Sermon for 2nd Sunday of Easter – “Doubting Thomas” preached at the Eucharist, Sherborne Abbey on Sunday, 7 April 2024 by The Reverend Christopher Huitson. (Acts Ch 4: v 32 – 35; John Ch 20: v 19 – end)
Many, many years ago an April Fool’s Day hoax was arranged by the BBC Panorama team who managed to convince a lot of viewers that spaghetti grew on bushes. They had a film of the process as evidence and, of course, seeing is believing as the saying goes. An essential element of all April Fool’s pranks is that the victim should be convinced that something is true when it isn’t and the more subtle achieve this without actually telling a lie. When the victim realises that he has been hoodwinked then he is suitably embarrassed to the amusement of all.
This year April Fool’s Day came the day after Easter Day, but from the way some people behave you might think that they were on the same day and that the resurrection was just a foolish joke to catch out the guileless.
Of course, from earliest times those with no faith would scoff at the very idea of resurrection, but more recently skepticism, even disbelief has emerged within Christianity itself. Doubts have been expressed about the possibility of such a miracle at all, or suggestions made that the resurrection of Jesus is but another legend of a dying and rising saviour -God not unknown in the Ancient Near East and in the Greco-Roman world of gods and goddesses. Sometimes the NT records have been accused of unreliability or contradiction between the four gospels.
A new kind of attack has come by the device of saying that the resurrection has to mean something else for humanity in our modern age; that, for instance, the resurrection signified the perception by the apostles that the cross was not a defeat but a victory, and the stories of appearances by Jesus were just ways of stating that. Then came the secularisation of the Gospel school who found in the resurrection something non-religious – an attitude, not an event. It turned out to be something like contagious freedom caught from the powerful freedom of Jesus.
It may be that these ways of demeaning the resurrection are partly because we place so much more emphasis on Lent and the crucifixion. The Sundays of Lent lead up to Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday each with powerful themes, with no suggestion that they were religious fiction and did not take place. But there is less similar provision of special days, apart from the Feast of the Ascension, in the great fifty days of Eastertide. It is time to restore the resurrection to its true and significant place and the starting point has to be the witness of those first followers of Jesus.
In the NT the Gospel is the good news of the resurrection and it was this unlikely and unexpected event which changed the attitude of the apostles from cowardice to confidence with a determination to spread this good news far and wide. Soon the oral traditions began to be written down. Part of the evidence was the witness of those who had seen the risen Lord and who were still alive in those early decades, so there could be no flights of imagination. St. Thomas, as we have heard, is the archetypal doubter. But to be a Christian then was not simply to have seen something or to have accepted that someone else had. The believer was offered an experience of Christ even if he had never laid eyes on him – a new experience of God which lifted people out of themselves and above the moral struggle and which gave glory to God. St. Thomas responds: “My Lord and my God.”
So our understanding of the resurrection reminds us, firstly, that this was something completely new and never experienced before. St. Paul speaks of a new creation and calls Christ the second Adam. St. John in the Apocalypse sees a new heaven and a new earth. The newness of the resurrection is the result of the fact that Jesus is the saving person, the bringer of redemption. The resurrection is therefore a unique event because Jesus himself is unique. So Christians believe that there never was another event like this because there never was another Christ. This differs from history which records events which may well recur albeit in slightly different ways or from science which investigates repeated happenings which are subject to prediction and control.
The Christian view then can never be a nostalgia, a backward look, but a forward look from the empty tomb. The experience of the resurrection is the concrete ground of Christian hope.
Then, secondly, the resurrection embraces the triumph of the cross. Easter faith is not the happy ending of the story of the passion, just a glimpse of glory which reassures us that God set Calvary straight. Christ did not escape from pain and death; he overcame them. He did not get away from it all; he conquered it all. The crucifixion and the resurrection are one. If they were disconnected events then there would be no powerful message, no gospel to proclaim. Our belief is in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus proclaiming the wondrous love of our Lord and our God.
As you know sermons happily embrace 3 points so there is, of course, a third and that concerns the transformation of Christ’s body. This was no partial Jesus, no purely spiritual man, no ghostly disembodied spirit; nor was it simply a vision. All of these might show that Jesus had in some sense survived death, but not that he had totally conquered it. Furthermore, it is the body of Jesus which is the link between the cross and the resurrection. The gospel stories rejoice to say that the disciples identified the risen Christ by the wound prints, gashes cause by nails and spear.
When Jesus died, he was really dead. The Christian faith has no place for the notion that his death was only apparent. The Christian doctrine is resurrection not immortality. But the accounts of the resurrection reveal a difference. Jesus has not returned to resume his old life. He is different. He is discernibly different for he has new freedom to appear and disappear, to come and go when doors are locked. And even when not visibly present he knows what Thomas was saying to the other disciples. Yet he is the same: “look at my hands and my feet” he says. “It is I myself.”
A dramatic change came over the followers of Jesus. Something happened. For the Christian, life itself is an experience of death and resurrection. This has been the testimony of every generation of the church. These things keep happening within it: conversions of life or significant changes of direction, forgiveness, healings of mind and body, transformations of whole peoples, movements towards social change, creations of great beauty in art and music.
The many forms of resurrection are governed by something that happened at the centre of things. For the only clinching evidence is knowing the risen Lord. It is only as we live out our own lives in the real presence of the resurrection that we discover its reality. Then we are shown personally what the NT testifies – that the resurrection is a reality, not merely an event in the past but an experience in the present into which we can enter – now and every day and when we leave this life, as the Easter Eve collect puts it: “so that through the grave and gate of death we may pass to our joyful resurrection”.