When a gifted former student of mine in worship and
preaching, Pastor Mark Rigg––now serving a Lutheran (ELCA) church in Pennsylvania––preached
this Gospel text one spring, he turned our attention away from Thomas’s inability
to believe and toward noticing that Thomas receives
faith from the Risen One. The story is told in such a way that Christ appears
already knowing Thomas’s announcement that he wants to see and feel the marks
of Jesus’ suffering.
Jesus invites Thomas into exactly what Thomas needs.
The visceral nature of this faith-creation is one way we can
come to think of the meal of bread and wine. It is as if, in the meal of Jesus’
body and blood, we become Thomas, again and again being given what we, perhaps,
did not even know we needed.
Fritz West’s approach to the story of Jesus and Thomas (in Homily Service 2006) extends the image by
connecting it with other narratives in our tradition.
John 20:19-31
How do persons come to believe?
Through the gift of the Holy Spirit. John 20:19–31 fulfills promises concerning
the Holy Spirit that Jesus made in the Farewell Discourses (John 14:15–31). The
two passages may be read in parallel. Above all, the promise of the Holy Spirit
(John 14:16, 26) is fulfilled in its bestowal (John 20:22). This makes of the
church a new creation, for the verb to breathe echoes God’s breathing life into
the first human (Genesis 2:7).
Further, the Holy Spirit brings
gifts: peace (John 20:21, 26; cf. 14:27), sight (John 20:24–29; cf. 14:17), and
presence (John 20:19–29; cf. 14:18). This last is Jesus’ gift to Thomas, who
asks for his presence and receives it—graphically.
What about us, who have no
opportunity to see Jesus in the flesh with our very own eyes? How can we
believe? This passage assures us that Jesus will give us what we need. Thomas
did not believe because he had the opportunity to stick his intact finger in
Jesus’ open wound, but because Jesus gave him what he needed to believe, a
pattern found throughout John’s gospel (John 4:1–26; 5:1–9; 9:35–38; 11:1–44).
Thomas’ declaration of faith “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28) shows that he
truly saw the Father in the Son (John 14:7).
Jesus gives us what we need to
believe as well: the witness of the disciples on the wings of the Spirit. In
another tie with creation, the disciples’ testimony moves beyond the word of an
eyewitness to become the Word of God. In breathing the Holy Spirit into the
disciples, Jesus empowered the church to witness to him as he had witnessed to
the Father. As his revelation gave sight to believers, so can their testimony.
– Fritz West
Acts 4:32-35
“To each according to need,” central to communist ideology,
is also here in the Acts account of how
the followers of the risen one first lived together. Those with property sold
it, “laid it at the apostles’ feet…” and distributed it.
Instead of merely handing out charity to the poorest, they
invited everyone to own everything together, share everything, and no one, as a
consequence, was poor any longer. “There was not a needy person among them.”
This is an image of church that ought to utterly scare us
who live in the competitive, individualistic, economy-worshipping First World.
Share?!!! Everything?!!! What would that be like?
To believe so strongly in the resurrection that all trust
is thrown into reliance on God’s Spirit moving in the community is an
unbelievable prospect. As G. K. Chesterton is known to have said, “The
Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found
difficult, and left untried.”
1 John 1:1––2:2
“…[I]f we walk in the light as God is in the light, we have
communion with one another…”
Let the preaching on this day offer countless possibilities
for surprise and delight that could come to us were we, in our homes and churches, to follow in the ways of our ancestors, to ask for the faith we long to have. This might be a Sunday for dreaming
about impossible answers to intractable problems––like poverty. Faith in a resurrected
truth can lead to . . . What?!
Fritz West is pastor of St. John's United Church of Christ,
Fountain City, Wisconsin, and liturgical writer and author of Scripture and
Memory: the Ecumenical Hermeneutic of the Three-Year Lectionary (The
Liturgical Press, 1997).
Homily Service 39,
no. 5 (2006): 46-55.
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