstract
belief in the idea that dead bodies can come back to life, but a living
relationship with the one who laid down his life for them. That’s why I take
issue with those who insist that you can’t be a real Christian unless you can
believe in things like the inerrancy of Scripture, the divinity of Jesus, his
virgin birth, his bodily resurrection, his second coming, and the doctrine of
substitutionary atonement. Please don’t misunderstand. I say I take issue with
those who insist that you can’t be a real Christian unless you believe in those
things not because those things aren’t worth believing, but because those things
are things, and Jesus is not.
The Bible doesn’t say that “whosoever believeth in
the inerrancy of Scripture will not perish but have everlasting life”; it
doesn’t say that whosoever believeth in the divinity of Jesus, his virgin birth,
his bodily resurrection, his second coming; it doesn’t say that whosoever
believeth in the doctrine of substitutionary atonement will not perish; it says
that whosoever believeth in him—in Jesus—will not perish but have everlasting
life (John 3:16). New Testament scholar Marcus Borg says that, “Prior to the
seventeenth century the word ‘believe’ did not mean believing in the truth of
statements or propositions. It meant to hold dear; to prize; to give one’s
loyalty to; to give oneself to; to commit oneself. Most simply, to believe
meant to love. Indeed the English words ‘believe’ and ‘belove’ are related.
What we believe is what we belove.”
Faith, therefore—the kind of faith that saves you—is not about believing in
resurrection: it’s about beloving Jesus.
My Lord and my God.
Shall we pray?
Lord God,
deliver us from believing in things and bring us to that place where we believe
in you. Where we hold you dear. Where we prize you, give our loyalty to you,
give ourselves to you, commit ourselves to you. In short, bring us to that
place where to believe in you is to belove you. To make you our beloved. The
desire of our hearts. Anything less seems empty, false, and faithless. Deliver
us from that we pray and we ask it in your name, believing that you are able to
do all things, even that. AMEN.
—Jim Somerville © 2009
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