MOST RECENT SERMON

Sermon. Easter 2. Year C. John 20.19-31

Though often descending into a discussion of the stereotypical image of the sceptic, ‘the doubting Thomas’, our Gospel today offers us far more. Its spiritual, and therefore physical, message, revolves around the interplay of belief and body, faith and wounding. And as people who believe, as people who are embodied in faith and wounded before God, this is not just Thomas’s story; it is our own

For today we hear of the first meeting of the Body of Christ, the first meeting of what becomes Church, the very first meeting of OUR church as people made new in the love of God. This meeting though is of a group of fearful men, hiding behind locked doors, refusing to really take in the Good News that Mary Magdalene has revealed to them earlier that day – she who first saw the Risen Lord.

And into this mix of fear and confusion, caution and doubt, comes Jesus.

Jesus visits on the first day of the week – in the Jewish religion of the time, this is symbolically the day of creation. This is the day that God creates all things. In the second account of Creation in the Book of Genesis, God breathed into the nostrils of the first human being, formed from the earth, and made them alive. And of course, Jesus, as God, also breathes in our passage today.

At the time of Christ the Jewish scriptures, including the Book of Genesis, were read mostly in Greek translation. And the same Greek phrase used for God breathing life into the first human is used here for Christ breathing upon the gathered disciples.

Jesus is here beginning the new creation; creation as it should have been, creation that is redeemed through his victory over death. And he makes the budding church the new creation – his gathered disciples, through his holy breath, are made anew and become the new creation in themselves, in their lives, and crucially in their bodies.

We are told Christ’s presence is physical. He is body; he shows his physical wounds and physically breathes on the disciples. He is really, physically, solidly present. Yet we are also told the doors, physical doors, were locked. There were physical barriers to Christ’s physical presence – yet he still was there physically present. He was not there as an appearance, as a ghost, as “spiritual presence”, but as a person embodied in flesh and blood, as we, the gathered Body of Christ, are flesh and blood.

What this impossible conundrum points to is highlighted by Jesus’ physical breathing of the Holy Spirit. The Greek word pneuma means, at the same time, literally, ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’. One is not a symbol or a metaphor for the other – the two meanings exist as one. Breath is spirit; spirit is breath. Holy breath is holy spirit; holy spirit is holy breath.

The physical is spiritual; the spiritual is physical.

This is the central mystery of our faith – that the uncreated, invisible God becomes and IS a human person; that the human form, the human body is the image and fit representation of a divinity that created, and is beyond, the universe. That the body, our bodies matter, that the body, our bodies are spiritual, are holy.

And more than this; that our wounded bodies, our wounded selves are holy.

The disciples do not yet rejoice when Jesus stands among them, showing he is alive where once he was dead. They do not rejoice when he grants them peace, the peace found only after the victory over death. They rejoice only when Jesus shows his hands and his side, when he shows them his wounds. Then, seeing the physical damage of the torture from the Cross, then they know for sure this is the physical Jesus. But in this showing of who he is, the same teacher they knew and loved before the Cross, he is showing them that even the resurrected body, even the body that that will commune with God forever, is wounded, is broken, as we are wounded and broken.

Christ standing before the disciples shows them physically, literally and without a doubt, that wounds are included in the Body of Christ; that no matter how wounded we are, we are included in the Body of Christ.   

Wounds are important too for Thomas. He wants to physically know the Risen Christ through these wounds. He wants to have intimate bodily knowledge of them; sight is not enough. In the end though, the invitation by Christ to touch, to enter into his sacred body is enough and Thomas goes further than the other disciples; ‘My Lord and my God!’ he proclaims. Thomas recognizes the eternal uncreated mystery we name God as this wounded, but whole and holy person before him. Then he believes.

Belief here however and throughout the New Testament is not as we may understand it. It is not an affirmation of faith, like we do every Sunday.

The Greek word translated as faith or ‘believe’ is pistis. Both within the Gospels and the wider world of the time of Christ, the word had a wider sematic range of meaning than we sometimes limit it to by our English word ‘faith’.

It was also understood as a vow, or a pledging of allegiance. This is the word used when someone pledged themselves to the Roman Emperor, or to another binding covenant relationship.

Allegiance to the Roman emperor required allegiance of the body; one could not commit to fight, without actually, physically fighting. And as Christians, we cannot have allegiance, we cannot have faith, without giving our bodies. We are religion of the body, a spirituality of the wound.

As wounded bodies, and as the Wounded Body of Christ, we are sent out by him – just as these disciples were – into the world. Jesus is clear; they cannot stay in that room, huddled close in fear. No matter what wounds they have, no matter what wounds we have, Christ sends us in to the world so loved by God.

We are sent to show Christ in our bodies and in our wounds, just as he showed the disciples his body and his wounds.

What happens when we do this, do nothing more – and nothing less – than being a wounded disciple is so beautifully summed up by Symeon the New Theologian, a Byzantine Christian monk of the 11th century, I will finish by quoting a famous poem of his in full.

We awaken in Christ's body

as Christ awakens our bodies,

and my poor hand is Christ, He enters

my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully

my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

(for God is indivisibly

whole, seamless in His Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once

He appears like a flash of lightning.

Do my words seem blasphemous? -- Then

open your heart to Him

and let yourself receive the one

who is opening to you so deeply.

For if we genuinely love Him,

we wake up inside Christ's body

where all our body, all over,

every most hidden part of it,

is realized in joy as Him,

and He makes us, utterly, real,

and everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in His light

he awakens as the Beloved

in every last part of our body.