23-04-06 - 1st Sunday after Easter


Can I begin this morning with last Sunday: not because I want to hang on to the joy of Easter Day but because of two things that happened. The first is that, glancing through the newspapers before leaving for church, I saw the announcement that Muriel Spark, who wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie had died. And I remembered first of all, going to see the film of the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in the Dominion Cinema in Morningside in Edinburgh . It was a very lonely experience. I must have been the only Glaswegian in the cinema, because I was the only person laughing. Edinburgh , apparently, didn't like being asked to laugh at itself.

 

The other thing I remembered is something Muriel Spark said. She lived for many years in Rome and she became a Roman Catholic and she went to mass every Sunday in Rome , but she always arrived after the sermon because, she said, she “didn't like third rate productions.”

 

Every sermon is bound to be a third rate production, and the second thing that happened last Sunday helps to explain why. It had been a pleasant day, spent, some of it, with friends, and I was relaxing in front of the television set when I turned to the BBC's 24 hour news channel, and one of the items was about the sermon that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had preached on Easter Sunday morning. Now because our television is what they call “interactive” I can decide whether I want to see more about a particular news item, and the screen told me that if I wanted to hear the whole of Rowan Williams' sermon I should just press the red button on the remote control. So I did. The headlines had all been about how Rowan Williams had been criticising the Da Vinci Code and press reports about a supposedly newly discovered Gospel of Judas, but, when I listened to the sermon, I discovered that occupied about four sentences.

 

What caught my attention was the rest of what Rowan Williams said. He was talking about the Easter stories and he said this: “The New Testament was written by people who were still trying to find a language that would catch up with a reality bigger than they expected. The stories of the resurrection all have the characteristics of stories told by people who are struggling to find the right words for an unfamiliar experience.”

 

“…trying to find a language that would catch up with a reality bigger than they expected…..struggling to find the right words for an unfamiliar experience”. Sermons about bound to be third rate productions because they are at third hand. There was the Easter event….and then there is the New Testament trying to find a way of describing it….and then there are preachers trying to talk about the New Testament's way of describing that unfamiliar event.

 

And I want you to bear that in mind as we turn to the Gospel story for this Sunday, about Jesus appearing to the disciples in the Upper Room when Thomas wasn't there; and then what happened when Jesus appeared a week later and Thomas was there. And do you know that that story is saying to preachers like me and to Christians like you? Do you know what that story is saying to people like us twenty one centuries after the first Easter? It is saying to us: don't think that living at a time far distant from these events, or indeed in a place far away from these events….don't think that gets you off the hook? It was no more easy for us to believe when it was happening right there beside us than it is for you to believe whoever you are.

 

Do you remember what Jesus says to Thomas? “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”.

 

Thomas was not present in the Upper Room when Jesus appeared to the disciples on the first Easter evening. Neither were the first readers of the Gospel. Neither were you and I!

 

And then a week later, Jesus appears again. And the way John's Gospel tells it, it is as if Jesus has come back to the Upper Room simply and solely to give Thomas the evidence he asked for. He had said: “Unless I see the print of the nails on his hands and can explore the wound in his wide, I won't believe it”.

 

The week after Easter, Thomas is given the chance to have all the evidence he needs, all the proof he requires.

 

The week after Easter, Thomas is given the opportunity to show that seeing is believing. “Put your finger here, and see my hands; place your hand by my side; don't be faithless but believing”.

 

And Thomas doesn't seize the opportunity or take the chance.

 

The week after Easter, we are tempted to think that if only we could have the experience of the first disciples; if we could have the chance to see then we would believe as well; and the story of Thomas is St John saying to us: what you see isn't what you get. What you see can be just as much open to question as anything else. Seeing isn't believing. And believing doesn't have to involve seeing. So blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

 

And that's where St John ends his Gospel. The stories of Jesus by the Sea of Galilee which form what we call chapter 21 were added later. John ends his gospel with the story of Thomas. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. And so you and I twenty one centuries later are included in that blessing.

 

If one of the things the story of Thomas is saying is that you and I, today, are no different from the first readers of the Gospel, then a second thing the story is saying is that we are very different from them indeed. John's Gospel was the last of the gospels to be written, round about the last years of the first century, when the Roman Empire was ruler by the Emperor Domitian. He was the Roman Emperor who sent the general Agricola to Britain to extend the boundaries of the empire as far as a line between the Firth of Clyde and the Firth of Forth. Domitian was a cruel dictator, and he decreed that the entire empire should address him not as “your Imperial Majesty” but as “our lord and our god”.

I am sure that it is no coincidence that when Thomas recognises the reality of the risen Christ, he says “my Lord and my God”. As if to say quite clearly that there is no power in the world, not even the power of the Emperor himself, that can challenge the authority of Jesus of Nazareth.

 

One of the most famous quotations of the past few years was when someone from the press was wanting to question Tony Blair about his Christian beliefs, and, famously, his then spin doctor Alastair Campbell said “we don't do God”.

I suspect this isn't what he meant: but people in power shouldn't ‘do God'; and not because people in power can't have faith. Of course they can. Tony Blair is as entitled to his religious faith as anyone else. You or me. But when Alastair Campbell said ‘we don't do God' he was letting us into the secret: that if what is important is

 

• Keeping the country running
• Making sure people are on-side all the time
• Trying to persuade people to vote for you next time round
• Coping with the compromises of politics

 

Then….don't ask me to look at whether this is right or wrong, moral or immoral…because we don't do questions like these. We don't do God.

 

Ten days ago, a man called William Sloane Coffin died. He was a theologian and college chaplain in the united States , and a constant opponent of every American administration. When on one occasion he protested to Richard Nixon, when he was President of the United States , about how his government was ignoring the poor, Richard Nixon asked William Sloane Coffin to describe in detail how he would run the American economy. And Coffin replied that was the president's business. He wasn't an economist. His job was to say that justice must always flow down like rivers and equality of opportunity was a God-given right.

 

So those who follow Jesus of Nazareth are always committed to questioning all political power and every political authority in the name of the things said by Jesus of Nazareth: blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, what does it profit if you gain the whole world and lose your own soul. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle……..

 

Thomas said “My Lord and my God”.

 

And in so saying he undermined anyone who claimed authority over him above and beyond that of the Christ who stood before him, God's “Yes” to all Jesus had said and done.

 

But there is something else to be said.

 

When the rest of the disciples tell Thomas that Jesus is risen, he doesn't believe them. He insists that he has to be satisfied, he has to be convinced, he has to be assured, he has to be the judge of what he believes. I like that. I like that here at the centre of the Easter story there is someone like me, who won't take anyone else's say-so, who won't be told what to believe, who won't be brow-beaten into losing his individuality and just go along with the herd.

 

“Unless” says Thomas.

 

And the very fact that Jesus makes his second appearance in the Upper Room, just to satisfy Thomas, suggests that Thomas' great “unless” has been given some kind of divine approval. You want to find your own way to faith, Thomas? Then I'll help you on that road. You want to discover your own way of expressing your convictions, Thomas? Then I'll be beside you on the way.

 

Thomas is the example of the sort of Christian who needs to work it all out for himself, who won't make do with a second-hand faith, who won't be satisfied with a second-hand religion.

 

And you're right, Thomas. You're right to want to make sense of it all for yourself. But don't imagine, Thomas, that you can have your special, individual, revelation, your own private spiritual fix, separate and distinct from the rest of the disciples. You'll just come to the same belief that the rest of the disciples arrived at a week ago.

 

Will you just picture for a moment these disciples, who had been in the Upper Room the first time Jesus had appeared to them. Can you think just how filled with joy and delight, pleasure and excitement, they must have been. Can you imagine what it must have meant to them? And now can you think how they must have felt when Thomas turned up – I wonder where he had been that first Sunday evening? – can you think when Thomas turns up and they say to him that the Lord is risen, and Thomas says, in his laid-back, laconic way: “Aye right”. Can you think how, if you were one of the other disciples, you must have found Thomas getting up your collective nose?

 

But can you imagine how it must have seemed to Thomas, suspicious of all this enthusiasm, constitutionally doubtful of all this faith? Can you imagine how it must have seemed to Thomas to be out on a limb, on his own, the one who said everyone else was out of step except our Thomas? Can you imagine Thomas digging in his heels, saying he won't accept anything on anyone else's say-so, and having to cope with being the one disciples who wasn't ‘on message', singing from the same resurrection hymnal as everyone else? Can you think what it must have been like to be isolated, doubting Thomas?

 

But can you imagine a church which was secure enough to allow doubting Thomas still to be part of your community, to question what you hold dearest and truest, apparently to undermine what you have discovered to be the very centre of your faith?

 

And can you imagine Thomas, so much at odds with everyone else, but still wanting to be part of that community of people who had Jesus in common, even if they disagreed about what they believed about Jesus?

 

And can you imagine a church today, broad enough to welcome someone like Thomas and secure enough not to feel threatened by his “Unless….” And can you imagine Thomas, determined enough to hold to his own convictions, but sufficiently aware that he needs the support of those who might see things differently from him?

 

And if you can imagine a church like that, will you join me in praying that such a church might come to be?