John 20:24-31: Jesus and Thomas – Christ’s resurrection restores us to wholeness.

Introduction

In our scripture today, Jesus appears to his disciples just after his resurrection, saying, “Peace be with you”. “Peace be with you”.

Jesus has talked about Peace for the disciples before in John’s Gospel.

But in Chapter 20, after the Resurrection, he says three times, “Peace be with you”.

The word for peace John uses carries the same sense as the Hebrew word Shalom, a term carrying the idea of wholeness and completeness.

Jesus isn’t just talking about peace as some serene, calm feeling. He is bestowing on the Disciples the fullness of what it means to live as true humans.

In our passage, the author of John’s Gospel wants us to see how this life in Jesus’ name makes us truly whole.

Encountering the risen Jesus is transformative

We have Thomas, who had every reason not to be at peace like the others. His friend and teacher had been executed by the authorities a week before.

The disciples are worried that they, too, may be marked men, that the authorities will come for them, too. They don’t feel safe.

But Thomas is also not at peace for another reason. He’s on a different page from the other disciples. He’s been away for five minutes, and his friends are claiming that they have seen Jesus.

Sure, Jesus raised Lazarus, but Jesus is dead. He knew as well as we do that dead people don’t bring themselves back to life.

And yet, his friends stick to their story.

This whole thing doesn’t make sense. Mentally and emotionally, Thomas is not in a strong place.

Thomas is stuck between his experience of the world and a new reality being heralded.

Do you feel like you can identify with Thomas? Grieved, targeted, left-behind, alienated, confused? Incomplete. At some point, we are all in that place. At some point, Thomas’ story is our story too.

We recognise that we are not ‘whole’, that in many ways we are fractured and broken.

We recognise that even though Christ has come, lived, and died, and that God raised Jesus from the dead and the world is indeed some way changed. But the transformation is not yet complete.

That is part of our Easter Saturday reflections; we find ourselves in between. In between the reality of the New Creation, being heralded and breaking in, and the final renewal of all things, in an Easter Saturday existence.

What made the difference for Thomas in his place of grief and confusion, what brought hope, wholeness, and a new way of seeing the world, was an encounter with the risen Jesus. He becomes the first in John’s Gospel to declare his trust in Jesus not just as his Lord but also as his God.

Much ink has been spilled in attempts to prove or cast doubt on Jesus’ resurrection by historical enquiry. Basing our belief on good evidence may indeed support our faith, but it can only take us so far. Christianity is more than the mental assent to a set of historical events.

Historical enquiry and testimony of others may become the occasion for belief, writes Murray Rae. But rather, the necessary condition for belief in the Good News of Jesus is transformation of the heart and mind by the work of God’s Spirit.

If Christ is as he claims, fully human and fully God, then we will never understand him solely by digging in the sands of time. Faith is not a dirty word. It is a word for recognising God at work.

When we encounter the living Christ, we become witnesses to what God is doing in the world in and through Jesus to renew, restore, and make us and all creation whole.

Encountering Jesus by believing without seeing

But we may not want to identify ourselves with Thomas, because, for a long time, we’ve told Thomas’ story a different way. We have had this tradition whereby Thomas is seen as a faithless disciple. Doubting Thomas.

Recently, some have told Thomas’ story in a still different way. Because of his doubt, he becomes a champion for modern rational sceptics. Thomas is elevated because his belief is founded on evidence, not ‘blind’ faith. As if he were the only voice of reason amongst the disciples.

But, may I suggest that Thomas was no different from the other disciples?

He did not ask for anything that hadn’t already been afforded to the rest of them.

Earlier in the chapter, we read that the other unnamed disciple, possibly John the Author, was confronted with the empty tomb, “saw and believed”,

Mary Magdalene was physically comforted in her grief by Jesus in the Garden. The other disciples met with Jesus on the evening of the resurrection.

In the verses just before our reading, the other disciples examine Jesus’ wounds.

And Luke also writes in chapter 24 that all the disciples had doubt in their minds.

Thomas sounds like a pretty normal person. Lost and confused, afraid of being taken in. Incomplete. Broken. Like the rest of us.

Then Jesus came and stood among them. Thomas experienced the risen Jesus who tells him, ‘Stop doubting and believe’. This may sound like a harsh rebuke, but other translations express it more softly, more pastorally. In the Message, Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “Don’t be unbelieving. Believe”.

Thomas had been stuck. Like the other disciples, like most people, before he put his hope in this story that Jesus was alive before he could trust him, he needed to be sure that He was the real Jesus, not some pretender.

We’re used to the light of the Christ Candle accompanying our worship. Last week, we talked about how we had extinguished it on Good Friday, how it remained unlit in our Holy Saturday contemplative space in the Chapel, and then we lit it together on Resurrection Sunday. A symbolic representation of Christ’s death, time in the grave, and resurrection. Throughout the whole season of Lent and Easter, we’ve used the same candle. Josh even pointed out on Sunday that the wax on the top was stained with the grape juice we’d used to extinguish it on Good Friday.

Except, I wonder if you noticed? Partway through our Easter Sunday Service, the candle went out. Did anyone see me switch it out for a different candle when it failed to relight? I wanted the candle to be alive and burning when we came to the table for communion. So I had to bring in a substitute.

An innocent and practical enough moment in our worship time and space. But at some level, the continuity of our symbolic action was interrupted.

Thomas, like the other disciples, could not afford such a switch for the person of Jesus.

Thomas needed proof of life that he was dealing with the same Jesus he knew and loved. Not some imposter, pretender, or even a disconnected idea or misguided wish.

Thomas’ proof of life was to examine, firsthand, Jesus’ wounds.

For us who come after Thomas, we missed the experience of physically walking and talking with the risen, incarnate Jesus on earth.

But Jesus’ words to Thomas in verse 29 are said for our benefit. ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’

We are still in need of Christ’s peace and healing to make us whole. But we cannot put our fingers where the nail marks were. Our proof of life is necessarily different.

There are different ways we experience Christ’s presence today, but John’s Gospel wants to point to one of these ways in that: Thomas’ story is told for us.

John’s Gospel is told for us.

We can add the New Testament, all of scripture, is written for us so that we, you and I, may hear it, read it, meditate on it, experience it, and come face to face with the signs of miracles and the signs of love, mercy and compassion and so come to believe that Jesus is the Christ.

Am I aware of the greatness of the gift we have in the scriptures? Am I aware that when I open them and let them speak, it is as if I am standing in Christ’s presence, reaching out to touch the nail marks?

Or do I all too easily scroll through the latest news headlines or the latest content my social media algorithms have conjured up, to numb me?

Christ stands amongst us today by his Spirit. In the scriptures, we meet the Peace bringer, the one who brings completion and wholeness to our troubled hearts and minds. Will I meet with Jesus today? Will you?

Wholeness in Resurrection

I mentioned before that Thomas needed to be sure Jesus was indeed the same Jesus, not some impostor.

The presence of the marks on Jesus’ body and that Thomas can indeed touch him show him beyond a doubt that this is not a ghost or an apparition. This is his dear friend and teacher.

Not only is Jesus resurrected and alive, but somehow he can join the disciples in a locked room.

We don’t really know how this works, but it’s likely not that Jesus is teleporting like on Star Trek, but likely it is because, as NT Wright terms it, “He comes and goes as though he belongs both in our world and in a different world, one which intersects with ours at various points but does use the same geography”. The Risen Jesus is still fully human and fully God and bridges the area between God’s space and our space.

It is the same Jesus, flesh and bone, the tomb was empty after all. But he is somehow different. His body still bears the marks of his recent torture, but not the pain.

In coming face to face with the resurrected Jesus, the disciples experience a foretaste of something truly extraordinary: They are looking on someone no longer subject to death and decay. Not that a body that has experienced death and been brought back to life, like Lazarus. But an incorruptible body. A body immune to the effects of injury, sickness, and death.

Sometimes we have this idea that our bodies are sort of, well, unimportant. Temporary. Just a means to an end. It’s just a shell, we sometimes say. It’s not the real me.

Our body is then just something to be tolerated. Like an ill-fitting or perhaps unfashionable garment, we’ve been lumped with for the journey.

As if the body were like a shipping container that holds the true spiritual cargo of our real self, transporting it through life on earth till we can jump out and be with Christ.

This type of thought comes more from the Greek philosophers, like Plato, who envisaged a separate mortal body and an immortal Soul.

But Scripture, indeed the resurrection, doesn’t hold to that way of thinking.

God made humans whole, as Genesis 2:7 terms it, “a living soul, being”, not a two-part dualistic mix.

When scripture uses the term Soul, it pictures all of a person. Their mind, their heart, and their body.

If the Resurrection is true, then our bodies, your body, my body, are special. They are an important part of who we are.

Of course, we do not experience the completeness of Christ’s victory over death as yet. Our bodies let us down; there are bits we may not like, we experience pain, sickness, limitations, and we die. “We groan inwardly”, along with all of creation, Paul says in Romans 8, “while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”

Christ’s resurrection stands as the foretaste of what is promised to us: An immortal physicality.

We are promised an immortal physicality.

The Extraordinary God takes what is elemental and ordinary and transforms us into the likeness of Jesus, the firstborn of the dead.

Christ’s resurrection, his glorious resurrection body are the first fruits of humanity’s eternal hope.

This is the good news: death, the byproduct of our brokenness, the road where our sin and rebellion lead, has been defeated. The Peace brought by Christ’s victory over death is Life. Life in Jesus’ name. Life as it is meant to be: restored, whole, humanity as complete, unfractured images of God reflecting the glory of the creator and sustainer of all.

Ending

Thomas’ story of confusion and brokenness is also our story.

The truth of Jesus has come and he’s stood amongst us and said “Peace, be with you” 

“Blessed are you who believe without seeing”, and by believing you have life, Life eternal that makes you whole.

May we have the grace to stand today with Thomas and say, “My Lord and my God”.

Amen.