In her wonderful book, The Preaching Life, Barbara Brown Taylor tells of monthly visits she once took as a pastor to celebrate communion with a nursing home on the other side of town.
“Once a month, nurses roll ten or fifteen of them into the sun room and park them in a semicircle around a small table. Some of them complain as I prepare the elements – Get me out of here! Take me back to my room!” – while others doze off in front of her. If you’ve ever visited a place like this, you know what she’s talking about. As good and necessary as they are, they can be hard.
“Few stay awake through the whole twenty-minute service,” she says. “When it’s time for them to take communion I go from chair to chair, patting them awake and asking them if they want the bread and wine. About half let me press the elements to their lips; the rest refuse to be roused or else they look at me as if I am a burglar. It’s one of the hardest things I do,” she writes, “because I sometimes doubt the power of the sacrament to break through their fog.”
One day she went late on a Monday afternoon. A volunteer warned her that everyone’s medication was wearing off—a mixed blessing because they were more awake than usual, but also more vocal and restless.
“What shall I read from the Bible this afternoon?” she asked them. ‘What part would you like to hear?’ The commotion lessened enough for one woman’s broken voice to be heard above everything else. ‘Tell us a resurrection story,’ she said. Her words settled over the room and the sleepers opened their eyes. ‘Yes,’ someone else said, and then someone else. ‘Yes. Tell us a resurrection story.’”
I.
Friends, whatever else they are, these curious scenes from the 20th chapter in the Gospel of John that we receive on this Second Sunday of Easter each year, are “resurrection stories.” Just like the story we heard last week of Mary at the tomb, they’re stories, strange but hopeful, of encounters with the risen Christ. These stories in John are so important because they tell us that resurrection is not contained to a moment in time so long ago. The story of Easter continues—resurrection continues, and we experience it, even now, wherever and whenever we encounter the love of God that calls us out of our fog into new and abundant life.
And if we take these stories as a model, we learn that these resurrection stories in our own lives are marked by at least three things. The first is mystery.
Earlier that morning, the tomb had been found empty and Mary had encountered the risen Christ, but so much remains unclear. The disciples, unfortunately, don’t have the advantage of hearing the choir sing the Hallelujah chorus on Easter morning! They’re still groping in the dark to discern just what has happened, or is still happening. And I’m not sure these encounters help much in that regard.
We’re told that they’re gathered in fear. First, no doubt, fear of what the authorities will do when they find the tomb empty. And perhaps second, fear of the ghost of their leader, who is said to be walking about posing as a gardener. The door to the room is locked—we’re told that detail specifically—and yet suddenly, miraculously, mysteriously, Jesus is standing there before them. He shows them his hands and his side. He tells them not to worry, not to fear—Peace be with you, he says. Then he breathes on them, recalling the breath of God that blew over the waters of creation, or went into those first human lungs, and he says Receive the Holy Spirit. And he’s gone. Or at least, that’s where that story ends.
What else happened? Did anything else happen? Did they have time to ask questions? Did they stand around in awkward silence, not knowing just what to say? We’re not even told how Jesus got into the room. Had he been hiding in the corner? Did he walk through the wall—and if so, does that tell us about his resurrected body? We’re almost left with more questions than answers. In fact, I wonder if you asked them even years later, whether the disciples could tell you just what happened that night.
One minute he wasn’t there, and then he was, like just before and after you light a candle. One moment, no light, the next moment light.
For all our talk of light at Easter, there is so much darkness in these stories. So many shadows. So much clouded vision. Christ has been raised—that the disciples can see. But just how it works and what it means remain a mystery. And I believe this is how it is with resurrection whenever we encounter it, or whenever it visits us—when we glimpse life beyond the grave, when what we thought was dead and gone is revealed to be alive again. Life continues, but so many of our questions remain unanswered. Oftentimes, experiencing resurrection requires that we make peace with what we cannot know. It’s only when we make that peace that new life is possible. The hope, like with the disciples, is that the joy we now know in the face of that mystery will be enough to see us through.
II.
Mystery is a part of any resurrection story. And with mystery, with this not-knowing, inevitably there is also doubt.
While history has not been kind to Thomas, in more recent times, he’s become a source of hope for many in more recent times. The patron saint of doubt and skepticism, granting us permission to not rush into faith too quickly, but with care and resolve. Thomas’s simple request to see and to touch for himself—the same as all the other disciples had received!—or the idea that someone so close to Jesus would need still a closer look, or even that Jesus didn’t give up on him despite his reservations, suggests that doubt, too, can be a vehicle for faith. And I count myself among those who have found and continue to find comfort and community with Thomas.
Honest doubt, or what’s been called “devotional doubt,”1 can be such a critical part of faith. It teaches us humility, reminding us of how much there is that we simply do not, and maybe cannot know—helping us to find peace with mystery.
Of course, not all doubt is honest or devotional. Sometimes doubt can be a crutch or a shield that keeps us from taking the risk of going deeper into ourselves, or of seeking truth. Doubt can harden into cynicism and close us off to beauty and wonder and possibility—all the attendant virtues of faith.
But honest doubt, doubt that knows its own limits and knows it’s incomplete—doubt that aims to run toward something instead of run away from—this kind of doubt often enlivens faith, and gives faith room to breathe and grow. It keeps our hearts open and curious. After all, the opposite of faith really is not doubt, but certainty. When we’re certain about something, we have no need for faith—these are different categories altogether. Faith only lives in the places where certainty is impossible; the places and times and seasons when we are forced to choose between unknowns, and cast our lot with what we cannot be sure of, but somehow come to know deeply is true—so much that we would stake our life on it. This is how it is with all of the most important decisions we will make in life. To protect ourselves from this risk of love or commitment is to deny ourselves a depth of life.
And granting permission to doubt, ask questions, or simply find your own way to faith, well, this is among the most crucial, honest, and hopeful things we can do as a church—for our children and youth, but really for all of us. And hope is really at the heart of this permission, isn’t it? Along with trust, which flows from hope. Hope that God’s imagination is greater than our own. Trust that given the space and grace and promise of a home to return to, we all will find our way. Trust that the Spirit is working in ways we cannot know.
III.
Thomas is so important to the resurrection story because he reminds us what faith is and what it isn’t. But Thomas is also critical because he reminds us of who Christ is and isn’t. Or rather, how we will know it is the real and true Christ.
We will know it is truly Jesus, not by the sound of his voice or the look in his eye, but by the presence of his wounds.
This is the third essential element of any honest-to-God resurrection story: wounds. Have you considered what it means that even the risen Christ still has wounds? That it was not until the disciples saw his wounds that they knew it was really him?
That Jesus, upon being raised from the dead, did not come back to life unblemished, but bearing the marks of his struggle? That God did not see to it that Jesus’s body would be pristine or even scarred over, but is still tender? That Easter comes to the disciples with Jesus, standing there before them, more vulnerable than triumphant. Or maybe the lesson we are to learn is that these two—triumph and vulnerability—are not the opposing forces we imagine them to be. The way of the risen Christ is no less surprising, no less counter-cultural, than the way Jesus walked in his earthly life, the way that led him to lay down his life. This is a different vision of strength, a different vision of power. It’s a vision the church remains uncomfortable with.
There is, in the present moment, a telling of the Christian story ascendant in our culture that is difficult to square with the wounded Christ of Easter. It is a war-making Christ that gloats over the suffering of enemies, that revels in death-dealing power, that rejects mercy as weakness and honor as naive. This is not the Christ of Easter. In fact, it is closer to a description of the forces that put Jesus on the cross. And to confuse those two is to mistake Caesar for Christ.
If we look closely, we see Jesus’ wounds are the only part of him that comes into focus in these shadowy scenes from John. They’re where our eye is directed, what the gospel wants to make sure we do not miss. Jesus tells them, tells us, twice, Look here, and here. This is important. This is how you can know it’s me.
Christ is risen, not with a sword in his hands to avenge his death, as if the love of God would ever need avenging. Christ is risen with marks of his struggle in his hands and side, and a blessing of peace on his lips. Like the disciples, this is how we know it is really Christ we’re being led to. And if even the risen Christ can offer this blessing and bear these wounds, then we can too.
We say through the resurrection God made “all things new,” but in Jesus’s wounds we learn that doesn’t mean “just like new.” Resurrection doesn’t mean, “Like it never happened.” Resurrection means it happened, and here I am despite it. The promise of our faith—that we wait for in the end but can experience now at different points in life—is not that things will return to how they were before. It’s a promise that life can continue despite whatever has happened. The promise of Easter is not that the clock will magically turn backward. It’s that time, combined with care and community—for resurrection never happens alone—will miraculously and mysteriously bring us forward, out of the darkness of how things have been, the pain we have suffered, the loss we have known, and into the gentle light of God’s new morning.
IV.
Mystery, doubts, and wounds. These are the parts of the Easter story we receive each year on this Second Sunday of Easter, and I thank God for it. I thank God for it, because it turns out you cannot tell a resurrection story without them.
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1 Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, 75-76