Sunday, April 12, 2015

Doubting Thomas Sermon

     In churches that follow the common lectionary, the story of Doubting Thomas is always the reading for the Sunday after Easter.  If you grew up in such a church you probably heard the story as a lesson that if we were properly strong in our faith we would not ask for evidence.  There is another way to see it. Thomas is not really asking for more than the other disciples already had received.  No one tells Thomas that he is wrong to question, instead the other disciples accept his need for what they have experienced.  It isn’t fair to call him Doubting Thomas as if he was somehow weak in his faith.  Instead, we should value Thomas as the person willing to ask questions.  During the Last Supper Jesus says “You know the way to the place where I am going” and only Thomas is brave enough to say: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus replied: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”  I don’t know that Thomas would have been satisfied by the answer but it is one that we cherish.  So we should be thankful for Thomas’s honesty and take him as an inspiration that it is ok to have questions and doubts.

But I want to focus on a different aspect of the story.  I did not grow up going to church and when I first paid attention to this story I heard something entirely different in it.  I had started to go to a church that emphasized Holy Week and saw Easter as journey in which we turn a corner from darkness to light.   Experiencing Easter that way and then going to church the next Sunday and hearing the story of Doubting Thomas, what struck me about the story was the touching of wounds.  I felt, wow, Jesus knows what it's like to be human to the point where he wanted his wounds to be touched.  I was reading into the story my own wishes for others to recognize my wounds but it also struck me as vulnerability and trust.  In the classic painting by Caravaggio Thomas is literally putting his hand into the wound, guided by Jesus holding his arm.  Jesus is inviting Thomas into his woundedness.

That was clearly a reading that had more to do with my own loneliness than with scholarship, but the story became very special to me because I felt it that way.  Then one year I went to church on the Sunday after Easter and heard a different interpretation. I don't remember where this was or who was preaching--I don't think it was that the pastor of my own church.  But the sermon I heard that day about Doubting Thomas said that if you read the text carefully, Jesus invites Thomas to touch his words but the text does not tell you that Thomas touched Jesus.  This minister explained the interpretation that Thomas has not needed to touch Jesus's wounds, it was enough to be invited to do exactly what he had asked for.  Thomas immediately replied to the invitation with the words: “My Lord and my God.” As further evidence, the minister said that afterwards Jesus asks “Have you believed because you have seen me?” He doesn’t ask “Have you believed because you have touched me?” 

In fact, the story that has come down to us doesn’t specify what happened.   There's no confirmation in the text that Thomas actually touched, but I'm not convinced by an argument from the absence of evidence.  My first reaction, when I heard that interpretation for the first time, was dismay, even horror.  Here was a story that meant a great deal to me and someone was saying that the detail that meant so much to me wasn’t in the story at all.  I felt like something precious to me had been taken away.  I decided okay, that may be one possible interpretation but I'm not going to believe it, it doesn't work for me that way.  I didn't grow up with the idea that there had to be one right interpretation so it felt okay to me to reject that particular interpretation as not the one I needed.  These stories are in the Bible for how they may speak more deeply to us.

I didn’t dig into the history of the different interpretations until I was preparing to talk about it to you today.  What I found was that the traditional Catholic interpretation is that Thomas touched the wounds, as a series of dramatic Renaissance paintings show.  The Catholic Church valued physical confirmations of faith, such as relics and pilgrimages.  This morning, when the Pope preached on this text, he spoke of Jesus inviting us to touch his wounds and enter into the mystery of his merciful love.  He emphasized that this story shows us Jesus generous enough to offer whatever Thomas needs.

On the other side, the Gnostics, an early group of believers who ended up being declared heretics, took a different approach.  They de-emphasized the body reality of Jesus, because they saw the body and the whole physical world as fallen or even evil.  They insisted that Thomas did not actually touch Jesus, in fact could not because the resurrected Jesus had a purely spiritual body, not a physical body.  They turned the absence of evidence into proof.

The Protestant reformation many years later took a somewhat different path to a similar interpretation.  One central belief of the reformers was that salvation comes from God’s grace alone, not from good works.  Faith becomes central, not action, and so Luther argued that Thomas had found faith without the work of actually needing to touch the wounds.  Thomas does not achieve faith by his own action, but from Jesus reaching out to offer what Thomas wanted.  Thomas doesn’t have to do anything or even ask for anything; Jesus knows Thomas’s needs and gives grace freely and undeserved.  The words: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” were interpreted as a blessing on those who believe simply on the basis of the words of the Bible, don’t need saints and miracles. 

But I don’t want to fall into being a historian here, I want to try to draw you into what this story means to me.  It may mean something very different to you, but I hope my experience of it will enrich yours.

I was someone who grew up with many wounds and my approach was to hide them.  I had a head start in that because my family looked good on the outside and believed in not showing feelings. The advantages to hiding wounds is that it helps reduce being re-victimized and I was able to get some stability in my life.  The disadvantage for people who take that approach is that we end up feeling nobody is willing to see the pain inside.   We hide our pain so effectively that other people think we have it all together even when we don't. 

I had a wonderful therapist when I started working on deep healing of my childhood wounds.  I went into a rant one day about how it was too hard to heal, too hard to learn to live my life differently.  I didn’t want to go any farther.  He said to me: “I will stay with you wherever you are.” He believed that there was something inside me that would move me towards healing, and he trusted that force even when it took us in strange directions. There were times when what I needed was for him to touch my wounds, and he did. 

As I came to feel like a changed person, I realized that I didn’t feel that I was being restored to some original self from before I was abused, I was becoming a deeper person because of those experiences and the journey of healing.  My wounds are a profound part of who I am.  When I began to speak of that, someone recommended to me that I read Henri Nouwen’s book “The Wounded Healer.” 

Nouwen’s book is mostly about ministers and the loss of security in our contemporary world.  It was first published in 1979 and responds to a nuclear age in which not only is the world menaced by nuclear weapons but also we are more isolated, have lost secure communities.  We are most of all, lonely.  We long for others to understand what we feel inside. 

Nouwen is very careful in his understanding of what it means to be a wounded healer.  He sees it as not about telling our own stories, but about being able to hold and share the other person’s pain because we have gone through something like it ourselves.  And giving the other person the space to own their own pain and come to an acceptance that can be shared.  Nouwen says that shared pain is a way to newness of life if we can stay aware of the presence of a God who is already with us wherever we may be, whose woundedness is a source of healing.  We come back again to the cycle of darkness and light. 

Easter is not just one day, but a season when the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection is a smooth stone I turn over and over in my hand.  One perspective on the cross and the resurrection is that Jesus had to die in order to suffer all the pain that human beings can suffer, so that we might know that Jesus can share our feelings whatever pain and loneliness we may feel. When we are in pain, we often find comfort in stories of people who have gone through something similar and become better people for it.  Jesus was not spared the suffering of being human.  Remember that the story tells us that Jesus is resurrected with his wounds still present.  Salvation is not about erasing suffering but about transforming it, redeeming it.  Jesus shows his wounds to show us that Jesus does know what it is to be wounded and alone.  And that ultimately, our deep pain has the potential to be transformed into wisdom and connection and richer lives. 

It is an odd approach to think about God as being vulnerable, yet to me Jesus resurrected with his wounds is a symbol not just of humanness but also a symbol of willingness to be vulnerable.  A willingness to feel pain and to connect to other people's pain and be a wounded healer. And that we might in whatever way may be appropriate, touch each other’s wounds as Jesus touched many of those he healed and was even, perhaps, willing to be touched.  Over and over again, we walk through our own experiences of darkness and new life, and Jesus is walking with us.

 Written by Pam Mack and preached at Peace Church, Clemson SC, April 2015

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