Scripture: John 20:19-31, selections from the Gospel of Thomas
For many years on the Sunday after Easter I preached about the disciple named Thomas, doubting Thomas as he is often called. There were several reasons for this.
For one thing the reading about Thomas and Jesus that we heard this morning was the lectionary reading for the Sunday after Easter every year. As you may know the lectionary is a list of recommended Bible readings for each Sunday, and it comes in a three year cycle so that every third year you get the same set of readings. Except that Thomas for some reason appeared every year. And so, since I was following the lectionary in my preaching for many years, I could count on a yearly visit from Thomas. There he was, every year, refusing to believe in the resurrection unless he could get some hard evidence.
More importantly, I preached on Thomas every year because I liked him, and because I thought the message about the doubting disciple was an important one. Yes, I would say every year—actually I would say it more than once a year, because I would find other times and other ways to say the same thing, but in this sort of ritualistic way, I would say every year—that it’s ok to doubt, that doubts are a part of our faith, that it’s good to ask questions, that sometimes the questions are more important than the answers, in fact that sometimes the questions themselves are the answers, and so on.
I didn’t mind saying that kind of message over and over, because it seemed to me to bear repeating. Many people seem to have been brought up or lived much of their lives in churches where what was valued was not asking questions or expressing doubts, but instead was being able to recite Bible verses or give the right answers to the catechism, or maybe being fluent in a certain kind of religious language, being able to say the right words in the right way in the right tone of voice, or maybe having given oneself completely and unquestioningly to Jesus Christ, in other words to somehow have shown yourself to be a good, right-thinking Christian, in whatever way that was defined, having the right kind of belief or a deep personal relationship to Jesus or whatever it was.
Since doubting and questioning has not been valued very much in many church contexts, I never really felt guilty for repeating myself in affirming the questioning parts of ourselves and the struggles that many people have with religious belief. I know there were a number of people who felt that faith shouldn’t be as difficult as I was making it out to be, and who probably felt sorry for me that I didn’t have a purer faith, or felt that as a minister I should be encouraging people to believe rather than to doubt, but I felt the message was necessary anyway, and it was true to me, and so I liked Thomas because he gave me one of my opportunities to deliver that message.
Also, beyond the fact that Thomas was connected to what I considered a necessary message, I also just felt that I would probably like him. There are just a few stories about him, but the one this morning shows him as a person who wants to think for himself, believe for himself if he’s going to believe at all,
And then there’s one where Jesus is talking to the disciples about his leaving them, about dying essentially. Those passages are called the farewell discourses, and in one of them Jesus says rather famously, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and I will take you to myself so that where I am, you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” At which point Thomas I picture sort of slowly, sheepishly raising his hand and saying: “Aaaand, what way would that be? Maybe I missed something here, but I don’t think maybe we’re as clear about all this as you think we are. I frankly am not really sure what you’re talking about. I mean, where are you going? And where are we going? And why am I not supposed to be troubled? You want to know the truth? I don’t get it. Maybe I’m supposed to get it, but I don’t.
Here the rest of the disciples were sitting there nodding their heads the way you do when you don’t want Jesus to know you don’t understand, or maybe don’t want the other disciples to know, or maybe don’t want to admit it to yourself even. Thomas had enough honesty with himself to know he didn’t understand and enough guts to say it out loud. I don’t get it. In fact what he said was (because he knew very well the others didn’t get it either) we don’t get it. He said what no one else was willing to say. And I have always liked Thomas because he wasn’t pretending to understand something he didn’t understand or believe something he didn’t believe. And I have always felt the church would be better off if it were filled with Thomas types, if we were all honest about who we are and what we get and what we don’t get and what we get but don’t like and so forth—rather than accepting things without question and adhering to some party line.
I have always found Thomas to be helpful, and I have always liked him as a character. But it’s been a while since I’ve preached on him for several reasons. I don’t follow the lectionary so much any more. At Sojourners a lot of what I’ve been talking about is part of our corporate culture if you will already, so I don’t need Thomas’ support to say the things I’ve been saying this morning. And I just got tired of talking about him and decided to give him a rest after who knows how many sermons. But I have recently discovered another reason to like Thomas and it has given me the motivation to return to Thomas in a sermon, to go back to some of the things I have found important and that I’ve already said, but also to talk about some other things as well.
One of our “Invoking the Spirit” groups is a book group that has been reading and discussing a book called Beyond Belief by a woman named Elaine Pagels Elaine Pagels is a scholar of early Christianity, a professor at Princeton, and she has somehow made early Christian literature interesting enough that she has become a best-selling author. Her first widely read book was called The Gnostic Gospels, and it focused on some early Christian writings that didn’t make it into the Bible and that have ended up being essentially suppressed all these years since then. This most recent book deals again with that same basic subject matter but focuses especially on a book called The Gospel of Thomas.
Forgive me for talking about a book that most of you haven’t read, and I’m not going to go into any great detail about Pagels’ book, but I do want to lift up a line of thought I found in the book (with the help of one of the disucussions that the group was good enough to let me sit in on). Pagels sees the gospel of John, which is in the Bible, and the gospel of Thomas, which was likely written about the same time but not accepted into the Bible and thus lost until a copy of it was found about 50 years ago—Pagels sees these two writings as representing very different approaches to the Christian faith. The gospel of John reports Jesus saying such things as: “No one comes to the Father except by me.” Or, “Believe in God. Believe also in me.” Or, “I am the way and the truth. I am life.” In other words, Jesus in this understanding is one, completely one, with God and believing in God means believing in Jesus and vice versa. God is distant and a little scary. Human beings are sinful and hopelessly separated from God, and we need Jesus, need to believe in Jesus as God, in order to be connected to God.
The attitude of the gospel of Thomas, according to Pagels, is quite different. We don’t know who wrote the gospel of Thomas, any more than we know that the disciple John wrote the the gospel of John. But Pagels sees significance in the fact that the gospel bears Thomas’ name. Thomas was a disciple who was called the Twin. It is never said in the Bible who is supposed to be the twin of. Pagels interprets the gospel of Thomas to suggest that the reference may be to Thomas being a twin of Jesus, if not biologically, then spiritually. What Thomas suggests, the gospel of Thomas, is that the spirit, the essence of God dwells in everyone just as it did in Jesus, that it may be disguised or hidden or buried, but it is there, and that to follow in the way is not so much to believe in Jesus, to fall down and worship him, to offer him praise, to proclaim him to be God or Savior or Lord, but is instead to see, as he saw, the God-likeness, the god that there is in all of us. And so what we gain from looking at Jesus is not so much an image of God descended to earth from the realms of heaven and taking a form that we poor humans can relate to, but is instead a mirror in which we see ourselves as we were meant to be, as God meant us to be, ourselves as the holy people we are. The gospel of Thomas the twin sees everyone as essentially a child of God and a twin of Jesus—and you don’t even have to believe in Jesus as God or Lord in order for that to be true. This was a different way of understanding God, a different way of thinking about Jesus, and a different way of viewing ourselves, a whole different way of seeing the world, than that offered by the gospel of John and what became official Christianity. And in the culture wars of early Christianity, the part of Christianity represented by the gospel of Thomas lost. It was kept out of the Bible, and condemned as a heresy. Tertullian, one of the leaders in the early church wrote that “when these Thomas Christians consider that ‘spiritual seed in everyone’, whenever they hit upon something new, they immediately call their audacity a spiritual gift—not unity, only diversity! And so we see clearly that most of them disagree with one another, since they are willing to say—and even sincerely—of certain points, ‘This is not so,’ and, ‘I take this to mean something different,’ and ‘I do not accept that’. Tertullian would probably not have cared for Sojourners, since we could be fairly said to value diversity more than unity, have been known to disagree with one another, and are usually quite willing to say things like, “This is not so” and “I take this to mean something different” and “I do not accept that”. I took a liking to these Thomas Christians. At least as they are described in this book, they are kindred spirits.
It led me to think that the church would be a lot better off if it were filled with heretics. We ought to be positively promoting heresy among us. Maybe at Sojourners we already do. But there are a couple of thoughts that go along with this. One is that saying the church would be better off if it were filled with heresy is not the same thing as what I have already said about how doubts and questions are good things and should have a valued place in the church and how we need to be honest, as Thomas was, about his confusions and resistances and where we are in matters of faith. Supporting heresy is a little bit different from that because heresy is, after all, a form of belief. It’s just that it’s a belief that has been pronounced by someone to be wrong or harmful in some way. And there are some beliefs that are harmful. In my experience they are usually beliefs that the holder thinks are the only right beliefs and that must be protected at all costs or spread to others by force. But for the most part we are all better off for having lots of different expressions of truth. It makes our faith richer and ultimately truer. But my thought here is that they are expressions of truth. They are not just questions, and as helpful and important as questions are, questions are not enough. Questions do not give us a reason to get out bed in the morning. Questions do not fill our journeys with joy or help us to love any better. In fact questions are valuable only as part of a process where we move toward a point where we can say: This is what I know to be true…recognizing that other people will say something different, say the same thing in a different way, recognizing that tomorrow I may say something different or say it in a different way. It is important to ask our questions, confess our confusions. It is also important for our spirits not to rest until we can answer for ourselves the question of what we know to be true, not caring whether it is an approved religious dogma, whether it sounds much like any orthodox Christian belief. It probably won’t, and that’s fine. That’s why I say we should be in the business of encouraging heresy. We need to encourage one another in our believing, whatever form that takes.
And a final thought. The things that we do know to be true, each of us, have probably come from our places of woundedness. That is a truth I find in the scripture about Thomas and Jesus. It is not just that Jesus showed Thomas the places he had been wounded as a kind of proof that he was who he said he was and this led Thomas to fall down before him in adoration. It is not just that Thomas recognized Jesus, but going back to the idea that the Thomas Christians saw their own holiness revealed to them in Jesus, I believe Thomas saw his own woundedness in the wounds Jesus showed him, and saw God in them. Thomas recognized Jesus, but also recognized himself in Jesus. Jesus opened up those wounded places in Thomas too and revealed them to be holy places. Not that God causes those wounds, afflicts us as punishment or as lessons or in order to teach us something, but just that in the wounds that come to us in the course of our living, there is truth to be found, and it is God’s truth, and without those wounds we probably wouldn’t know very much to be true. But with them, not in some cleaned up version of ourselves, but with our wounds, and in our ability to share them, and not hide them, we may be able to recognize who we have become, and who others are and what they have to offer us, and in it all the very presence of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 18, 2004