St. Matthew's, Chandler AZ
Sixth Sunday of
Easter
|
Year B
|
"The student
looked up from the Gospel reading and said "Thomas is a punk!"[1]
She used
considerably stronger language.
Tuesday nights at
the ministry house on campus were our community’s opportunity to gather for a
meal and worship; and while I would occasionally give a sermon or a reflection,
I most often left the space for an impromptu Bible Study on the texts for the
coming Sunday. I might have some
interesting tidbit about the text or a comment about some theme, but I most
often asked those gathered questions like:
What new ideas did the text inspire them to think about?
What is God doing in this passage and how are we called to respond to that action?
I am always
interested to see where people might take these questions, and I knew we were
doing something right when we got to a place of an unvarnished, raw, reaction
to something in the text—be it a testimony to God’s action in one’s life in a
way strikingly similar to the biblical situation, a disagreement with something
in the Bible, or an outburst about one of the people in the passage we had just
read. Those raw reactions make me sit up
and take notice; they make something of the divine come alive within me. God acts frequently in the midst of
disruptions, and casting aspersions on the disciples we are told in subtle ways
by the tradition to emulate or see ourselves as like isn’t the way smooth bible
studies are supposed to go, but whoo-boy God shows up in those moments. I also have the type of personality that
responds to sass with sass. You can find
God there too, it turns out.
And to be fair,
the student is right. Thomas is a punk—and I swear that I’m not recycling a
sermon on Thomas—but think about it. We
talk about Thomas as though the only thing he’s known for is that he
doubted. First of all, all the disciples
doubted the resurrection until Jesus showed up in the locked room. We remember Thomas like he somehow different
from them.
But that’s not even the worst
thing Thomas did. Before Jesus and his
entourage even arrive in Jerusalem before the crucifixion, it was known that
going there will mean death because the religious leaders were looking to kill
them. And Thomas said, in his first
sentence in the Gospels, that they should “go and die with him.”[2] Sounds pretty brave, right?
But guess who does not end up on a cross with
Jesus? If Jesus was the
passive-aggressive type, you can imagine that the last words from the cross could have been, “Gee, who said they
would follow me all the way to my death, and who is nowhere to be found? Thomas and Peter.” So, Thomas didn’t follow through with his
promise.
He punked out on Jesus.
Thomas is a punk.
But here is where
the student seemed to have the real problem. Jesus’ forgiveness of Thomas and the other
disciples came too easily. Jesus just
shows up and forgives. And Thomas gets
exactly what he asks for: to see Jesus
again in the flesh.
Jesus could have just said, “If Thomas won’t
believe the other disciples, then tough for him. Out he goes, the unbeliever.” And, if you’ll
remember, the disciples had received the Holy Spirit at this point from Jesus,
and they keep the unbelieving Thomas around for a week in the same house.[3] That’s a long time to keep someone who
disagrees with you around when you do not have a smartphone to distract
you. The disciples as bearers of the
Holy Spirit and Jesus could have just written Thomas off, but they do not. They stay with Thomas and the truth is
revealed to him (even though he was a punk).
See, here’s the
thing: we are so used to conditions
being put on love, on affections, on friendship, on religious life, on all of
our interactions, that witnessing the indiscriminate love God has for us and
for others is often difficult—even offensive—to us. The forgiveness and love of God is given to
us freely, and because of this, we sometimes think it comes to too easily.
Father Robert
Capon, an Episcopal priest, once wrote a prayer that encapsulated the
difficulty of living with the reality of God’s freely-given love and grace. He said:
“Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit. Show us that
there is at least something we can do. Tell us that at the end of the day there
will at least be one redeeming card of our very own. Lord, if it is not too
much to ask, send us to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which we can
congratulate ourselves. But whatever you do, do not preach grace. Give us
something to do, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate
acceptance.”[4]
The ironic thing
about this prayer is that even though it shows how we may grasp at
something—anything—we can control about the relationship we have to God, this
is the one prayer God will never answer.
This love and grace God gives us is outrageous, but to allow us to carve
out a space of our very own, to pretend that we can continue to struggle in
this world on our own, God will not allow that.
To do so would be abandonment, and God will never do that. Nor will God
respect our claims to set the conditions of the love God offers to us or to
others.
This is the sixth
Sunday after Easter. And all throughout
this Easter season our readings have been pointing us to the nature of this
love that God has for us—our readings from the Acts of the Apostles, from the
Gospel of John, and from especially from the first Epistle of John, which is in
part a treatise on love. Through Jesus’s
resurrection appearances, we see a love that reconstitutes broken
relationships, a love that pursues even when we think the object of God’s love is
unworthy, even if that object of God’s love is one’s self.
Though the Acts
of the Apostles, we see the Holy Spirit constantly a few steps ahead of the
disciples, showing them that Ethiopian eunuchs and Roman gentiles are within
God’s grasp and loving purpose. All the
disciples can do is breathlessly make official the radical, barrier-breaking
movements of God’s equal regard for all.
All the while the disciples--Peter especially--have to get over the
revulsions engrained in them for profane animals and profane persons. After the baptism we heard about today from
Acts, Peter has to return to Jerusalem and explain to the offended disciples
what happened, about which he said, “If God gave [those gentiles] the
same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I
that I could hinder God?’[5]
The image of love
scripture gives us is as wonderful as it is terrifying. Assenting to it as a philosophical
proposition—maybe that is possible. But how do we accept it? Our relationships, our acquaintances, our
common lives, our economics, all of these have a sense of quid pro quo so
firmly rooted in them that it is so hard to imagine something so freely given
and so unearned that also sometimes seems invisible.
But there is also
something attractive about this love.
Something that calls us to experience a reality greater than the one we
see around us. Something beyond the
mundane, something that ignites holy desire and pushes us beyond our
limits. Something that strikes us a
freely given but demands so much. Others
sense that attraction; even if it isn’t always clear that Christians act
according to it. Will we share what we
know of such a mystery?
Beloved of God,
Who are we that
we might hinder God?
Who might we
prefer to set God’s love as conditional for?
Is it a
particular person?
Is it a group of
folks?
Is it yourself?
Where might the
Holy Spirit be calling on each of us to break a boundary on God’s love we would
rather keep in place?
