Easter 2 A

John 20: 19-31

One of the most memorable parts of my time in seminary was in a class that I took on preaching through the seasons of the church year. My professor was an eccentric man, even by my standards; I remember spending several hours each week in his office discussing how to talk about the gospel, with two King Charles Spaniels under his desk and, on top of shelves crammed with books, a baseball ( his father had been a major league player at one time) and a memento moria skull. He was someone given to provocative statements, but one has stuck with me because I believe it really may be true, if only in theory. He said that any act of preaching the gospel on a Sunday morning was a heresy, an offense against the church, because you had to be able to preach the entire gospel at once, which couldn't be done, at least in a Sunday morning worship service. In other words, the people on the other side of the pulpit had to hear the entirety of Matthew or John with the preacher as a guide and fellow traveler, not the small bits we usually hear. The birth, the healings and miracles, the passion and resurrection, all of it had to be there before we could think we had begun to do justice to the mysteries we were talking about.

But before you think anything like that will happen here this morning, we are here to talk about the fear in that upper room. It is a real, physical, limbic fear, a back-alley fear of seizure and death, but it is also the fear that we feel when we know something has transformed us and maybe the whole world, something that we could not really understand but threatened our lives as we knew them and everything we had taken for granted. It is into that fear that Jesus steps this morning and his first words are, Peace be with you, not the peace of the world that organized his execution but the peace of the Holy Spirit, which he is breathing on his disciples, the peace of something new entering their lives, changing them and maybe changing us too.

One of them, however, is not there. When Thomas arrives, he will not accept all this talk about an empty tomb, about their Lord standing among them. Like them, he knows the promises of God-- because he is at my right hand, I will not fall; therefore my spirit rejoices and my body shall rest in hope. He wants to see this thing for himself, not stories or parts of stories. It does not matter for Thomas, and maybe for the rest of us, what the others saw or heard in that upper room last week. It doesn't even matter that the other disciples, his fellow travelers for the past three years, can tell him about this experience, one as real as the healing of lepers, changing water into wine, multiplying loaves. Thomas wants to see the Lord for himself, to put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side. He wants all of his Lord before him, and, if you are like me, you do too. It is only after Jesus appears among them again and offers the very thing he is asking that Thomas makes the most profound statement of faith in the entire gospel: My Lord and my God! Thomas's confession endorses the very beginning of the gospel, that, The Word was with God and the Word was God, that the living God is revealed in the person of Jesus.

I have always had a soft spot for Thomas. I became a deacon on his feast day, and I don't believe it was an accident. All of us ordained that day were commissioned to go into the world to prove it, as the preacher told us, to prove that there was something in their lives beyond the suffering that many of us saw, the sleepless nights that we knew among the people we worked with and grew to love. Our cry, My Lord and my God, was to be the answer to a world where peace was a scarce commodity, where people didn't want any more promises. They too wanted to see the whole thing, whatever it meant to them, a real Lord working in the very real world they lived in, spreading a news that was not only good but real and tangible instead of the empty assurances they received each day; it was only then that they might spread that news themselves. I have an icon of Thomas staring back at me from my bookshelves to remind me of this joy and responsibility.

But there is another reason why I feel a special kinship with Thomas. He is called the Twin in the New Testament, which is famously silent on who the other twin is, but I believe I know who it might be. I think it might be me and, if I'm guessing right, it might be many of you, too. We all want to see the real Jesus, not a second-hand story about him, and the only way we can do it is by looking into the face of each other and seeing the risen Christ, through the work we do, the ministries to which we offer ourselves, but most of all what we are willing to be to one another. If Thomas is indeed your twin, as I believe he is mine, then our work begins this morning and each day forward to show this Christ to the world, a world tired of half-measures and hungry to glimpse the real Jesus that we can see even amidst the brokenness and fear around us.

My Lord and my God. To be able to see Jesus, the whole Jesus, in this way is to be able to see in a different way, maybe especially during this Easter season. There is plenty of fear in our upper rooms, fear of jobs we think may vanish, fear of what might happen with the people we love. But the Easter message is to recognize Jesus, all of him, wherever we go, in our offices, among the schoolchildren we work with and the people we serve. If we are indeed willing to see the risen Christ in this way, not only with our eyes but in our hearts, then we cannot help echoing the faith we see in the disciples this morning, in the words we say, in the bread we break, but most importantly in the love we can offer the world.