“What Jesus Didn’t Say”

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. 

Have you ever felt defined by your worst moment? Or, to put it differently, have you ever felt like the world defined you by what they thought your worst moment was? This is the question that comes to my mind when I think of poor Thomas. We have a terrible habit of defining one of Jesus’ disciples by a singular moment in his life. A moment that we have decided warrants calling him, “Doubting Thomas.” However, if we had looked elsewhere in the book of John, we might have called him “Courageous Thomas” based on John 11 when he says to the disciples reluctant to follow Jesus, “Let us go that we may die with him.” Or maybe if we looked at John 14, we’d call him “Confused Thomas” because he doesn’t understand how to follow Jesus to his Father’s house with many rooms.  But no, we called him Doubting Thomas. 

I think it’s worth taking another look at Thomas this morning. Let’s dive deep into the second half of the 20th chapter of John, not with predetermined nicknames in mind, but with open ears and open hearts to see what the Risen Christ says to Thomas and to all of us, and just as importantly—what Jesus doesn’t say.

John 20:19 picks up immediately after Mary Magdalene has become the very first preacher of the gospel, sharing the news on Easter morning that Christ is risen from the dead. It’s the next day and are the disciples are all celebrating? Preaching the gospel they’ve heard but not yet seen? No. They are all inside a house, afraid. Perhaps our Easter this year wasn’t quite as unprecedented, after all. 

The author says they are “afraid of the Jews” and our intellectual integrity requires us to admit that, yes, this does have an anti-Semitic ring to it. Sadly, John’s gospel is filled with these statements about “the Jews” which are easy to take out of context. John’s gospel has been explicitly used by Christians to justify the persecution of the Jews for centuries. To put it in its rightful context, this verse would be like saying today that, “they all stayed in their homes because they were afraid of the Americans.” It would sort of be true, as we are all staying home because we are afraid of infecting or being infected by other Americans, but it misses the fact that we are part of that group. When John writes about being afraid of the Jews, he assumes that we all know that the disciples themselves are all Jews. That Jesus was a Jew. They aren’t afraid of the Jews, they are afraid of the Jewish political leaders who opposed Jesus because they saw him as a threat to the safety of the Jewish people.

They are sitting afraid in a locked room because practically overnight their whole world changed. Perhaps you can relate. Jerusalem is in chaos— this man who performed miracles and claimed to be the Messiah was executed by the state and everyone is afraid of the political ramifications. Will Rome crackdown? Will those who followed Jesus revolt? Will there be retribution for being associated with Jesus? Will life ever go back to the way it was? For the disciples, whether they knew it yet or not, the answer is no. There is no going back—only forward.

As they sit in this locked room, all of a sudden Jesus came and appeared in their midst. This is also where the Gospel of John gets a bit weird—sometimes Jesus seems… inhuman. He apparently walks through walls or locked doors and can read minds. Some people have misinterpreted this so far as to become Gnostics, believing that Jesus only seemed like a human being, but really wasn’t. Yet, all we have to do is read to the next verse to see that Jesus was very, very human.

The first words out of his mouth are, “peace be with you.” I almost feel like I could stop the sermon right there because is that not the word we all need to hear today? When the disciples are afraid, when they don’t quite believe the testimony of the woman who saw Jesus in the flesh, Jesus comes and his first words are of peace. And then, after showing them the very real scars on his hands and his side, his next words are also of peace. Again, he says, “peace be with you” for it seems that he knows how precarious peace can be. How easily it can slip away in the midst of uncertain times.

Then, Jesus does something that might seem very strange—he breathes on them. Although, being good observant Jews, they would not have found it strange at all. They would have immediately thought of the way that God breathed life into Adam and Eve and they would have known that the Risen Christ, God incarnate, was breathing new life into them—what we call Holy Spirit. 

It must have been a joyful day for those disciples, but for some reason, Thomas was not with them. We don’t find out why. After 3 years of following Jesus as a group, why was he not there that day?  All we know is that he misses Jesus’ appearance and so when the disciples tell him that Jesus really is alive, he says, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” And so, for two millennia, this one line has cursed him forever as a “doubting Thomas.” 

But if you recall, and I’m sure you do because you have been paying very close attention, you’ll know that all the other disciples didn’t take someone else word for it either. After Mary told them that she had seen the risen Lord, they locked the door and hid in fear. It is not until they have seen the wounds in Jesus’ hands and side that they believe. What Thomas is asking for here is the exact same thing that all the other disciples got—proof. He was not the first follower of Jesus to want good evidence, nor would he be the last. 

John flashes forward to a week later: despite having seen the risen Christ, the disciples are all back in the locked room, only this time Thomas is with them. We don’t know what Jesus was doing all that time or why the disciples are still in hiding. It seems that the world has still changed, that it has not gone “back to normal” yet and that even good news doesn’t mean that it will ever go back to normal. Once again, Jesus seems to have walked through walls to meet them and he greets them with the familiar words, “Peace be with you.”

It’s as if he knows the conversation the disciples had in his absence. He turns to Thomas and tells him, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Jesus knows that Thomas has doubts about if the person he saw murdered and buried could actually come back to life. So meets Thomas just where he’s at and he shows him his scarred and wounded body. We don’t know if Thomas took him up on the offer and put his hand on the gaping wound on Christ’s side or felt the holes still raw in his hands. All Thomas can say is, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus responds, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

But this is where it gets most important for us to really, really pay attention to what Jesus doesn’t say here. Jesus doesn’t say,

I’m ashamed that you didn’t believe without hard evidence.
I’m disappointed that you doubted the testimony of others.
I’m going to always think of you as a doubter.
Wanting proof is asking too much of God.
This is the most important moment of your life and you blew it.

Jesus doesn’t say any of that to Thomas. He affirms that Thomas now believes and offers those of us without the ability to touch Christ’s wounds a blessing for the faith we must have. Unfortunately, Christians have had a terrible history of putting all sorts of words in Jesus’ mouth over the years. It can be easy to forget that the most important thing we can do is listen to the actual words that Christ said. The rest is noise. Sometimes helpful, sometimes hopeful, but it never compares to the words of God.

            So what is this story all about? It’s about Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord, knowing that his friend has doubts and meeting him there. It’s a story that gives us peace, the peace Christ extends over and over to his disciples because we know that Christ will meet us in our doubts too. We don’t get to see the hands and side of the resurrected Christ. But we may still be like Thomas and want that kind of proof anyway. Even when if church tells us that doubts and desires for proof make us bad Christians, we remember that Jesus has never said that. Jesus is not disappointed that you have big, hard questions to ask of him. Jesus is not upset at your doubts and desires for evidence of such an unbelievable event as the God of the universe taking on human form only to be crucified by the people he came to save and resurrected three days later. I want a little of what Thomas had too.

So what does this story mean? It means that resurrection is not the “happy ending” of the story. Resurrection is the joyful middle of a long, hard story. This story means that the experience of death changes us permanently. Death does not have victory over Christ, but it does leave marks on his body. This story means that in Christ, there is no shame—not for Thomas’ doubts nor for Jesus’ scars. In fact, Jesus’ wounds are an integral part of his identity. As theologian Candida Moss explains, it is only his wounds that permit Thomas to identify him as his Lord and God. Jesus’ vulnerable, wounded body is what allows Thomas to share his vulnerable questions with God and receive acceptance.

This story means that this world will wound us all. This pandemic will leave us all with wounds—financial, emotional, or physical. Some will be grieving loved ones whose deaths were entirely preventable. Others will recover from the virus but find that their bodies will never be the same again. Still others will see their life savings obliterated and wonder if there will ever be an “after” this. There will be a day when the threat of this virus will have ended, but it will not leave us untouched. There will be days that we resent our scars. There will be days when the wounds especially ache and we wish that we had never had to go through such an ordeal as this. And on those days, we will remember that the risen Christ comes to us in a disabled body. The risen Christ bears wounds too. They do not make him any less worthy, any less whole, any less than the image of God in human form. Nor do our wounds, our scars, or our disabilities make us anything less than God’s beloved. Our scars will make us vulnerable and that vulnerability is what enables human connection. In sharing our wounds, we will experience the grace of God that only comes through vulnerability. The risen Christ offers us real hope of a life after death instead of stories of willfully ignorant optimism.

I know that this does not sound like hope. We want to be told that this will all soon be over; that life will go back to the way it was; that our economy can reopen shortly; that we won’t be left with scars. But the truth is much harder to hear. The truth is that we must find hope in the face of pain and death. The truth is that we must live as resurrection people.  

Resurrection people are tough.
Resurrection people are gritty.
Resurrection people are vulnerable.
Resurrection people have wounds and scars.
Resurrection people sometimes doubt that any of this even real.

But resurrection people also know that when we are afraid and when we doubt, Jesus will show himself to us. He will meet us just where we are at. He may not show up in the way that he did for Thomas, but he will show up just for you. God knows and loves you just as you are. You don’t need to have Thomas’ story for God’s grace and peace to be extended to you, wherever you may be.