John 20:19-31

A famous prayer is often used at Christian funerals. It begins with this sentence: "Almighty God, our heavenly Father, you have given us a sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life." Those words undoubtedly capture something vital about Christian truth. Among other things, Christian faith proclaims hope of resurrection to eternal life, that is, hope of participation in the life of God. But what do you make of the phrase ‘sure and certain’? Is hope ever completely sure? Is it every finally certain? Isn’t it part of the nature of hope, at least in this life, that it has an element of uncertainty, even risk about it? And isn’t this particularly true of such a counter-intuitive claim as hope in the resurrection? Is death not what it seems: the end of hope? Can I hope in life beyond this life as ‘sure and certain’, as the prayer asserts?

The last part of the Gospel of John, which we have been reading in this Easter period, deals with this question. In fact, John says his entire Gospel is written with this in mind. "These [things] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name." Not maybe. Not perhaps. But that you may have life in his name—‘sure and certain’, in the words of the prayer.

But when we look at the story leading up to these words, it doesn’t seem so simple. Because there stands Thomas; ‘doubting Thomas’ as history has dubbed him. Large as life. And refusing to be silent. After Mary Magdalene had brought that first, frankly incredible report, from the graveside of the crucified Jesus: "I have seen the Lord," the fearful disciples, barricaded in a room, were suddenly faced with the risen Jesus himself. He speaks to them a word of peace. He commissions them for mission, and he breathes the Holy Spirit upon them. Then vanishes.

But Thomas was not there when this happened. When the rest catch up with him, they say exactly what Mary had said to them: "We have seen the Lord." But Thomas has not seen. And Thomas is anything but sure about it. Indeed if Thomas is sure and certain about anything, it is that this report of resurrection cannot be true. He blurts out his famous words: "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." Now that’s a blunt, not to say gruesome, demand. And it’s an absolutely contrary claim. To their, "We have seen the Lord," Thomas opposes his "I will not believe." Now he could’ve meant, ‘I don’t believe what you say.’ That is, ‘you’re mistaken in your report. Jesus is dead not alive. And if you think something else, you have deluded yourself in one way or another. You’re wrong’. Or he could’ve meant, ‘I don’t believe what you’re saying.’ That is, ‘you’re trying to deceive me, to trick me into believing something you don’t believe either.’ Either way it’s not a happy exchange. Thomas says to them in effect: you’re deluded or you’re lying. Either way, that doesn’t leave much room for maneuver. And it could well have lead to the parting of the ways. We’ve seen such rejection time and again in the modern world, for exactly this disagreement. Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins and a host of lesser luminaries, say to the Christian claim of resurrection: ‘no, never, you’re wrong. Goodbye.’

But here is this fascinating note in the story that John tells of this first disagreement over the report of Jesus’ resurrection. "A week later," that is a week after Thomas’s outburst, "his [Jesus’] disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them." And he hadn’t changed his tune. I wonder what that week was like. Did they argue? Fight? Retreat into stony silence? Agree to differ? Pray? I don’t know. We’re not told. But we are told. "A week later Thomas was with them."

They hadn’t thrown him out. They hadn’t frozen him out. Despite their radical disagreement, the community still welcomed Thomas as part of their company. It must have been awkward at best. They had such opposing perspectives on this crucial matter. The others were sure. Thomas was anything but. And yet they held a place for him. Why?

Well, not least, I think, because Thomas had something to offer them. Thomas belongs with the believers because he refuses to rush to what we might call cheap faith. Freud dubbed it wishful thinking; Dawkins calls it ‘delusion’. We Christians believe in the resurrection, so the critics argue, because it softens the harshness of death. The world seems to be empty and pitiless. Life flourishes for a moment. But soon cold nothingness asserts its ascendancy and we vanish away. We don’t like that prospect so we jump at a—frankly—impossible alternative. Thomas won’t let the believers get away with that. He knows Jesus was treated with contempt, injustice and brutality and that he really died and was buried. That truth about Jesus, and about the world, needs to be faced and not side-stepped with easy words about resurrection, immortality or what have you. Unless Thomas can be convinced that it is this Jesus who actually went through that terrible reality, this Jesus whose hands were pierced and whose side was cut open, that is alive, he is not going to be soothed into false faith with sweet words. And the church, we believers, need to face that honestly too. That is Thomas’s gift to us. And that early community was prepared to receive it. "A week later Thomas is still with them."

But the other side of the coin is there also. A week later Thomas was still with them. As easily as they could have thrown him out, Thomas could have chosen to go. Why stay with this bunch that seem bent on fantasy or falsehood as far as he could see? Leave them to it. Find another group to be part of. But no, Thomas sticks with them. Why? It’s not that he has relented and decided to join their conviction. He hasn’t. When Jesus appears this second time and Thomas is with them, it is clear he is still where he had been a week before. In full frontal doubt. But he’s there. So he must have felt the community, the community of resurrection faith, had something to offer him despite their differences.

Perhaps, one thing they had to offer was genuine acceptance even in the face of strong difference of belief. This is important. The resurrection of the crucified Lord creates at heart an open community. The resurrection itself is an open event. I mean by that, that the risen Christ holds open the door of God’s life to all people. Resurrection as an act of God in which violence, sin and death are taken into God’s life and overcome, so that they no more hold dominion in the world, potentially includes within itself the whole creation. The world is offered a part in this new creation of God. The world, not just people who see the world the way I do. The resurrection is an event held open by the risen Christ to Thomas the doubter as much as it is to Mary the believer. That is manifest when Christ himself appears before Thomas and says, ‘well here I am.’ And the community reflects that living openness by including Thomas in their midst just as he is, full of doubt, questions and disputation. Thomas is able to find his own way, in his own time, in the openness of the community of faith. He doesn’t have to toe an official line, or be doctrinally correct, or abandon his sense of honesty in the search for truth. He has a place in the community, though for the moment he doesn’t share its basic conviction and is full of radical questions.

In the day to day life of the church there will always be Mary and Thomas. Faith and doubt live together. The important thing is not to be too quick to draw a sharp and exclusive line between them. Because Thomas disagrees with Mary at this moment doesn’t mean that somehow Thomas doesn’t belong or should be excluded. Faith and doubt can work with each other in their disputation, and perhaps help one another along. And in any case, the line between faith and doubt doesn’t just run between Mary and the Thomas. It runs down the middle of each of our hearts.

There are times when life treats us roughly. When loved ones die and leave us, when hopes are dashed, when jobs go wrong, when friends abandon us, when health fails: at such times any of us can feel, as Thomas felt, that harsh reality simply swamps faith in resurrection, hope and life; and we find it hard, or even impossible, to believe any more. I have been in such places; perhaps you have too. I feel I have been fortunate in such circumstances to find that the community didn’t throw me out. They stood by me in doubt and sorrow and despair. When I couldn’t say with any truth or confidence, "I believe in the sure and certain hope of resurrection", the community held that truth for me; their faith carried my doubt; their hope in the resurrection held open the door of life for me when for the moment I couldn’t see it, and didn’t even want it.

So Thomas is important for our church. As a church, we have the great privilege and responsibility of being witnesses to the resurrection of the Lord. But life is messy and often opaque. It’s not possible for all of us to hold this faith all the time. But one of the marks of the community of the resurrection of Jesus is that it holds open the possibility of resurrection life for all, even, and perhaps especially, for those who find it hard to fathom and even harder to credit.

And so I think one of the great texts of hope in all the New Testament is this one. "A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them."