Sermon for St. Anne’s - Sunday 27th April

Acts 5:27-32

Psalm 118: 14-end

Revelation 1 4:8

John 20:19-end

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer

There are some characters in the Bible who have had to carry down the ages the burden of being associated with behaviour and actions that place them on the wrong side of the Crucifixion story. Pontius Pilate, Judas, the crowds who shout, ‘crucify him’, people whose very human failings bring about terrible cruelty and suffering.  And today John tells us the story of Doubting Thomas.  I’ve always thought it a little unfair that Thomas has come to embody all the negatives associations we think of when we call someone a ‘doubting Thomas’.   A Doubting Thomas is cynical and sceptical, someone who demands empirical evidence.  And yet, like the father of the boy in Mark’s Gospel who cries ‘I believe, help thou my unbelief’, Thomas’s doubt isn’t something that sets him apart from the other Disciples, it isn’t an expression of cynicism, rather his doubt is a necessary stage on his journey towards discovering a deep and life changing faith. His movement from doubt into faith is something we can all share in, it’s an honest expression of our shared humanity, because most of us have doubts, and it leads to the deeply moving moment when Thomas becomes the first of the disciples to understand that the risen Jesus isn’t a ghost, or a man like Lazarus who died once and will eventually die again, but is one with God and as such offers him an escape from the darkness of his doubts into a new life of freedom and faith, a new life which today’s Gospel suggests is open to us all.

At the start of today’s Gospel, the disciples have  locked themselves away in the house where they usually meet.   They’ve locked their doors we’re told ‘for fear of the Jews’, and those doors are locked both times that Jesus appears.  But this is a Gospel about the love of God and the peace that comes with that love being totally unbothered and uncontained by our locked doors, whether those locked doors are physical, spiritual or emotional.  For the disciples, for Thomas and for us today those locked doors aren’t just physical doors made of wood and metal; they can also be  metaphorical doors, the barriers we put in place  through our reluctance to allow God to enter the  locked spaces of our own hearts and minds.  The disciples have locked themselves into the meeting room, but they’re also locked in by their fear. A fear which Jesus dispels with the words ‘Peace be with you.’  This a peace which releases them from their fears; it’s the peace which comes from recognising Jesus as one with God and which enables them to accept and celebrate the gift  He brings from God.  That gift is the creative inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and it comes to them quite literally on the breath of God.

All the way through His ministry we’ve seen Jesus working with the messy organic stuff of everyday life- he puts his fingers in peoples ears to help them hear, he uses his spittle to help the blind to see, and here, when the disciples are locked away and fearful of going out into the world, his breath, the most intimate part of his physical embodiment as a human being,  frees them from their fear. In Genesis we ‘re told that ‘the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being.’  The life that Adam and Eve receive through the breath of God comes eventually to an end, but today Jesus comes to the disciples and breathes into them and us a new form of life, the life that comes with opening those locked spaces in our own hearts and minds to the peace and life-giving creativity of the Holy Spirit.  Thomas and the Disciples discover that they don’t have to  stay locked into their own fears, anxieties and dark places; their grief at His death, their fear of being caught, their reluctance to have faith in the resurrection.  Instead, Jesus gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit, which he makes clear is creative, forgiving and life giving. With this  gift they can break free from the locked rooms of their own hearts and go out into the world spreading the extraordinary news of Christ’s resurrection, just as we see them doing in today’s reading from Acts. 

Thomas in all his honest doubting integrity shows us how we, like him, can free ourselves from the things that we may feel locked in by.  He says that he won’t believe in the risen Christ ’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’.  Thomas reminds us of the flesh and bones reality of the crucifixion.  In his words we hear the experience of someone who was an eyewitness to an act of terrible cruelty; his doubts are rooted in his trauma at seeing someone he loved subjected to the most terrible suffering.  We, like Thomas, may also find it hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God; like Thomas and the Disciples there may be fears, anxieties and things we’ve suffered in our own lives that have left us apparently locked away in dark places of our own,  but Jesus comes to Thomas, the disciples and us with the gift of the Holy Spirit and to show us a way of freeing ourselves from that trauma through faith in Jesus, a faith which has the potential to change everything.

The reality for Thomas, the disciples and us as well is that  belief in Jesus as one with God inspires a faith which transforms the way we see other people and everything else around us.  It liberates us from all the things that we keep locked away.  When Thomas exclaims ‘My Lord and my God’  he’s allowing himself to be freed through faith to live in a new way, free of the fears and doubts which had locked him in.  He sees that Jesus is God and humanity combined into one, and he realises that this is something new and wonderful.  At the same time that Thomas was recognising Jesus as God the words ‘Our Lord and God’ were used to show loyalty to the Roman emperor, and so the very first listeners to Thomas’s story his words ‘My Lord and my God’ would have been understood as a radical challenge to the worldly authority of the emperor Tiberius.   Thomas is rejecting the power of the emperor in favour of Christ, whose power and authority comes not through force or the cruelty of a justice system which saw crucifixion as a fair form of punishment, but from the love of God.

Jesus’s final command in today’s gospel is that it isn’t enough just to hear the story- we must be ready to live differently as a result. Like Thomas we must replace our allegiances to the things of this world, including the things that imprison us such as for example our greed, our anger or our inability to love, with a readiness to believe that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God. For Peter and the apostles that means preaching the gospel, and for Thomas and all of us who share his calling it means allowing the holy Spirit to help us let go of all the doubts, anxieties and prejudices which keep us trapped in our own locked rooms.  And then we, like Thomas,  may discover for ourselves what Jesus means when he talks of having life in his name.