Last week you and I experienced the Risen Christ.
Some of us may even still be a little raw from the experience – dazed, perhaps, wondering, What happened? Was it real? Could it be? Did I dream it?...
Trying to remember exactly, perhaps to make sense of, or even reclaim, the experience.
After all – nothing seems to have changed, really.
The streets beyond these walls are still pretty scary – Roman soldiers everywhere, violence and threats of violence.
No wonder we’re huddled behind these walls, hiding, despairing – at loose ends, really.
What’s next? Where do we go from here?
And then Jesus – the Risen Christ – comes and stands among us, and says, “Peace be with you.”
He shows us his hands and his side.
He breathes his Holy Spirit into us, and suddenly we are different, transformed!
Thomas isn’t with us. We don’t know where he was, or why.
- Perhaps he’s gone searching for food for our evening meal, coming back with the groceries. He uses the “secret knock” to gain entry to the room, and bursts through the door. “Whew! Here’s the food you asked for, Peter! Wow! It’s dangerous out there!”
- Or perhaps he’s gone to Galilee as directed, and is only now returning, dragging his travel-weary and discouraged body through the door: “Hey, guys! I looked everywhere around Galilee! No sign of Jesus anywhere! Couldn’t find him at all!”
What we do know is that Thomas must have been drawn up short, startled and amazed at the change in the disciples, at the atmosphere in the room, at the way anxiety and despair have been replaced by Peace.
“Whoa! Something’s different! What happened to you?!”
And the disciples tell him. “We have seen the Lord,” they say.
But it’s more than “We have laid eyes on the Lord.”
Clearly, they have experienced the Lord.
They can tell Thomas all about it, but he can’t know it in here, their words can’t give him that same experience.
“I want what you’ve got!” we can almost hear him exclaim! Whatever it is, I want it, too! Let ME “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, too, want the experience of the Risen Christ!
Thomas has been a faithful follower of Jesus.
He knows a lot about Jesus, about his earthly life and ministry. He has followed him; he has heard his teachings; he has been loyal, willing even to go to Jerusalem with Jesus to die; he has undoubtedly been grieving Jesus’ death; but, when we first meet him in this morning’s Gospel lesson, he has not experienced the resurrection.
Just as words cannot convey the power of a work of art – we must experience for ourselves the painting, the concerto, the poem, the ballet – so, too, with Thomas and Jesus.
He doesn’t want simply to HEAR ABOUT the disciples’ encounter with the Risen Christ.
He can see the power of that encounter, the transformation – and he wants that experience for himself!
I think of this morning’s Gospel lesson as giving us two “snapshots” of the early church which are important for us today, especially as Messiah faces Brad’s retirement and this time of transition:
- In the first, we see a motley assortment of Jesus-followers, frightened, confused, depressed, despairing – wounded in spirit if not in body – huddling together for security behind the walls of that room.
- In the picture, “taken” as it were just a short while after the first, we have that same group of Jesus-followers after their encounter with the Risen Christ: a group altogether transformed and empowered by the Spirit!
It is clear that “the church” is NOT about Peter, or the Beloved Disciple, or James the brother of Jesus, or any other one person who might assume a leadership role. Even so, the Church of the Messiah is not about the clergy, or the wardens, or the vestry. The church is about the gathering of followers of Jesus who have been transformed by their experience of the Risen Christ.
The other remarkable fact about this passage, these “snapshots,” – and an important lesson, at least for me – is that when Jesus appears to this assembly, never once does he say: “Why did you all scatter while I was on the cross? Where were you?!” Or, “Peter, why did you deny me?” Or, “Didn’t I ask you to go meet me in Galilee? I looked for you there…”
The encounter is free of reprimand, chastisement, criticism, or guilt. Instead, Jesus says to them: “Peace.”
Peace.
He gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit.
THERE is the Church!
The Church – then and now! – is what happens when we encounter the Risen Christ!
This morning of course we hear that Jesus does come once again into the closed room where the disciples are gathered, and he does offer himself, his hands and his side, to Thomas.
As Jesus offers himself, so Thomas receives, so Thomas experiences.
Thomas may well be the model for St. Augustine’s observation: “When you begin to experience God, you realize that what you are experiencing cannot be put into words.”
Thus, Thomas’ response: “My Lord and my God.”
My Lord and my God.
He can say no more; he can simply acknowledge his experience.
But what about you and me?
How can we experience our Risen Lord? We, who cannot see, who struggle to believe what we cannot see?
Jesus’ life and death happened in a specific time and place: two thousand years ago, in and about Jerusalem.
But his resurrection liberated him, not just from death, but from the confines of time and space.
Fortunately for us, Jesus does not reside in that hut Peter wanted to build for him on the mountain at the Transfiguration.
And his body is not in a tomb in Jerusalem.
The resurrection makes the experience of the Risen Christ available to each one of us, to you and to me.
Of course we can’t invoke experiences of the sacred: they don’t come on demand.
Thomas asked for what he wanted; but he did more than ask: he also opened himself to receive.
So, too, with us:
We can pray.
We can open ourselves to receive.
We can move through our daily lives alert to possibility.
A rabbi taught that experiences of God can never be planned or achieved. “They are spontaneous moments of grace, almost accidental.” His student asked, “Rabbi, if God-realization is just accidental, why do we work so hard doing all these spiritual practices?” The rabbi replied, “To be as accident-prone as possible.”
So, what about you and me?
How can we be “accident-prone”?
How can we experience our Risen Lord?
We can’t put our fingers in the marks of the nails and our hands in his side…
Or can we?
For I believe that:
- Whenever we reach out to the poor, the downcast.
- Whenever we sit with someone in their pain.
- Whenever we oppose injustice, or exhibit solidarity with the oppressed.
- Whenever we feed, or clothe, or nurture, or care for, or weep with, the broken parts of creation,
then we are touching the wounds in the hands and the side of Christ.
Whenever we feed, or clothe, or nurture, or care for, or weep with, the broken parts of creation, then we are touching the wounds in the hands and the side of Christ.
Do we recognize him?
Peter said, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.”
Not just the disciples.
You and I, also, are witnesses.
Witnesses who have seen, and who know – who have touched his wounds and been transformed.
Witnesses whose lives have been changed in such a way that others may see, also.
Henry David Thoreau once asked, “With all your science, can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?”
Not with knowledge, but with experience.
Knowledge tells us about.
Experience makes it ours.
May we each reach out to touch the wounds of Christ in this creation, and find the experience which renders speech inadequate even as it lights our soul, so that our witness, like that of Thomas, is a reverent: My Lord and my God.
Amen.
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