Intimacy – Touching Each Other’s Wounds

What Thomas wants we all want.  We want to know that Jesus is real.  We want to know that he is alive and not dead.

Enjoy Simona Frenkel & the Choir

That experience of knowing – really knowing – that Christ is alive, and is still able to touch and love and heal, is something we want and need, especially when times are dark and uncertain.  And for Jesus’ disciples the times are very uncertain.

They’ve had a terrifying series of experiences.  They saw Jesus arrested, whipped into a state of shock and crucified.  And then on Easter morn all Peter and John saw was Jesus’ empty tomb, which wasn’t really good news at least not at first. If anyone had seen them hanging around the tomb, they would have been suspected of grave robbery – a crime punishable by death in the 1^stcentury.

So it’s no wonder that, at the beginning of this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus’ disciples are gathered secretly, behind locked doors, for fear of the Judean authorities.  And grave robbery wasn’t even the worst of it.  As followers of a man who’d just thrown all of the money changers out of the temple during the highest holiday of the Jewish year, having easily started something that could have turned into a riot against the Temple priests and Romans authorities they could have been facing death for insurrection as well.

So the question that’s probably racing through their minds isn’t so much “who will be next?” but “how long do you think it will be before they find me.” So to reach them, breathe his spirit on them, and commission them to serve as agents of his forgiveness, Jesus has to come through the locked door behind which they’re all hiding.

Well, almostall of them were hiding. One of them wasn’t.  Thomas wasn’t there and so he doesn’t see Jesus, doesn’t experience or receive the commission Jesus gives the others.

But here’s why I think Thomas becomes so significant.  If he represents the doubt we all have when it comes to our faith from time to time.  He also represents all of us who keep on keeping on in spite of our doubts.  Think Mother Teresa here, because during her entire ministry to the lepers and poor in Calcutta she was constantly plagued with doubts about Christ’s presence.  Yet she kept on serving in spite of them.

So while Thomas might have been labeled the doubter at least he wasn’t locked away in some room because of fear.  And since the text doesn’t tell us what he was doing I’d like to think he was out in the world the way Mother Teresa was out in it – in spite of the doubt.

Thomas, the disciple who wants to touch Jesus is on to something:

The path of discipleship isn’t a path of safety.  Thomas gets that.  He’s the guy who says, “let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16).  Thomas knows that there are things worse things than death – like never really living at all.  There’s a gorgeous passage in a short story by Sara Maitland (“Dragon Dreams,” from Angel Makerthat I could see being said by Thomas to us and for us who’ve experienced that dark night of the soul:

When (you) died I knew that there was no safety, anywhere, and I will not sacrifice to false gods.  There is no safety, but there is wildness and joy, there is love and life within the danger.  I love you.  I want to be with you. …  I refuse to believe that we only get one chance.  This letter is just a start.  I am going to hunt you down now in all the lovely desolate places of the world. …  There I will be waiting for you.  Please come. Please come soon.

There’s danger out in the world, but there’s also joy, life, adventure and an abundance of it Jesus tell us.  And I think Thomas also is on to something else that’s incredibly important to experiencing the risen Christ.  If you want to see the real Jesus, if you want to really know that he is alive and at work in the world touching and healing the wounded among us then look for the wounds in the world.  I think the wounds are the surest sign that this stranger that Thomas finally touches is really the risen Christ.

Thomas gets that.  And maybe that truth grounded in Thomas as it did Mother Teresa and all of us willing to go out into a dangerous world armed only with the promise that danger and death will not have the final word.  The resurrection will.

But something does throw Thomas off – the report by the others that they have seen the risen Christ.  Now Thomas is operating with an assumption that is spot on, but not complete:  There is one Body of Christ.  But he assumes that means that there is only one place and one way to see Jesus.  He assumes that if the other disciples had seen Jesus then he’s missed his chance. If they received the Spirit then Thomas is left with nothing.

But this isn’t so.  Thomas thinks that the body he wants and needs to touch, the body of the risen Christ is the same body that had been nailed to the cross.  But it’s not like that.  Not anymore.  Everyone can touch the wounded body of Christ because Christ’s risen body consists of every one of us – every baby, every grandmother, every teenager, every woman, man and child.

Every time we take someone’s hand as we exchange the Peace of Christ, we touch the risen, living Body of Christ.

A lot of us here know that to be true because we’ve shared joys or tragedies, we’ve prayed for one another and given thanks together for the joys of birthdays, anniversaries and answered prayers.  A lot of us have experienced it by going to visit someone in need or by dropping off food or a word of hope to someone we might not even now all that well. We’ve experienced it in a moment of shared vulnerability, in the singing of our children, in the classes we’ve taken together or over a cup of tea or coffee.  In all these ways and many more we’ve seen and served the risen Christ.

And the temptation sometimes is to think that there is but only one way to experience the risen Christ, but there isn’t just one way.  There are at least four if you take the Gospel accounts seriously. There’s also Paul’s way, and Timothy’s way and then of course your way and my way.  I think that’s why Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”  Living things grow, and change.  And the body of the risen Lord is changed and changing too.  Discipleship always involves a moving target.

So if you want to feel Christ’s presence even more deeply than you might feel it here on Sunday morning, if you want to feel God’s Spirit moving so deeply within you that every fiber in your being wants to shout out, “My Lord and My God!” If you want to know that Christ is alive and that sin and death no longer have the last word, then we’ll have to leave whatever rooms of fear we’ve locked ourselves into.

I need to know that God is real.  I need to know that Christ, can still touch and love and heal the world. So let the gospel come alive in actions plain to see in imitation of the one whose love extends to the likes of you and me.  Amen