My Lord My God

MY LORD AND MY GOD!

Scriptures:

I Peter 1:3-9

John 20:24-29

OK, here’s a memory test for you. Especially for those of you who grew up in the 60s or were still tuned in to popular culture during that decade: who sang these lyrics?:

I thought love was only true in fairy tales,

Meant for someone else, but not for me.

Love was out to get me,

That’s the way it seemed,

Disappointment haunted all my dreams.

Then I saw her face,

Now I’m a believer,

Not a trace of doubt in my mind.

I’m in love – I’m a believer

I couldn’t leave her if I tried.

Right. I could see the smiles on many faces. It’s one of the biggest hits of the Monkees, who had quite a popular television show in the mid-60s. Apart from the infectious tune, I think “I’m a Believer” was a smash hit because it speaks about a very common human characteristic: namely, that love does not become real until we are confronted with the object of our love. Love in the abstract is pretty meaningless, as I said in the meditation on Maundy Thursday. Well, I suppose there are those who really do enjoy dealing more with words and concepts than with actual people – but it’s pretty hard to love a concept.

Certainly, the Monkee singing this song has had it with abstractions. The kind of love that one just hears about – the love that is romanticized out of all proportion to reality – this kind of love is only found in fairy tales. To try to believe in love on that kind of romanticized basis can often be destructive. Just look at our divorce rate. People tend to bring unrealistic notions into a new romantic relationship.

So, Thomas (who has entered into our Biblical imagination forever and always as “Doubting Thomas”) was not wrong, I believe, in wanting to see and touch this person whom he thought to be dead but to whom now he was being asked to give his total commitment. Thomas is our favorite whipping boy, isn’t he? We love to criticize his doubt and feel that had he been a better disciple he wouldn’t have needed this proof of his love. But remember what I said two weeks ago in telling the story of Jesus and Lazarus: Thomas was the one disciple who affirms Jesus’ decision to go to Bethany and face his probable arrest, imprisonment, and death. Thomas is the one who rallies the rest of the twelve around by saying, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Thomas is strong in his support of Jesus’ understanding of God’s will for his life.

What’s more, the risen Christ does not condemn or even rebuke Thomas for wanting to see and touch him. Instead, Christ offers Thomas – himself, wounds and all. The whole person of the risen Christ is to be the focal point for Thomas’ belief. Thomas’ shout, then is the starting point for his full love: “My Lord and my God!” Or, if he had been a youth in the 1960’s, he might well have exclaimed, “Then I saw his face and felt his wounds, now I’m a believer!”

By now some of you may have begun to wonder: what does this have to do with us? We cannot see the risen Christ. We cannot put our hands in his side. We cannot confront him as the object of our love and belief. Surely, the resurrection faith is an abstraction, and if we are to love the Christ it must be in the abstract. How can we depend on what someone else saw as the basis for our faith?

Maybe you’d rather that I not raise this kind of a question on a beautiful morning when we’ve had a filling Easter breakfast and the experiences of faith and love are more powerfully in our minds and hearts than on any other morning of the year. Yet, if we do not raise this question, if we do not become at least a little like a Doubting Thomas, this abstract feeling of faith and love will probably not hold up for all the other mornings and days of the year. It may be that this is exactly why John included this story of Thomas when the other gospel writers had not – because the early Christian community was in danger of letting its remembrance of the resurrection experience degenerate into just a fuzzy feeling, having no substance, no relationship to reality. Or, as William H. Willimon puts it so well: “There is something about this forever reaching God that is determined to draw us into God’s loving embrace….. We do not preach ideas, precepts, or principles, but a person: Jesus Christ raised up before us, pursuing us.”

Go back for a moment to the song lyric and to the boy who sings that he now believes in love. The only justification he can give us for such belief is, “Then I saw her face.” We know nothing more about this face. I suppose it was pretty; certainly, it must have been so to him since beauty is most often in the eye of the beholder, as the old cliché has it. But we can definitely assume that behind that face is a person, and – most important of all – a person who is demonstrating love for the one singing the song. Otherwise, his protestation that “love was out to get me” would hold true. Simply seeing a face – if that face was cold and indifferent to the needs of the one seeing it – would hardly be cause for a belief in the mystery of love – a belief that, according to the song lyric, could do away with even the slightest doubt.

Just so, the important thing is not that Thomas places his fingers in the wounds or that we hear the story about this event. The important thing is that we know about the life of love which stands behind such a gesture. Suppose, if it were possible to imagine such a horrible thought, that a little over a year ago after the execution of Saddam Hussein he approached you and announced that even though he had been killed he had risen from the dead, and he invited you to see and touch the place where the noose had cut into him. And suppose that your senses of sight and touch were telling you that indeed here was a man who had been resurrected from the dead. Would this realization cause you to exclaim to Saddam Hussein, “My Lord and My God!” Just saying it is ridiculous on the face of it, and even the thought is repugnant in spite of this hypothetical resurrection. What we know of his life would instantly make us reject any allegiance we might be asked to give. The fact of resurrection cannot be separated from the whole of any person’s life.

So, it was not the physical fact of resurrection which caused Thomas’ exclamation of belief so much as it was the knowledge of what Jesus’ life had been up to and including the resurrection that makes Thomas affirm, in effect, “Now I’m a believer; Not a trace of doubt in my mind.” When Jesus responds to Thomas by saying, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” he is not calling for blind faith on the part of later Christians, but rather he was encouraging them to see the whole of his life, to recognize his love for them which came from that life, and to believe on the basis of realized love.

The first letter of Peter was addressed to Christian exiles – people who would be faced with this same kind of question we’ve raised today – people who have not seen the Christ but yet who wish to believe. Peter (or whomever the author may have been; probably a disciple of Peter’s) testifies to the two new facts that are now a part of human life: the mercy of God, which Jesus has made abundantly clear through the crucifixion and the resurrection, and the “living hope” which has come through the resurrection – a hope that is not just abstract but which has been realized in a person. Here’s William H. Willimon again, speaking about what this “living hope” means: “Here is Easter hope. The resurrection doesn’t simply mean that Jesus rose to eternal life. It doesn’t simply mean that we hope to see our loved ones when we die. It also means that the very first thing that the Risen Christ does is return to the same cowardly and misunderstanding disciples who had so disappointed and forsaken him. He came through their locked doors.”

Yet, in spite of these two new realities, our author of I Peter expresses some surprise at the belief of these exiled Christians. You can almost hear the astonishment in his voice when he says, “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy…..” That same sense of astonishment was registered 1800 years later by, believe it or not, no less a figure than Napoleon Bonaparte, who once wrote, “An extraordinary power of influencing and commanding men has been given to Alexander, Charlemagne and myself. But with us the presence has been necessary…. Whereas Jesus Christ has influenced and commanded His subjects without His visible bodily presence for eighteen hundred years.”

But still we have to ask: why should this be so? Why do we not need to feel the wounds ourselves as Thomas did? And the answer comes to us: because we do see the Christ. We see him in the faces and in the wounds of those we are called upon to serve. That love which made up the whole life of Christ encompasses all those we physically see and touch and try to love. Here is where the belief expressed by Thomas’ cry, “My Lord and my God!”, ultimately becomes greater than the belief in a love that is triggered by a pretty face. For the belief in the kind of love that the Monkee’s song talks about demands mutuality – a returning of love – or the belief crumbles. But those we are called to love in Christ’s name are often the most unlovable – those boxed within the closed circuits of themselves. All we get in return – all that we really can know – are these twinned new realities: God’s mercy and our living hope.

It is the case that we see the resurrected Christ when we look into the face of a deprived child who wants so desperately to learn and be taught. It is the case that we touch his wounds when we reach out our hand to someone who has been alienated from society and needs the healing touch of human warmth. It is the case that we exclaim, “My Lord and my God!”, when we say through our words and actions that you are a worthwhile human being to someone who has been rejected by everyone else. Christ’s words in Matthew 25: “…just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” (25:40) would not have quite the meaning for us that they do were it not for the resurrection. We, who quite rightly should be doubting Thomas’s in our scientifically-oriented 21^st century, find that there is no room left for doubt when the resurrected Christ is revealed through each person we meet, actually or metaphorically: through the gambling addict, the Wall Street broker, the alcoholic, the upstanding citizen, the Iraqi, the gay person, the straight person, the wife or husband, the child, the terrorist, the minister; through the grumpy, or gossipy, or generous neighbor; through all manner and condition of people we encounter the resurrected Christ who entreats us, as he did Thomas, “Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

To be able to say of each person we meet, “Then I saw her or his face, Now I’m a believer,” is to affirm that Christ did not die in vain and that his resurrection envelops even our lives. Having seen in this way, we are able to receive his blessing: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Even though during the early hours of an Easter morning doubt may be the furthest thing from our minds, it is good here and now to recognize that part of the disciple Thomas that each of us has within ourselves. It is our doubt, which calls out to see the resurrected One, that brings us to see him in the lives of others. Through serving others, we, too, will be able to proclaim, “Hallelujah! The Lord is risen! My Lord and my God!”

Amen

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

Las Vegas, NV

March 23, 2008