March 27, 2008
Upper Room
Easter 2A Jn 20.19-31 2008
We give Thomas more grief than he deserves. We seem to remember him more for his doubt than for his faith. We call him Doubting Thomas when Courageous or Faithful or Risking Thomas might be more appropriate to his enterprise.
While the rest of the disciples were cowering full of resentment and fear that they’d bet their lives and whatever fortunes they had on a loser, Thomas was out pounding the pavement, risking arrest, renewing old contacts, checking the want-ads, and looking for work.
He didn’t believe the talk about Jesus. He wanted better evidence than the behavior of his cowering colleagues. Then, when he got it, when he got what he wanted, he signed on for good or ill. He accepted his commission as an apostle. He wrote a gospel. And, some say, he started a new church over in India. “Brother Thomas’s Sawdust Trail,” (aka Mar Thoma). Sounds like a hustling evangelist to me.
We don’t have the hard evidence Jesus presented to Thomas. (If walking through closed doors with holes in your side and hands can be called “hard evidence.”) John knew that, but he apparently knew something else, as well. Faith is not only always surrounded by doubt and without hard evidence. Faith creates both doubt and evidence.
Faith is risk, and risk wouldn’t be risk without doubt. And faith that comes only after evidence is no faith at all. It is trust, yes, but not faith. Faith is that daring commitment that climbs out on life’s limbs and leaps. And that is all the evidence we get.
And it works two ways. My faith is a kind of evidence for me and maybe also for you. And your faith is a kind of evidence for you and also maybe for me. Our faith — all that touch and go — as a community is what makes church church. The ekklesia — the called — doesn’t even deserve the name if it is not first and foremost a community of faith — and probably of doubt, as well. And there is no evidence for that — even the kind that moves mole hills — until there is a pulsating, dynamic, nonjudging heart of love and justice at its core.
The fearful disciples in the upper room would probably never have convinced Thomas until he experienced the vision of the risen Lord, himself. Nor if fear is our only motivation and keeping us in our upper rooms would we ever convince those who pass by. Not until we show the world by the daring way we love one another can our witness ever become the winsome and compelling evangel of the Lord.
For it is in that nourishing and healing love that transcends both faith and doubt and even hope, if St Paul is to be believed. And wherever such love is found, that is where the Lord is truly risen, where He is risen, indeed. It is there and only there that we find “church.”
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