2nd Sunday of Easter B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2015

Thomas was not as silly as we have made him look. In fact, I think we would all be much better disciples if we would let ourselves experience something like what I imagine he went through.

When Jesus was arrested in the garden, Thomas was shocked. It was not just fear for his skin that was behind his abandoning Jesus. In fact, all the disciples were shocked. They were all totally confused. Despite all that Jesus had said, they did not expect that he would be arrested, because psychologically they could not. For them, he was the Messiah, the Christ. They believed that; they wanted that. And it got worse. Jesus was humiliated, helplessly brutalised and murdered. No miracles; no triumphant escape.

The possibility of resurrection did not occur to them; it was not on their radar. On the Sunday morning, the women disciples went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ dead body. The male disciples did not have the decency, the energy, the residual love, whatever, to do even that.

Later that same Sunday Jesus appeared to them. Thomas was not there. When he joined them later, they told him they had seen, not just Jesus, but “the Lord”. Thomas would not, could not, believe. What could he not believe? The other disciples? Their story? It must have been just a ghost, or a figment of their heated imaginations… Why did he demand to see Jesus’ wounds before ever he would believe? What went on in his mind over the next few days?

How could Jesus have been killed if he really were God’s Messiah? How could any sort of decent God ever allow that? That was not Thomas’s idea of Messiah – not his idea of the one Israel had waited for for over a millennium, the one who, according to so many prophecies, would reverse Israel’s humiliation, the one who would forever establish his authority over all the nations. Effectively, Thomas anticipated a Superman Messiah. And behind the Superman Messiah, a God who would pull the necessary strings – a Superman God. Crucifixion could in no way fit that scenario. If the disciples’ report were right, his whole idea of Messiah, and of God, was wrong. But how could that be? How could God’s Messiah possibly suffer and be crucified? What sort of authority, what sort of divine power, was that?

The following Sunday Thomas was back with the other disciples, and Jesus appeared once more among them. Gently, encouragingly, he invited Thomas to touch the wounds still there in his body. What could Thomas do? The crucified Jesus was risen indeed; and the worst efforts of his murderers had stopped neither his loving nor his forgiving. Thomas’s already wavering expectations about the Messiah and about God gave way, confronted with another undeniable reality. Without precisely understanding what he was saying, he came out with the magnificent expression of faith, My Lord and my God!

Why I think Thomas’s journey to faith is so important is because I believe we have to follow a similar journey. We all, pretty inevitably, seem to start with a Superman sense of Jesus and of God. Life challenges that sense, particularly suffering, particularly the experience we so often read as the silence of God, the absence of God, the heartlessness of God, in the midst of that suffering. I believe that we have to lose faith in that God – in order to discover the God of Jesus. What about God’s power? Thomas had to wrestle with that question, as did the other disciples, as do all disciples. Would God’s pulling strings, making exceptions, really lead to life? Or is God’s creative, truly life-giving power the energy of love – revealed in the raw wounds of the risen Jesus?

I do not think that anyone can answer those questions for us. We must learn for ourselves. It helps when there is a supportive community at hand, or an understanding friend, to carry us as hesitantly we explore, re-write and surrender to the mystery of love without limit.