Public Faith: Confession, Loyalty, and "Doubting" Thomas

There are two events in this Sunday’s Gospel, events separated by a week.  In the first, the glorified Christ bestows his peace, breathes his Spirit, and sends his disciples to continue his mission: to judge sins to be sins, and to forgive them. In the second, the Lord appears again to the disciples—this time including Thomas—and displays his wounds to show that what had happened the week before really had happened.  Jesus Christ—risen and glorified, conqueror of death itself—really had sent his Advocate, his Spirit, who would bring peace to the hearts of the disciples as they were sent into the world in the same way as the Father had sent the Son into the same world—judge it but not to condemn it, but to save it through suffering. 

In our day, marked as it is by unbelief, the second event—the story of Christ’s appearance to Thomas—naturally draws our eye. The risen Lord points to his wounds to show that the one who had been crucified was, against all odds, alive in his body, in front of them. How can it not arrest us? Here is a body marked by death, standing alive daring unbelief to persist. “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.” It forces us to ask whether God, if there is a God, could do such a thing as breathe new life into a corpse. And so we are drawn to Thomas, we acknowledge our doubt, make our confession, and hear again the gentle judgment of the risen Lord, “Stop doubting and believe.” 

But to make the story of Thomas about skepticism is to make two mistakes. The first is to read it as though it has nothing whatsoever to do with the first. But look: the day is the same—the eighth day, the first day of the new week, the day of life, the day of resurrection—the setting is the same—the house, even the disposition of the disciples is the same—the doors were locked for fear. These stories belong together. We need to read them together. 

The second mistake follows from the first. To read the second story alone leads us to miss the point of the story. We take its themes of doubting and believing—which undoubtedly are there—and conclude they have to do with degrees of knowledge. Thomas’s conversion is one from scepticism to faith. But knowledge and scepticism are our problems. They are not the problems of the text.  For in the text, faith and belief have not to do with knowledge as much as with loyalty. John simply isn’t interested in the questions that so occupy us. And when we take as central what, in the text, are tangents to the main point, we miss the point. 

So, let’s keep the events together and read them as one extended encounter with the Risen One and see what emerges. 

Jesus has risen. He has appeared to Mary and offered her the strange commission, “Go and tell my brothers I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” And she has done so. And the response of the eleven? To huddle behind locked doors in a safehouse—so scared were they that it remains anonymous even in the text. They hide for they fear that the wrath of the Roman and Jewish establishments that had been visited upon their master would overflow to find them. And Jesus appears. 

This is and is not the Jesus they knew. The Jesus whose heart had ruptured just two days before. He is recognized and yet, he appears. He does not knock. His body is no longer limited by the three dimensions that define us. He has been glorified. He has—recalling his warning and charge to Mary Magdalene—ascended to his Father. He has been lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness. And now, alive again, he is not confined to our space and time. He is a human being fully present to the life of God. He appears as the one who has already been exalted to reign. Paul will later tell the Christians in Ephesus that when Christ ascended, he gave gifts. John is now narrating that great giving. 

“My peace I leave with you,” says Jesus. Exactly what the disciples need. Huddled and hiding, baffled by Mary’s message, their hearts were anxious and afraid. Do you think this visual validation of Mary’s report brought comfort? I think just the opposite. Put yourself in their place. Were I to have seen my grandfather seated in the front pew this morning when I walked into the pulpit, my first reaction would not have been happiness, let alone peace. And the Glorified One gives his peace. 

But the peace he gives is not simply to calm their hearts while they hid in the house, immobilized by locks and fear. For the gift is followed by a command. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 

As the Father has sent—the action, the Father’s sending—is ongoing. Jesus has been glorified. He has ascended. He has returned to his father. And yet his mission is not complete. He is still sent to the world, for the world, to save the world. And now his mission will continue through the witness of the disciples. Who had been with him. Who had heard him. Who saw him die. Who have now seen him alive. The peace he bestows upon them is not a salve to their fear as much as it is a catalyst for their courage. They are to unlock the doors, to set aside the fear, and with proper confidence proclaim to the principalities and powers that their time had ended, that God’s Christ had triumphed and was now reigning, that the old order was passing away, that people were being rescued from the kingdom of darkness and brought into the kingdom of light. Now that he has been glorified, they will continue his mission. They have been sent to carry on his sending. 

They will not do so alone. For now, Jesus gives another gift. Jesus breathes into them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Jesus mission does indeed continue, and in a new way. The disciples will have another Comforter, sent by the Father through the Son, who will remind them of everything Jesus taught them, who will guide them into all truth, who will, in the absence of Jesus, convict the world of sin and of judgment and of righteousness. 

The Greek here is a little awkward. Were we to opt for a less smooth, but more literal translation, we would say that Jesus breathed into them. John calls to mind Genesis 2 and Ezekiel 37. God breathes into Adam and he becomes a living being; the Spirit of God breathes life into the dry bones and they live. Here, now, John is saying with that little preposition, the renewal of the face of creation is beginning. Here, now, the Spirit enlivens the disciples and God’s redemption of the world is beginning to be accomplished. The Son of Man has been lifted up. He has been exalted. He has been glorified. And he gives his Spirit, the Spirit of the Father, the Holy Spirit so that all the gone wrongness of creation, the sin, the evil, the bondage to God’s enemies, the exile of the human race, will be forever ended. 

And again the disciples are sent. Their mission, the continuation of the mission of Jesus is clarified. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” The mission of Jesus is reduced to one word: judgment. In the power of the Spirit of God, the disciples will continue Jesus’s his actions, his teachings, his work. Some will respond in repentance and faith and be forgiven. Others will rise up in opposition or seethe in silent resistance. Their sin will be retained. Either way, the mission will continue. It cannot be stopped. It is God’s mission, passed to the Son, carried out by the Spirit, continued by and in the disciples. 

The Ascended One had appeared. The Glorified One had given. The Conquering Christ had commissioned. One would expect that, after a week, the doors would not only have been unlocked, they would have been blown clear off the hinges. This rag tag band having been transformed by the peace of Christ and the presence of the Spirit into powerful preachers of the mighty acts of God. But no. The doors still sit in their doorsills, not simply closed, but still locked. The disciples are still huddled. Still hiding. Still fearing. Still doubting. They need a second commissioning. 

The disciples, having received the gifts, need to be told again about their purpose. And they are, this time in the spontaneous confession of Thomas, though his words, “My Lord and My God.” 

Thomas is indeed doubting. But we must not judge him too harshly. He is not a sceptic—in our modern sense. He is a wounded lover. He is one whose loyalty has been stretched to its limit and it has, under the awful weight of a Roman cross, snapped. When he says, unless I see, unless I touch, he is not demanding proof as much as he is begging to have the same experience as Mary, who clung to the risen Lord so forcefully that he had to command her to release him. He wants to have the same experience as his 10 companions the previous week. This is a story about faith, all right, but faith understood as fides—loyalty—not a degree of certainty that lies between knowledge and mere opinion. 

When Jesus displays his wounds to Thomas and the rest, he is first of all reminding them of a public event—his crucifixion. He may have been tried in semi-secret, under cover of darkness, on the basis of perjured testimony privately given. But the gibbet on which he gave himself, hung between heaven and hell for the salvation of the world, was in plain sight. The charge—Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews—written in multiple languages to secure as wide a readership as possible. This was an execution in broad daylight. It was the power of religion and the power of Caesar on public display. Indeed, its public nature was what established and permitted the persistence of that power. These were they who had the power to deprive people of life. They did it in public because they could; they did it in public as a reminder that any who crossed them might be next. 

“Put your finger here, put your hand there,” says Jesus. There is no escaping this. This humiliating death. It really did happen out there. Out there in the world of Annas and Caiaphas, in the world of Herod and Caesar.  And Thomas erupts, “My Lord and my God.” 

This is no ecstatic utterance of private prayer. This is a political declaration. The first readers of the Gospel, having lived through the persecutions of the Empire, would have recognized the language. The emperor himself was Dominus et Deus noster. Our Lord and God. The emperor himself guaranteed the peace of Rome and empowered his legions to keep it. So much so that he was venerated as a deity. A small thing only, a pinch of incense and a confession. The Emperor, by virtue of his peace-keeping power, was Lord and God. He kept the peace. He permitted prosperity. He was—really!—the source of life! 

Breaking into this world, shattering it, are the words of Thomas—my Lord and my God. Christ has died in public. He has conquered death in public. He has defeated Caesar. He is the true bringer of peace, the real source of life. When he points to his very public wounds, wounds that are now rich wounds yet visible above, he closes the door forever to private devotion and opens the one to public proclamation. One door will never again be opened; the other will never again be shut. And Thomas gets it. Thomas is the first. My Lord and my God! And Caesar is not. 

The second appearance is a judgment on the locked-door disciples. They have the peace of Christ. They have the power of the Spirit. They have been sent on the same mission of the Son. It is time to throw wide the doors, to forgive sins, to embody the love of he who sent his Son to save the world. Now, in peace and in the Spirit’s power, it is time to go back out into that world. 

This is a story about loyalty and confession. If Christ is raised, if Christ is glorified, if Christ really has ascended to his Father’s right hand and now reigns over all the self-styled Caesars who cling to the order that is passing away, then we who are heirs of the disciples, the recipients of the same Spirit, the inheritors of the same commission, cannot keep it in private. Just as the disciples were called to take the forgiveness of sins to the world of Caesar and Herod and Annas and Caiaphas, so we today are called to take it to the world of Justin Trudeau, Rona Ambrose, and Elizabeth May. 

As in the day of Caesar, the world that is happy to have us provided we keep our loyalty to Jesus private. The world still that does not want to hear that its sins have been forgiven, that its way of ruling has been found wanting, that it has been overturned and is already being made new. 

The early Church, following the witness of John’s Gospel (as well as the advice of Peter, Paul and Jesus himself) looked at government in two apparently contradictory ways. On the one hand, as instituted by God and as acting to preserve the space in which the Gospel could spread, the powers were to be appropriately honoured. Christians are good citizens.   

On the other hand, any assertion of government to be the source of life was a futile attempt to deny the victory of Jesus; it was the spirit of anti-christ.  

What kept both perspectives together, what kept them from finally contradicting each other, was the victory of Jesus. Jesus had conquered the powers and their rule was a mediation of his; Jesus had conquered the powers and they could not deflect the Church from her mission. 

This has not changed. The Gospel of Christ, the Gospel lesson for today, Thomas’ confession of Christ, means that whether you tilt orange or red or green or blue, the first loyalty before the ballot box and after is to the One who showed us his wounds. Who has called us to stop doubting and believe. Who alone can claim the title, Lord and God.