Sermons from Past Years

John 20:24-31 "Have Not Seen" Scott Hoezee

At one time or another we've all heard variations on the old cliché, "Make one little mistake and you're labeled for life!" I've got no proof of this, but I suspect Thomas may have been the first to utter that line. Thomas was one of Jesus' inner circle of twelve disciples. But like most of that group we know virtually nothing about Thomas and hear virtually nothing from him. On the surface you would guess that of all the Bible trivia questions in the world, naming Jesus' twelve disciples would be among the easier questions to answer. But it's not precisely because most of the disciples do not do much in the gospels. Folks like Thaddeus, Bartholomew, Nathanael, and Simon the Zealot are very much background figures with Peter, John, James, and in the end also Judas taking lead roles.

In the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke Thomas never says a single word. Only in John's gospel does Thomas speak up on three separate occasions. Twice he speaks just a single sentence but his third appearance in John 20 is more significant. But poor Thomas: he speaks at length just one time in the whole Bible and he is forever thereafter known as "Doubting Thomas!" Make one little mistake and you're labeled for life.

In the course of church history Thomas has probably gotten a bad rap. Whether or not his incredulity about Jesus' resurrection was typical of Thomas we don't know. What we do know is that the little incident involving Thomas in John 20 has long provided the church with one of its most memorable and instructive biblical texts. On this Easter evening let's ponder both Thomas' reaction to Jesus' resurrection and Jesus' reaction to Thomas' reluctant faith.

John 20:19 tells us that this story begins on the very eve of Easter. It's still Sunday, the first day of the week. Earlier that day Peter and John had checked out Mary Magdalene's report that the grave was empty and sure enough it was. Beyond that, however, they didn't see anything else to explain the emptiness. Mary, however, did meet up with Jesus and told the disciples this wonderful news.

It's difficult to know what the disciples made of all this, however. The only thing we know is that they were still paranoid that the same people who got Jesus rubbed out would come for them next, thus verse 19's telling us that the door was locked "for fear of the Jews." Any desire the disciples had to go find Jesus themselves was not strong enough to counteract the desire to protect their own hides. The seemingly remote possibility of meeting up with Jesus struck them as less likely than meeting up with the Jewish goon squad whom they'd last seen in action in Gethsemane.

In other words, the ten disciples in that locked room were initially no different than Thomas. You get the sense that they were not ready to believe this wild resurrection story, either--at least not based only on the report of a potentially hysterical woman. So far as they were concerned, the last word on Jesus was that the Jews killed him and so it is still the Jews, and not Jesus, that shaped their behavior that first Easter Sunday evening.

But you know the rest: Jesus showed up, proving that whatever else might be true of our resurrection bodies, one thing is for certain: in God's kingdom the folks who manufacture padlocks had better look for a new line of work because Jesus passed through bolted doors as easily as a breeze whistles through the willows. Apparently this cinched matters for the disciples. Jesus displayed his pierced hands and side and there was no denying the warmth that was coming from this body. This was no ghost. You couldn't see the wallpaper through him. He cast a shadow.

But then verse 24 throws in a detail we didn't know about before: Thomas was absent that night. Maybe he was hiding out behind a locked door somewhere else. Maybe he had concluded that without Jesus as the glue that held the disciples together there wasn't much sense in hanging around with those fellows anymore. Whatever purpose they'd had once upon a time was gone now. Thomas at least had the good sense to recognize that if knock-kneed, feet-of-clay, "I swear to you I never knew the man" Peter was the best they had left in terms of a leader, he'd be better off going back to the fishing business.

So perhaps Thomas was wandering around aimless and lost and deeply grief-stricken that night. Maybe he was in the park mindlessly throwing out seed to the pigeons. Wherever he was and whatever he was doing, what he knew for sure was that Jesus was gone. But long about the time he was starting to re-plan his future--a future in which he'd never again be taken in by Messianic pretenders--several of the men from his disciple days came sprinting up to him. "Thomas, Jesus is alive. He's back from the dead! We've seen him!"

Poor Thomas. When your hopes hit bottom the way his had, when your life has just recently been reduced to just so many broken shards and fragments, you can't just instantly pick up the pieces and go right back to where you had been. Life as Thomas had come to know it for the last few years was over. And now, based on a half-baked, unsubstantiated report he was supposed to instantly get back to where he had once been, believing that Jesus was someone special and maybe even the Messiah?

It doesn't work that way. And so Thomas is guarded. He can't deny the enthusiasm of his friends but he'd been around these gentlemen long enough to know that they'd been wrong before. One time out in their boat during a storm they mistook Jesus for a ghost. Now maybe the disciples were mistaking a ghost for Jesus. "If it's all the same to you, my friends, I'll take a wait-and-see attitude here. To believe what you're saying would require me to put my whole heart back on the line again, and right now my heart is broken. If ever I manage to put it back together again, it will only be in the face of rock solid evidence."

And for the next week this remained Thomas' resurrection policy. Seven days and nights went by without anyone seeing a trace of Jesus. Long about the time Thomas was feeling confident he'd taken the right approach, the other ten disciples all begged him to join them for still another Sunday evening potluck. Maybe they thought it was like some kind of a magic formula: get together on Sunday, have a meal, be sure the door is locked and maybe, just maybe, Jesus will appear the same way he had the previous week!

I imagine Thomas rolled his eyes when they invited him. But in the end he relents and glumly joins the people who Thomas is now convinced have lost their way in life. Except that the funny thing was that the disciples' plan worked. They re-created the scene from the prior Sunday in the hope that Jesus would come again, and he does! An encore appearance of Jesus in the flesh, once again wishing them "Shalom." It doesn't take too long for Jesus to zero in on Thomas. While the other disciples grinned at Thomas like satisfied Cheshire cats Jesus offers Thomas the evidence he had said he needed.

As is often the case in the Bible, you can take your choice in how to read Jesus' lines in this story. The Bible is all but devoid of the kinds of adverbs that novelists use to describe the tone of people's voices. John does not tell us whether Jesus spoke "softly" or "sarcastically" or "angrily" or anything else. So you could read verse 27 as if Jesus were speaking confrontationally, maybe with an edge of sarcasm and rebuke in his voice. "You want evidence, Thomas! Well here! Here! Put your fingers in these holes and then stop your doubting, you foolish imp!"

But I don't read verse 27 that way. For one thing it would not be terribly characteristic of Jesus to talk in that fashion. For another thing I think Jesus fully understood the hurt and sorrow that had clotted Thomas' heart for the past week-and-a-half since the crucifixion. I don't think he blames Thomas for hesitating, especially since it was a hesitancy borne of grief.

So I picture Jesus smiling as he approached Thomas, generously holding out his nail-pierced hands and speaking in the tone of voice a parent adopts when trying to re-assure a weeping child that it's OK the milk spilled. "Thomas," Jesus says with a smile, "Look at me, touch me. It's OK, stop doubting and believe." Jesus wasn't trying to shame him or make him feel worse. He was trying to love him and make him feel better, and I suspect that it was the warm smile and the tender words and the overflowing love which, more than the nail-pierced hands, led Thomas to recognize exactly who was in front of him. "My Lord and my God!" was all Thomas could choke out through his tears. It was all he needed to choke out.

And then Jesus says something curious. "You've bought the Easter story because you've seen me in the flesh. Blessed are all those who have not seen and yet still believe as fiercely as you do." As I said in another sermon some years back, when I was a little boy my mother once said to me that in verse 29 Jesus was talking about us. He was talking about all of us latter-day folks in the church who had never seen Jesus in person and yet believed in him. And I recall thinking how cool it was that I was in the Bible!

Later, as I grew up, I began to think how foolish that idea was on my part. Of course Scott Hoezee is not in the Bible--Jesus was just speaking in generalities. But now I've grown up a little more still and I find myself coming back to my childhood conclusion that I am in the Bible, and so is each of you. Because through the miracle of the Holy Spirit the Bible is like no other book I know of. No matter how gripping a really excellent novel is, no matter how "caught up" you get in the plot of a good book, in the end the book and its characters remain at a certain distance from you. Even the most gripping of page-turners does not finally bring you into the story. And so when you're finished, you put it on the library shelf and move on to your next book.

But not so the Bible. It insists on drawing you into the action on a personal basis. William Placher once used the analogy of a painting by the Spanish artist Velazquez. In this painting Velazquez depicted a large reception hall inside a Medieval castle. In this large room are a great many people, including the artist himself. At the center of the painting you can see the backside of an artist's easel, with Velazquez himself peering around the canvas, paintbrush in hand, looking out directly at you, the person viewing the painting.

In fact, everyone in the painting is facing outward, staring at you. And at first you get the feeling that the point of this picture is cleverly to make you feel part of the scene. It looks like Velazquez wants to trick you into the portrait by making you feel like he is painting you--that you are so important that he and everyone else is looking at you. But upon closer examination you notice on the far back wall of the hall is a mirror in which you can see the reflection of the king and queen of Spain! And then you realize the joke: of course little old you are not in this picture! Everyone is looking at some folks who are really worthy of a portrait: royalty! You don't belong in this picture and even if you thought at first you did, the little mirror shocks you into realizing your foolish error.

But the Bible, and especially the gospels, do just the opposite. At first you think these are ancient stories from long ago and far away--tales about other people and their lives. But then as you read along, suddenly you have the overwhelming sense that the Jesus you meet in this text is staring out at you, inviting you to take your place in the narrative by joining Thomas in saying, "My Lord and my God!" And the reason that can happen is because of the truth of Easter and its sequel day of Pentecost. Jesus is alive. He's no fiction. He's no made-up character in a book. He's alive and through his Spirit is right here again tonight.

For here we are, like those disciples, gathering together on the first day of the week. Perhaps the doors are not locked here at Calvin and yet for Jesus to step into this room and be among us, as we believe he is every week, requires that he pass through something more formidable than a bolted door. He now has to pass through nearly two millennia worth of history. He has to pass through our minds, which have been trained to be locked tight against pre-modern, unscientific things like virgin births and resurrections. He also has to spiritually "appear" to people who have never seen him the way Thomas did and so he understands the difficulties we face in coming to and then maintaining faith.

And yet he does come to us in all our humanity, in all our struggles, in all our doubts. And by his Spirit he vividly comes to our hearts, smiling and exuding love, calling for us to join Thomas in overcoming our understandable difficulties that we might keep on believing.

Cynics say that John 20 is just a little too neat to be taken seriously. We suspect that John was the last gospel to be written and we know it is the most theologically interpreted of the gospels. John was writing his gospel for the era of the Church as he and others began to suspect that it might very well be a while before Jesus came again as he promised. And so cynics will say this led John to make up stuff. In the case of John 20, they say, the idea that the disciples gathered two Sunday evenings in a row only to have Jesus appear to them both times is just a tad too neat. It looks like John's attempt to validate the idea that Christians need to have worship services on Sundays instead of on the Jewish Sabbath and that if they do, Jesus will always come and join their church services.

It's a chicken and the egg question. Did the Church just happen to begin to hold services on Sundays and so later John made up this story to validate that. Or did this incident really happen and so became part of the reason why the day of the resurrection (Sunday) became the day of Christian worship? Faith believes the latter, recognizing what John goes on to say in verses 30 and 31: that he reported all of this not as some detached, objective historian. No, there's just one purpose behind this entire gospel and all the gospels: to trick us into the picture, to make us join Thomas in encountering the living Lord Jesus and so proclaiming him to be also our Lord and God.

There's no hidden agenda in the gospels. They all say that you belong in this picture. Faith may come no easier for us than it did for Thomas but come it must. And when it comes then we join all those who, as the last line from John 20 says, "have life in Jesus' name." Thomas entered that room of disciples that evening full of doubts that were rapidly hardening into cynicism after a week of no-shows from Jesus. He entered that room with a barely repressed sneer that he was right and the other ten disciples were wrong. But he also entered that room dead. His heart was lifeless, his spirit sagging, his hopes still in disarray. But Thomas left the room alive--alive in a way he never before thought possible!

And if that encounter with Jesus is what led the church to keep on gathering together on Sundays for the next couple of thousand years in the hope that Jesus would come and be among them, too, then you can only conclude that Sunday worship services are the best idea anybody ever had. For Jesus keeps coming back in a thousand ways and in a million places each Lord's day, speaking "Peace" and bringing life. Make one mistake and you're labeled for life. But in Thomas' case we can also say: make one statement of faith and you set an example for millions. Thank God for Beleiving Thomas and all that he has taught us! Amen.