Passage for reflection: John 20: 19 - 31
Imagine if you will for a while something life changing happening, a huge moment no one expected, something your friends are so excited about – but you weren’t there. You missed it and now you cannot get your head round what they are telling you. You think they are having you on.
On the evening of the first Easter Day Jesus has come to the disciples huddled in the upper room in fear and he has given them peace and he has breathed on them with the gift of his Spirit.
I want to think about Thomas and then us as we try to come to terms with the reality of Easter: that resurrection just happens, that new life out of seemingly desperate endings is God‘s way.
Thomas wasn’t there that evening. Where was he? Like all of them he’d been through the brutality of witnessing crucifixion. I wonder whether while most of them wanted to be together, maybe he just needed to be on his own in his grief. Remember when Jesus talked about going to Jerusalem to suffer and die, and the others wanted to go anywhere but there, it was Thomas who said “let us also go with him that we might die with him.” He’d been fiercely loyal to Jesus and so I reckon he was heartbroken. The reality of death was real.
And so it is. Yes, we have our faith in eternal life, we know the end of God’s plan for his people, but let’s be a honest shall we? When death comes, and we encounter it, it is really hard. We say death is nothing at all, in a poem to comfort us at funerals, but actually I’d like to take Henry Scott Holland in a corner and say actually, it isn’t nothing at all, it’s huge and it’s shattering.
The time for hope comes but first people need to know we get their pain.
Thinking about the Duke of Edinburgh, we give thanks for the life of a remarkable man who served his country faithfully and did all sorts of stuff, I want us to remember an elderly lady who is grieving a life partner of 73 years marriage who she has called her strength and stay. I want us to remember a family who mourn a father, grandfather and great grandfather. I want us to remember all those who have lost loved ones through this dreadful pandemic and are trying to pick up the pieces.
Death is real. I’ve been fascinated since the announcement of the Duke’s passing of protocol that swings into action. D day was planned for ages. So suddenly there are decrees about flags at half mast, bells tolling in cathedrals 99 times, Parliament being recalled, and in the media all usual programming altered. Radio 2 as I wrote this yesterday afternoon were still playing music to suit the national mood,(Carpenters tracks) and I loved some of the teenagers who were listening to Radio 1 on Friday morning when suddenly a Lana Del Ray song had the National Anthem break into it. One wrote on Twitter they hadn’t a clue what was happening and thought we’d suddenly gone to war, and another later clearly bemused why the radio sounded different exclaimed “surely Prince Philip liked a bit of Dua Lipa.” We’ve been through the likes of Diana and the Queen Mother passing on, they had not. Death became suddenly real and unavoidable.
Thomas was full of death. So imagine his friends telling him Jesus was alive. He just couldn’t accept it. No one survives what Jesus went through and you don’t just walk through locked doors. So he asks for proof. “Unless I see, unless I feel his wounds, I will not believe.” I get him. How cruel to wind him up. He liked to ask questions. Remember when Jesus went on about being the Way and them knowing where he was going, it was Thomas who spoke up and said “We don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way? I don’t get it!”
A week later, Thomas sees Jesus. He gets the chance to do what he needs to, and he doubts no more. He is the first to offer a creed post Easter: “my Lord and my God.” What does he show us? Well, I think a Jesus who doesn’t deny death is a big deal, but who patiently shows people with questions he will answer them and show them a power in the world stronger than death. Questions and searching are okay with this Jesus. Death isn’t whitewashed out of the story. The pain is allowed to be voiced.
And sometimes coming out of a horrible situation people need permission to share exactly where they are. Or they need to be allowed to emerge into a new reality slowly.
There is in this encounter a word for us. Jesus says to Thomas “blessed are those who have not seen yet come to believe.” Then John the Gospel writer has some words about his editorial policy. “These stories 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.” John has in his previous 19 and a bit chapters given signs about who Jesus is. Here, in this upper room, he reveals his true identity, and from this upper room, he calls the church to share him, yes, death is real, but he is the Lord of life and conqueror of death. Alleluia!
I was interested to see in one of the programmes about the Duke on Friday night he’d written some books and one was on theology. The Guardian obituary confirmed this and his love of questioning!
“Clerics visiting Balmoral or Sandringham to preach Sunday sermons could be disconcerted by his beady-eyed scrutiny from the front pew and his close questioning over lunch afterwards.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury in his Easter sermon last Sunday thinking about us emerging out of our own lockdown and our own times of death:
“Death is the greatest and most devastating liar. The lie that the final breath is the end, there is nothing more; the lie that we will always be separated from those we have loved, ultimately losing those we love for ever… of course death matters. It is brutal, terrible and cruel. But it lies when it claims to have the final word.”
That’s what Thomas needed to hear. That’s the sure and certain faith the Queen holds on to, that’s the message that must come out of us, every day to a world and hurting people who really think death is it. For them, like Jesus did Thomas, can they be convinced through us to believe in Easter?
No comments:
Post a Comment