Fear, Doubt, and Hope
Easter 2/15 April 2007
Job 42:1-6
Acts 5:12a, 17-22, 25-29
John 20:19-31
Fear, Doubt, and Hope
When writing an autobiography, the events, people and relationships a person chooses to write about, tells us quite a bit about that person. The choices that are made reflect what the person holds to be important and formative in his or her life at that point in time, and are dependent on any number of factors including whether or not the person is happy with his or her life, is experiencing transition, wishes to settle a score or perhaps leave a certain type of legacy.
The same was true for the writers of the Gospels. Their experience of Jesus, his ministry and the lasting effects of his life, was based not only their personal view of him, but also on their own religious background, the community they were part of, the community to which they were writing to, and the forces those communities were contending with. And because of all these things, each of the Gospels has a different perspective, including or emphasizing things that the others do not, or at least not in the same way.
Thus it is often helpful to look at each of the Gospels in three different but highly interrelated ways or levels (actually there are lots of different ways in which we can examine the Gospels, but I want to talk about these three today). First, we can examine their context, the world in which they were written; second, we can hear and take in their content, the story that they tell; and third, we can listen to how they are communicating to us today.
In turning to the portion of John’s Gospel which we just heard, we see themes of fear, doubt and hope resonate on all three of those levels.
Scholars generally believe that John’s Gospel was the last of the four to be written, approximately 90 to 100 years after the birth of Jesus. It was a time of great persecution of Christians and Jewish Christians were experiencing this persecution in particularly painful ways.
Professor Robert Kysar, in his book John, The Maverick Gospel, notes that during the time that John’s Gospel was written, the Jewish followers of Jesus were separating themselves from the synogogue, either voluntarily or under “pressure from their brothers and sisters in the synagogue.” Quite simply, the tensions between those believing Jesus to be the Messiah and those who did not, made peaceful co-existence, increasingly difficult.
Once separated however, they no longer had the relative freedom to worship openly as they pleased, for that was a privilege granted to the Jews by the Roman occupiers under the strictest of conditions, not the least of which was that there be no challenge to Roman authority. Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, which still rankled the Roman authorities, as well as the claims of his followers that he was their Lord and King, was anathema to those conditions, and so these Jewish Christians increasingly became targets for persecution.
It was a horrific time and members of the community from which John’s Gospel was written felt betrayed and isolated by their own people, and the language used in that Gospel often reflects their anger and hurt. Thus, we hear the wholesale denigration of “the Jews” as the killers of Jesus, language that we now, given the advantage of time and an historical perspective, not only find inaccurate but offensive. Language that has all too often been used, and in fact, is still used, as an excuse to scapegoat and persecute the Jewish people.
But so that we do not fall into that same trap, it is important once again to return to the Gospel’s context. These people lived in an occupied land, and the Jewish leaders of the time, by and large did they best they could to maintain a working relationship with the Roman authorities so as to both protect their people and the sanctity of their religious life.
Anything that upset that balance had to be dealt with quickly and decisively because there were lives at stake. And certainly for some of the Jewish leaders, anything that jeopardized their own power also had to be dealt with, but to generalize their concerns onto the whole community ignores the larger reality.
Professor Kysar captures this tension well:
The Evangelist [that is the author of the Gospel] served a community locked in a crucial dispute with the local Jewish synagogue. The Jewish opposition was threatening the Christian community, just as the Christian evangelistic efforts among the Jews were threatening the stability of the Jewish synagogue. The result was that both communities were defending themselves.”
Thus when we look at the Johannine community, we see a community experiencing great turmoil on many levels—personal, political, and spiritual. It mirrored in many ways Jesus’ prediction from Matthew’s Gospel that family member would rise up against family member because of him.
And yet these people also had great hope. Because of Jesus and for the sake of Jesus, they persevered, for the Jesus they had come to know showed them time and time again that nothing could keep him from them: not the powers and principalities of this world, not death, and certainly not locked rooms.
Which brings us to today’s story.
The disciples are huddled together in a room in great fear. The one they loved and followed has just been executed and it is probably a fair statement that at least some of the people that brought Jesus to his end would like to do the same thing to them. Plus there are all these unexplainable things happening such as Jesus’ tomb being empty and Mary Magdalene’s strange claim that she has both seen and spoken to Jesus.
But then, seemingly out of nowhere, Jesus appears to them, showing them his hands and his side, so as to almost say to them, this is not an illusion, I am real, and in doing so, he not only calms their fears but also gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit so that they may continue the work he has begun.
It is not over.
And this is good news, but just in case we don’t fully appreciate the first time the import of what is written, The Gospel writer has Thomas come along, so we can hear it a second time.
Now, in fairness to Thomas, since the other disciples actually did get to see and speak to Jesus, it doesn’t seem quite right give him the label of “doubter,” but it is true that Thomas always seemed to need a little bit more concrete assurance than the others.
One of my favorite characterizations of Thomas comes from Frederick Buechner. He writes, “Imagination was not Thomas’s long suit. He called a spade a spade. He was a realist. He didn’t believe in fairy tales, and if anything else came up that he didn’t believe in or couldn’t understand, his questions could be pretty direct.”
And so, on one level, it is ironic that Thomas of all people is not there when Jesus appears and yet, on another, it’s perfect, because Thomas really personifies the doubter in us all. But as the story unfolds, we come to see that doubt can be one of the last things to keep God out of our life. For doubt often causes us to ask questions, to engage with God in ways we wouldn’t otherwise.
And we see from Jesus response to Thomas, that God can handle our doubt. Jesus did not rebuke Thomas for his questions, but rather allowed Thomas to see him and touch his wounds. And in doing so, gave Thomas much more than he asked for—for he gave Thomas not only the reassurance he requested but also hope in whatever was to come.
Afterwards all Thomas could do was exclaim, “My Lord and My God,” the first time those words were spoken directly to the risen Jesus by anyone in any of the Gospels.
And they were words that had profound meaning for the community for which they were written, a community whose life blood was rooted in its relationship with the risen Lord. A community that had many good reasons to doubt and yet remained faithful in spite of those doubts, sometimes imperfectly but more often than not with great courage. And they did so in part, so that we might be able to exclaim those same words ourselves, over 2000 years later.
And that is one of the miracles of the Easter story. We see from our brothers and sisters who have gone before us, that even with our fears, imperfections, and at times, doubts, by the grace of God, we here today have been given the sacred and profound honor and obligation, to continue telling Jesus’ story, in our own way and out of our own context, so that others may come to believe, and exclaim him Jesus as Lord and God, as well.
The Rev. Canon Allisyn Thomas
March 18 2007