Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
1 Peter 1. 3-9; John 20. 19-31
“Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.’”
Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St Thomas (1602). Hangs in the Sanssouci Picture Gallery, Potsdam.
Do you blame Thomas for doubting that his friends had really seen Jesus risen from the dead? I don’t know about you, but if any of my friends want me to believe something that seems pretty far-fetched, I expect them to have some actual evidence for me, ideally hard physical evidence. If they can’t supply that, I’d expect there to be some evidence that whatever far-fetched thing they wanted me to believe had had some impact on them.
Now, the idea of one of your mates not only rising from the dead, but walking through walls and appearing in a locked room, is about as far-fetched as it gets. So the fact that the apostles were still hiding in the upper room, full of fear, would have left me pretty unconvinced too. He gets dismissed as “Doubting Thomas” when he is only engaging in the sort of healthy scepticism we should all practice at times.
And, actually, when we think about it, is it always a bad thing to be a doubter? All groups of people need different temperaments and personalities. An organisation or institution without doubters is going to see all sorts of poor practices, dishonesty and abuse going on, unchallenged and perpetuated. The term for a church without doubters is a cult. I wouldn’t be without the doubters in the various churches I’ve worked and worshipped in over the years. Of course, an organisation with too many doubters is also an unhealthy place, and is probably in the process of losing faith in itself – indeed, something very much like that happened to the Church in the latter part of the 20th Century. There is, I think, a natural ecology to these things.
What Thomas wanted was some hard physical evidence that Jesus had risen from the dead – and he got it. Christianity is a very physical faith. We’ll see that in a few minutes’ time, when we baptise little Ivan: the water is essential for baptism. There is no valid baptism without it. We couldn’t baptise for periods during the worst of Covid because we weren’t allowed to be physically present together. It wouldn’t have been valid to pretend to baptise someone down a Zoom link. For the same reason, we also couldn’t carry out ordinations during Covid – the bishop actually needs to lay hands on the person they are ordaining, in a link of physical touch that goes all the way back to Thomas and the other apostles. As a result of that, my ordination as a deacon was delayed by three months, which seemed like a big deal at the time.
Christianity is a physical religion as much as a spiritual one. Yes, the Christian faith points us towards God, and points us towards the life to come – but it is also very much about us human beings, here on Earth, in our God-given bodies in all their frailties and imperfections. An over-spiritualised Christianity, too detached from the real world is an unhealthy thing. It sits a long way from the God who became one of us in Jesus Christ, lived in the real world with all its mess, was killed in the most brutal way, and did it all so that we could share eternal life with Him. Christianity done right unites the physical and the spiritual – it doesn’t elevate one over the other.
Indeed, this might sound odd coming from a clergyman, but I’m always a bit suspicious when people go on about how spiritual somebody else is—you know: ‘that wise, holy clergyman who is a bit of a saint’. And I’m even more suspicious when people go on about how spiritual they are themselves. Part of the issue is that I’ve spent too much time working in the Church. I’ve met a few people over the years who were very good at quoting the Bible or composing pious phrases who were people you wouldn’t have trusted with your money – or your niece. If someone is supposed to be very spiritual, let me see the hard evidence of that in their lives.
Jesus’ wounds are how He seeks to convince Thomas that He has indeed risen from the dead. Death is often the gateway to new life. This happens at the grandest of scales – in the week of the Artemis 2 mission, it might be good to remind ourselves that the stuff that makes our bodies up – carbon and oxygen and water – would not and could not exist without countless stars meeting their ends violently in supernovae billions of years ago. And we know from even the most mundane parts of our daily lives that we often can’t see new opportunities until we are forced out of our existing routines and relationships, processes that often involve real pain.
Just like Christ, it is our wounds that will convince others of the reality of our experience of Christ – including the way we have clung on to the practice of our faith even when doubt has robbed us of emotional certainty – even when the Church itself has wounded us. Faith that has been made on Easy Street convinces nobody.
It is the same refining logic that St Peter draws on in today’s first Bible reading. We hear from the First Letter of St Peter far too rarely in church. It was written just as the generation of Christians who knew Christ was starting to die off, and the faith of those who remained seems to have been starting to flag a little. When St Thomas met Christ on that first Sunday after Easter, the disciples thought Jesus would very soon return in glory to rule the world. This letter was written when it was starting to become obvious that this phase of waiting for Christ would be a very long one. Peter encourages Christians to remember that trials in the faith are a way of refining it, purifying it, strengthening it. Peter’s image of faith refined like gold through fire suggests not that God tops up a depleted resource, but that the trials themselves are the means by which He works what He has already placed within you.
Also, remember your faith is a gift of God and so is your salvation. God gives you the amount of faith you need to fulfil His purposes in your life. But your salvation is assured if you have even the tiniest mustard seed of faith in His promises, for it is He who saves us and not we ourselves.
People often wonder why we baptise babies, when they can’t make a decision for themselves. But that’s the point – it is God who calls us to follow Him, and He is at work in the background of our lives, even when we aren’t aware of it, even when we reject Him. God is much stronger than we are – truly mighty, capable of terrible justice, and mighty in love, and longing to save us.
It is in the hope that Ivan will come to put his faith in that mighty, terrible, just, and loving God as He grows up that we will now baptise Ivan, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, to whom be all praise, glory, honour, dominion, and power. Amen.
