Jesus and Thomas

 

So it is the evening of what we now call Easter Sunday.
Jerusalem is quiet, shocked still by the happenings at the end of the previous week.
Not so much by the executions –
they seem to be two a penny these days –
but by the fact that that rabbi, the one they called Jesus, the one who had come into the city on a donkey with a huge crowd shouting and cheering him on –
they had killed him!

And his disciples –
most of them, anyway, had locked themselves in the upper room of a house, as they were afraid, with good reason, that the authorities who had taken Jesus to his death would be after them, too.

There were odd rumours going round.
A couple of the women said they had gone to the place where he was buried, and found he wasn’t there.
An angel had apparently told them that he had been raised from death.
Mary Magdalene even said she’d seen him and talked to him.
Well, you can’t trust what women say, can you?
But then Cleopas and his wife come rushing in, breathless and exhausted, saying that they had seen Jesus on the road and walked with him, and he’d come in to supper with them.

And then, suddenly, Jesus himself is there, standing in the middle of the room.
He hadn’t opened the door –
they had been careful to lock it again once Cleopas had arrived.
But he was there.
Alive.
Real.
You could touch him,
see where those terrible nails had been hammered through his hands and feet,
see where the soldiers had stuck a spear into his side to make quite sure he was dead.

But he wasn’t dead.
“Peace be with you!” he said.
And they were no longer afraid.

He said he was hungry, and shared their supper with them, just like in the olden days.
But it wasn’t quite like that, he was different.
His body was just as solid as ever, but somehow, not quite the same.
And in his manner, he seemed far more sure of himself, far more certain.

“Receive the Holy Spirit” –
what did he mean by that, they wondered?
“If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven;
if you don’t forgive them, they aren’t.”

Again, what did he mean? The disciples, at that stage, had no real idea.
And then Jesus wasn’t there any more, although nobody saw him go.

And then Thomas arrived.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
“Got held up.”
And, all talking at once, they try to tell him what has happened.

But Thomas is sceptical.
Can’t really be true, he says.
You must have been dreaming, or a mass hallucination or something.
And even though they tell him over and over again, he still has trouble believing.
“I’d need to touch those wounds you say you saw, need to put my hand on his side where the spear was.
Then I might believe, but really, no –
people don’t come back from the dead!”

Poor Thomas.
It seems less than ten days ago that he was the one who said to Jesus, “Well, if you insist on going to Jerusalem, let’s all go with you and die with you!”
and now he seems to have missed out on all the excitement.
People don’t come back from being dead,
no matter how much you would like them to.

But then, on the other hand, there had been those miracles, people healed –
the time Jesus’s friend Lazarus had died,
and Jesus had called him to come out of the tomb, and he had come.
Or when that little girl had died, only Jesus had said she was only sleeping.
Or that time when….
Thomas remembers all the times Jesus had healed the sick or done other miracles.
But then, he couldn’t be alive, could he?
And so on, round and round, on the treadmill of his thoughts.

This goes on for a whole week.
It must have seemed an eternity to poor Thomas,
with the others, although still cautious and hiding from the authorities –
indeed, some of the fishermen were talking of going back to Galilee and getting the boats out;
safer that way, and Jesus had apparently told the women to tell them to go back to Galilee –
the others, still cautious, yet fizzing and bubbling that the Teacher was alive!

A whole week.

But at the end of the week, they are still in the locked room.
They have been gathering there every day to pray and be together,
and trying not to come to the attention of the authorities.
Thomas is beginning to seriously wonder whether they’ve gone mad, or whether he has.
Maybe he should just leave them, and go on home to Galilee.
But maybe, one last time, he’ll join them.

And he’s so glad he did, because Jesus comes again, specially to talk to him,
to show him his hands and his side, and say
“Go on, you can touch them if that’s what you need to do to believe in me!”
Thomas doesn’t seem to need to, he believes anyway and worships his risen Lord.

And then later on, tradition tells us,
he goes to India and founds the church there,
and many denominations there say they trace their origins back to his ministry!
So what do we learn from this story.
We sometimes call Thomas “Doubting Thomas”,
as though that was the only significant thing about him.
It wasn’t, of course.
He was a brave and bold disciple, and he went to the furthest reaches of the known world, and beyond, to tell people about Jesus.

What’s more he was brave enough to say that he didn’t believe it.
That took a great deal of courage, if you think about it.
All the others seemed to be totally convinced that Jesus was alive, even if they did privately wonder if they had dreamed the whole thing.
But Thomas was the only one brave enough to say he thought it was all rubbish.

But in a way, the story isn’t really about Thomas, is it?
It’s far more about Jesus, and the way Jesus deals with Thomas’s doubts and fears.

I wonder why Jesus felt it necessary to wait a whole week before coming to reassure Thomas?
It does seem odd, when you think that Thomas had been one of his most loyal followers.
Some people might think that he was punishing him for doubting, but that doesn’t seem very probable.
Not when you look at the way he treated him when he finally did turn up.

Jesus has form for delaying, if you remember.
When Lazarus was so ill, and then died?
And we know that Jesus loved Lazarus, and was badly upset when he saw his tomb.
And Mary and Martha were upset, too:
“Lord, if you had been here, our brother wouldn’t have died!”
But Jesus delayed, so he said, that God’s glory might be revealed –
and he raised Lazarus from death.

I’m not just so sure why he had to delay in this case, though.
But perhaps it was to show us that it’s okay to have to wait.
So often we want to see God at work now.
We want to be healed now.
We want answers now.
But God doesn’t seem to work like that.
Sometimes we need time to work through our feelings about something.
Sometimes we need to be certain that we really do want God to work –
do you remember how Jesus would always ask people what they wanted, did they really want him to heal them?
Were they sure?

After all, when God acts, life changes.
Thomas’ life was irretrievably changed.
Well, obviously, so were all the other disciples’ lives changed.
Jesus said “Receive the Holy Spirit”, and although nothing much seemed to change at that moment –
they were still hiding away in the upper room the following week –
later they were able to receive the Holy Spirit in a more dramatic way, and were changed forever more.

But for Thomas, the change was immediate and dramatic.
He went from unbelief to faith in the course of a single moment.
And his life was changed.

I do like the fact, too, that Thomas was still hanging with the others.
He could have walked away, gone back to Galilee, or wherever it was he came from.
But no, he stayed with the others, and they all saw Jesus come to him specially, they all saw Jesus inviting him to touch his hands and his side.
They all heard Thomas exclaim “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus came to Thomas and gave him a special touch, a special visit.
Later, he came to Peter on the shores of Lake Galilee, and spoke to him, specially, making sure Peter knew he had been forgiven for denying Jesus on that dreadful night when the authorities had arrested him.

The author of John’s Gospel reminds us, too, that Jesus did many more things than that, and that his book is a carefully curated selection
“in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through your faith in him you may have life.”
Jesus said to Thomas that people would be able to believe in him without necessarily having seen him.
“How happy they will be!”

And down the years, Jesus has come to us in many different ways.
Some of us may have experienced his presence unmistakeably, no matter how short a time.
Others may never have experienced him directly, but have met him through the words of a friend, the actions of a stranger, a random sermon.
We are all different, and Jesus treats us differently –
he meets us in the way best suited to our nature, the way we would be most inclined to trust.

Thomas needed a special visit from Jesus.
And Jesus paid him that special visit.

We all need a special visit from time to time;
maybe we will have to wait, as Thomas had to wait, as Lazarus had to wait.
But Jesus will come to us in the end.
He will come, he will forgive us, heal us, reassure us, and enable us to use our lives to his glory!
Amen.