You may already know that the Sunday after Easter is also called “Low Sunday” as in “Low attendance Sunday“, I guess because everybody is tired after all the churchy things going on during Holy week and Easter! It’s usually the time when the priests, if they have an assistant or a seminarian, would ask them to preach, and this not only because they are tired too, but also because this passage from John’s Gospel that we have just heard is the same very year, no matter if we’re in year A, B or C. Every Sunday after Easter, we hear the story of Thomas. And so it can be hard to find something new to say…
One of the refreshing things we can do though, is to turn to the original text. And you don’t even need to be fluent in Greek! There is a blog on line (“Left Behind and loving it“) where a theologian every week translates anew the passage of the Gospel for Sunday, and he has often great insights that help us come closer to the original intent of the author, often buried under layers of tradition…In our case, that would probably be the way we almost immediately think about Thomas as “Doubting Thomas” and then interpret the whole story using that angle. What was striking to me for our passage this week is that the translator notices that we always read that Jesus appeared to the disciples while Thomas “was not with them”, as if, he says, Thomas had to excuse himself to go buy himself breakfast. Yet, if we look closer, the form of the verb that is used would be best translated as “Thomas was not being with them” as in “Thomas was no longer with them”. And so, although it may sound like a detail, it actually makes a big difference. Jesus didn’t show up right at a time where unfortunately Thomas had something else to do (and that wouldn’t have been very fair to him, if you think about it), rather Jesus showed up after Thomas had decided he didn’t want to be part of the group of the disciples anymore. I found that very interesting.
Why would have Thomas left the group? We can only imagine, but surely it had a lot to do with dealing with the pain of the loss of Jesus, who was not only their friend but also the one they had set their hope on, the one they started to believe was the Messiah. As they had lost Jesus, the disciples had very likely lost some of their faith in a God who would let Jesus dies a horrible death, they also probably had lost some of their faith in their group, in the bond of their friendship (since they had all fled except for John) and they probably had lost faith in themselves, having let fear overcome them (as is noted at the beginning of our passage). For Thomas it was probably more than he could bear, he who was the one who, a few chapters before, encouraged the disciples to follow Jesus to Jerusalem in spite of the danger, so they could “die with him” (John 11:16) – and then he deserted like too like the rest of them.
And so, although we have never been in Thomas’ shoes, I would say that it is probably not that hard to relate to that. I guess that, for a lot of us, because of suffering or trauma, we may have reached (once or now) a point in our lives where there are things that we cannot do anymore, at least not the way we used to. Not so much because of the loss of a physical ability, but because our heart is not in it anymore. Not because we are just discouraged, but because something so difficult happened to us that we feel like we’re done. Maybe it’s a job, maybe it’s a relationship. Something bad happened and it just does not make sense for us anymore. There is a movie that has just been released “Moving On”, it is quite a silly movie if you want my opinion, but there is a passage that is quite touching. The main character meets again with her former husband after twenty years of estrangement, and he finally asks her why she left him. And based on what she says, we realize that it isn’t anything he did, and actually neither it is anything she did that ended the marriage, it just that something so terrible happened to her that she couldn’t be in the marriage anymore (we learn later what).
Well, I think it’s true with faith too, maybe it’s especially true with faith because it’s all about faith actually: Faith in our relationships, faith in our vocation, faith in God. Sometimes we lose our faith with no fault of our own just because something really bad happened to us. Ask people why they don’t believe in God, most of them won’t start an intellectual fight, most people will say that they don’t believe in a loving God because there is too much suffering in the world, and if you dig a little, you realize that this awareness come often after something bad happened to them personally. They become what we call “Doubting Thomases”, but at the root of their doubting is almost always trauma and suffering.
So what happens next to our doubting Thomas in our story? Well, that’s exactly where he is when he meets Jesus: lost and stuck. But it is only then that the risen Christ comes to meet him. And he comes to meet Thomas in a very special way: by showing him his wounds. I think he does that for a very special reason: Of course he is bringing to Thomas the material proof that he is indeed the same Jesus who was crucified, but more than that, by showing his wounds he says to Thomas that he could undergo all that suffering and come through to the other side of it. Pain and loss are as real as the marks of the nails on Jesus’s hands and feet, but there is more to the story, there is a possibility to go beyond the trauma to find new life in God. It’s Jesus whom Thomas meets, the Jesus he used to know…and a different Jesus too: A Jesus who is healed, transformed and risen. Not just a friend, not even just the Messiah, the king of Israel, but, as Thomas professes, the one who is “Lord and God”, because nothing else will do.
At this point, of course, this is not only Jesus who is transformed, it is Thomas’ faith too. Thomas lost his faith to find a new one, or if you prefer, to bring his faith to a new level. The doubting Thomas is the first one in the Gospel to acknowledge Christ’s divinity. Indeed, Thomas couldn’t do faith as he used to, having maybe a kind of naive trust that Jesus would fix everything on earth, that his enemies would finally listen to him, that God would give to Jesus unlimited power. But Thomas finds a new faith in a God taking up on human suffering and redeeming it for eternal life. And I think this what Peter is trying to explain to the first Christians who are being persecuted. In the Epistle we have heard this morning, we see that Peter encourages several communities to believe that their faith is tested through their many trials, like “gold through fire”. Suffering can be vain and meaningless, but if we persevere it can also have a way to purify our faith, to broaden it, to bring us closer to God.
What happens on that day is that Thomas is in need of healing. Healing from loss and the trauma of the crucifixion, healing from disappointment with God, friends and self. And the miracle is that, instead of curling up at home lost in self pity, he decides to go back with the disciples and gives it another try. Yes, Jesus shows his wounds but it’s mainly a mirror offered to Thomas of his own suffering, and how this suffering can and will be transcended. It’s an invitation for us to ask for healing too. That the many trials of our life, instead of getting us stuck and lost, would open us up to a broader faith in the risen Christ. And as the ten other disciples, we are also invited to encourage those we know to be stuck and lost to give faith another try, assuring them, as the ten did for Thomas, of our loving our presence, faithful friendship and truthful testimony.