“T” is for Thomas

A sermon by Paul Peters Derry on John 20: 19-31

Trauma, commonly understood as “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience” and “emotional shock following a stressful event or a physical injury,” is most often applied in a negative sense.  PTSD:  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  We suffer lingering effects of trauma.  Trauma limits an otherwise “carefree” existence, unbalancing us, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

It’s long been assumed that collective experience of trauma gave rise to the Fourth Gospel.  A couple of generations after Mark, Luke and Matthew, “Followers of the Way” experienced expulsion from synagogue.  A community shaped by this trauma of being kicked out:  the rejected become the rejectors.

An example from tonight’s gospel reading, when we’re told that the disciples were together, with the doors were locked “for fear of the Jews.”  Given the explosive political context of the first century believers living under Roman military occupation, my sense is that disciples would have barricaded themselves out of fear of Roman authorities.   As the story was told a generation or more later, it makes sense – sad but true – that John’s Gospel would have a decidedly hostile attitude to those who’d kicked us out.  “You reject us, so we’ll reject you.”

New Testament scholar Adele Reinhartz challenges this “expulsion hypothesis,” or at least says it presents only part of the picture.   She argues that God’s incarnation, and its insertion alongside God’s covenant with our Jewish sisters and brothers such that we too are now part of God’s promises, is the primary motivating trauma behind the Fourth Gospel.  Incarnation breaks open the boundaries between divine and human realms.  Reinhartz shifts an understanding of trauma from something generally viewed in a negative to something that is, as she concludes, “the incarnation, God’s revelation of the divine Word in the flesh … the most exhilarating, life-giving event imaginable.”

A new day has dawned.  A seismic shift, a heaven-to-earth and earth-to-heaven transformation has happened.  Life as we knew it has gone and – something for which we have more than a passing familiarity – we’re having to pivot to a whole new way of being, acting, and relating. 

On this new day, it is now evening.  Jesus appears to the Twelve, standing among them, blessing and commissioning them. Those who witness all of this are delighted.  One of the Twelve, was not present, such that when others announced, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas declares, “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.”

It’s significant in that John has it occurring on that first new day.  Important enough that the lectionary schedules it every year on this 2nd Sunday of Easter.  It’s meant to grab our attention.  The moral of the story, captured in the gospel writer’s interpretation of Jesus’ reprimand to Thomas: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  In other words, “Don’t doubt, believe.” 

And yet, I can’t shake the longing for the story offering something more.

I’m hoping that it can offer something more along the lines of affirming doubt as a sign not of weakness, but of deep and abiding integrity.  Like the words offered by Clementine Churchill to her husband, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as portrayed in The Darkest Hour, the account of everybody’s last choice to become Prime Minister became their greatest hope.  In a particularly riveting scene, Churchill at his deepest-pit of depression and exhaustion – can you blame him? – is sitting on the side of his bed.   Churchill can no more pull himself up from the side of the bed than he can marshal allied forces against the invading onslaught. Clementine reassures, challenges, scolds, compels Churchill, “You are strong because you are imperfect. You are wise, because you have doubts.”

The story also offers something more, in how can we not, with Thomas, want for ourselves to be graced with first-hand experience of the resurrection?  Second-hand accounts provide no substitute, and as one television commercial puts it, “This is not the time for second-best.”  In twinning with Thomas, the ever-faithful disciple at the heart of tonight’s gospel, it never is.

Finally, the story offers something more as it resonates with how a new day dawns, how seismic shifts, a heaven-to-earth and earth-to-heaven transformations happen, how life as we knew it is gone and we’re pivoting to a whole new way of being, action, and relationship.  In each and every experience of this, God’s people always feel a mixture of excitement and unease, anticipation and anxiety, possibilities and panic.

In the 1971 Hymn Book, a hymnary that nobody liked, and everybody felt short-changed by, designed as part of the denominational merger envisioned for the Anglican and United Churches of Canada.  And yet, it offered Sydney Carter’s “Lord of the Dance,” and a hymn written by then Dean of Christ Church Anglican Cathedral in Vancouver, Herbert O’Driscoll:

“From the slave pens of the Delta, from the ghettos on the Nile
Let my people seek their freedom in the wilderness awhile,”
So God spoke from out of Sinai, so God spoke and it was done,
and a people crossed the waters toward the rising of the sun.

When we murmur on the mountains for the old Egyptian plains,
when we miss our ancient bondage, and the hope, the promise, wanes;
then the rock shall yield its water and the manna fall by night,
and with visions of a future shall we march toward the light.

In the maelstrom of the nations, in the journeying into space,
in the clash of generations, in the hungering for grace,
in our agony and glory, we are called to newer ways
by the Lord of our tomorrows and the God of earth’s todays.

 “From the Slave Pens of the Delta” brings Exodus theology to bear alongside 1960s unsettledness-yet-hope-that-never-dies. O’Driscoll’s attentiveness to the “now” leaps off the page, with nods to space travel, generational conflict between “baby-boomers” and their parents.  “Maelstrom of the nations” points to how O’Driscoll wrote the hymn after the 1967 “Seven Days War,” outbreak of the “Irish troubles,” and other intermittent conflicts requiring deployment of United Nations’ peace-keeping forces.

It’s a hymn for that time, a hymn for our time, and a hymn for every time and place, it proclaims God’s people always feel a mixture of excitement and unease, anticipation and anxiety, possibilities and panic.

One more thing.  In preparing this sermon, I came across O’Driscoll’s full name:  T. Herbert O’Driscoll.   Thomas Herbert O’Driscoll.

That’ll preach …

In the name of God:
Father of the fatherless, Mother of the motherless,
Companion, Friend, Saviour and Spirit for us all.  Amen