2 Easter Sunday
April 27, 2014
Acts 2:14a,22-32
Psalm 16
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31
When
we read the Bible, it is quite easy for us to remain in childlike naiveté in
fascination with the story. We are so
fascinated with the story because stories have an artistic magic to create the
seeming literal reconstruction of an actual historical event.
But in our naiveté, we sometimes miss the
teaching purpose of the story by the writers who were writing many years after
the purported events of the story.
The Doubting Thomas story is a case in
point. We think that this all about the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus and the specific details of this appearance
are not found in the other Gospels which were written earlier than the Gospel
of John. If we read carefully this
passage as well as the entire Gospel of John, we find that this passage is more
about the status and practice of the faith community six or seven decades after
Jesus walked on this year.
What is the issue in the doubting Thomas
story? Did the eyewitnesses to Jesus
have a more valid faith experience than those who believe in Jesus but did not
have an eyewitness experience?
The Doubting Thomas story has two significant
punchlines for which the story is used as a set up. The first
punchline is found in the words of Jesus: “Thomas you are blessed because you
saw me and believe; but blessed are those who do not see me and still believe.” Do you understand how the writer is using the
Doubting Thomas story to affirm the validity of the belief and faith of the
people in the community who did not walk and talk with Jesus?
The second significant punchline of the
Doubting Thomas story is the self-pronouncement of the writer about the writer’s
own writing: “These things are written so that you might believe that Jesus is
the Christ.” The members of the
community of the writer of John’s Gospel did not see Jesus, they did not walk
or talk with him, but by reading words about Jesus they can arrive at the very
conditions of faith and belief. And
these conditions of faith and belief are as valid as or even more valid than a
person like Thomas who demanded literal empirical evidence. Thomas in fact is presented as one who is
inferior in faith when contrasted with those who believe and who did not see
Jesus.
So, we can see how the story of the Gospel is
crafted to represent the conditions in the church some six or seven decades after Jesus.
These things are written….the written word
attains new status as being the vehicle for belief. This is an incredible insight from John’s
Gospel because John’s Gospel is all about the word. John’s Gospel begins with, “In the Beginning
was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God. And the Word became Flesh and dwelled with
us.” You see the second person of the
Trinity is called the Word but that Word became very limited in the historical
person of Jesus, but in the resurrection of Jesus, the risen Christ is once
again identified with the profound Word which is the very basis for all human
consciousness which accounts for how human experience is created much
differently from all other sentient and non-sentient life.
John’s Gospel is essentially about the
profound history of Word as an embracing general concept of our understanding
of all of created differentiation of everything in life; but it is also about
the limitation of Word into the person of Jesus who became a model and exemplar
of how you and I should live our worded lives.
The writer of John's Gospel states that what is humanly
understood as actually having existence is created by the word. Indeed this is true. You and I literally are steeped in
words; in our naiveté we think that we are actually seeing each other here and now,
but in fact we are seeing versions of each other as we are filtered by the invisible
screen of language which is the mental habit of being human. We see and know each other through the habits
of language; we see and know our world through the habits of language.
The writer of John’s Gospel wrote to educate
us in the very practice of Word. This
writer does not even use the word miracle for the fantastic acts of Jesus; John’s Gospel uses the word sign. Sign is a conglomeration of words. Sign is a constellation of events to point to
another meaning. The healing of the
blind, walking on water, multiplication of loaves and all of the seeming miraculous
events are actually signs to teach us about meaning of the life of Jesus. The words are meant to teach us what it means to be born of the Spirit to be able to see our lives in a
completely different way. We, literalists, love our stories, we like to stay at the level of the story and not move on to the educational sign and
purpose of the story.
John’s Gospel is about the Word in all of its
varied manifestations. Words comprise
the Jesus stories to teach the readers to know Jesus and to come to have faith
in the risen Christ. The writer of the
Gospel of John uses the disciples as examples of students of faith being
delivered from literalism about the words of Jesus to arrive at the profound teaching
purpose, namely, knowing that one has entered an entirely new paradigm of
existence in this transformational kingdom of God. And this transformational kingdom of God is a
parallel universe of faith that we can live in now. It is heaven on earth; it is a place where Christ went before us to
prepare for us.
The writer of John understood Jesus to say to his
disciples, “My words are spirit and they are life.” Probably spirit is most easily understood as
having an equivalence with the particular way in which our words form and shape
our lives and our self-understanding. The writer of John’s Gospel
understood that nothing can get closer to us than our words. When we receive words and as they penetrate
the deepest part of memory and our worded beings, we know that we are being
created, formed, made, developed. We are so comprised by words that even our
bodies become body language. The movements, acts and gestures of the body are guided by the purposes of word.
Our body language at a profound level is called our morals and our
ethics.
The writer of John knew that words are spirit
and they are life. Words make up how we
can live in a new paradigm, a new heaven on earth as we express what it means
to be born from above.
The writer of John did not write just to
entertain us with clever stories about the doubting Thomas; the writer of John
wrote to inform us that our lives are always, already being formed by the
habits of word. We cannot escape
words. When we could not fully choose
our word environments, we received the scripts of our lives some of which we continue to live out even now. We live now trying to
interdict and change some of the scripts of our lives which sometimes seem to be based
upon fear and anxiety and bias and smallness of mind.
The Gospel of John wrote that the Word was
made Flesh in Jesus. In the Doubting
Thomas Story, the writer is essentially saying, “The Word became text; this
written text, these spirit-words of Jesus in writing.” The writer of John wrote the Gospel so that
we might believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God. And if Jesus the Christ, the Son of God in
us now as the Risen Christ as the fullness of God’s Word, then we can know
that we always have a future.
In the most practical sense of the word, the
risen Christ for me now means, Phil, surpassing himself in excellence in a
future state. The risen Christ for you
now is the hope of you, surpassing yourself in excellence in a future state. And that is a very believable and accessible word about the
Risen Christ for you and me. Let us be
thankful for the incredible insights about Word which the writer of John gives
us to help us to believe, and let us be delivered from our literalness about
the story and be born into the wealth of meaning found in the Risen Christ as
the Word from the beginning of human consciousness. Let us be thankful that the
Word was made flesh in Jesus in a very special way. Let us be thankful that the word was made
text in the Gospel of John to retain the memory of Christ. Let us thank God that the Gospel of John gives us words to
know that the Word of God can still become flesh in you and me. Amen.