David Tatem, Low Sunday, 2009: Thomas

David Tatem's Sermon, 19th April 2009

If you were here on Easter Sunday, then you may remember that in my address I suggested that one of the things that the account of Jesus’ resurrection tells us is that reality is different to what we have always thought it was, indeed feared that it was, because of the apparent defeat of Good Friday. Instead, we are invited to celebrate the fact that against all the logic that says that ‘might is right’ and that you only have to have the strength and the means in order to be able to define reality the way you want it to be, the way that God has planned from the beginning will be the way that lasts, ultimately.

‘Low Sunday’ as this is traditionally known invites us to remember the story of Thomas whom we also traditionally call ‘Doubting Thomas’; the one of the disciples who has gone through Good Friday but has not gone through the Easter Day experience and is suddenly confronted with his friends who have undergone some amazing and baffling transformation in their state of mind and although he may not have heard of the term ‘mass hallucination’, we might wonder if he’s not well on the way to inventing it!

But lest we think that we’re just being told the story of a disciple who is weak in his faith – as if the others weren’t, let’s remember that John’s gospel is written to be read by people who have also not directly experienced the risen Christ in the way that Peter and the others had and whatever we read is intended to help those people and that we are those people too, as well as the readers of nearly 2,000 years ago. So it seems very clear that Thomas is one who we are intended to identify with and actually not simply because our faith may be weak but because it may be strong.

We can, of course, just take the story as of one who can’t believe it and who is convinced by the evidence and we can say well, if that happened for him, then it makes it possible for me to follow his example. Or we can go a little deeper and wonder if there isn’t perhaps more to it.

It’s helpful to start with Thomas’s declaration at the end of the account. ‘My Lord and my God’. It’s a very developed statement, a long way from a statement of ‘ok I’m convinced now tell me what it all means’, or even ‘thank God, I thought you were dead!’. This is of the order of ‘I almost had it all worked out, I could see the sense of what you were doing but then I wasn’t quite sure, but now it all falls into place, I know exactly who you are and what’s going on and to that I give myself utterly’.

The story of Thomas can speak not only to those who doubt but actually to those who inherently have a strong faith but need a coherent story of reality in which to have faith and that is a very contemporary situation.

Despite what seems to be the strength of the position of the modern atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins, there is a strong counter-current of people who are actively and positively exploring and discovering the coherence of religious faith, that is to say, it’s ability to not only make sense of the world around us but to provide a meaningful way of living in it and engaging with that sense.

The writer AN Wilson 20 years ago declared his ‘conversion’ to atheism and has in the past written about the sense of freedom and joy that he experienced at the time. More recently he has announced his re-conversion back to Christian faith and it is interesting to read the article published in the New Statesman at the beginning of April in which he describes the journey. It seems to have two parts to it; one is that ultimately he has come to the conclusion that the place to which he had gone was empty and meaningless and that he had come to see that the heart of the Christian story not only makes sense but makes sense of and gives a meaning to life. The other part is to do with his observation of the difference that has made to the lives of people he admires, not academics who have come up with convincing arguments but people who have invested their lives in their faith and the difference that has made. He mentions Ghandi, who although not a Christian in a formal sense lived a life utterly rooted in his faith in God and was influenced strongly by the life of Jesus and he speaks of the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other Christians who confronted the degenerate philosophy of Nazism to a point where Bonhoeffer could face his own execution with a serenity inexplicable in any other way than because of the sense that his faith made. I and I guess many others would want to expand on that and say that it was a faith which encompassed body, mind, soul and the world.

It is, after all, the difference that the resurrection makes that is what the resurrection is about, the difference it makes to the quality of life of those whose faith is rooted in it and formed by it. But lest we leave it on the personal level it is also the difference it makes to the way we engage with the world, as people like Bonhoeffer and countless others have done down through the centuries. If AN Wilson has made any mistake in what he has written it may be to focus on people as well known as Bonhoeffer and not to refer to the lives of people far less well known, of which there are an uncountable number. We could share our stories too, not perhaps as dramatic, but none the less real.

Perhaps that is another thing that Easter invites us to do; to share our own stories of the ways in which the resurrection of Jesus has made a difference to our lives and then others may be able to see how that difference in us has made a difference to others around us, or the world at large in one way or another. Even if, one day, we don’t make it onto the celeb pages of the obituaries (and I confess that often I don’t recognise half the names that are there anyway), we may make it into the ‘other lives’ section that at least one broadsheet has introduced – stories submitted by friends who have marked the difference that their friends lives have made, often in small but significant ways.

Thomas himself is not one of those apostles we have a huge amount of information about in his later life, unlike Peter or Paul. Tradition (and maybe some history) says that he went to India and preached the gospel there and founded a church. There is certainly a church tradition there which long predates the western missionaries. Originally the Mankara it is today known as the Mar Thoma church and its pattern of government and rituals are ancient indeed, so perhaps we can see there today the result of the difference that Thomas made, nearly 2,000 years ago.
Well, this place is well built and in 2,000 years time it may just be an ancient monument. But let us pray and commit ourselves to the thought that the difference we make may be more than just a memory but something still alive, still growing and still making a difference, because of Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God.

Amen