Let us pray: My Lord and my God, resurrected Christ, our world needs your peace and hope, our hearts need your touch. Spirit, please breathe through my words that they may be your words, and bring the touch and the hope that we need today. Amen.
Last weekend, we celebrated the profound mystery of our faith: Christ died for us and then rose from the dead. Benjamin shared an encouraging message, reminding us that the resurrection means that no matter how much death and injustice confront us in this life, we can look forward to everything being made right, made new, redeemed. Indeed this incredibly good news has given life, strength, hope and meaning to millennia of Christians.
This week’s text builds on our understanding of the resurrection, starting with the fearful disciples huddled locked in a room, three times we hear the words so many in our world need right now: “peace be with you”, we have a very curious verse about forgiveness and the famous story of good old “Doubting Thomas”.
When I first read this in preparation for today what most struck me was not Thomas’s doubts, but what it was that gave him faith to say “My Lord and My God”. It was that Thomas wanted to put his fingers and hands in the marks in the marks of Jesus’s crucifixion.
The other disciples were invited to look at Jesus’s hands and side but we don’t even hear about the marks or scars at that point. But for Thomas, they really matter. Without touching the scars, he says would never believe.
I wondered how the story would be different if by the time he saw Jesus the wounds were completely healed leaving no scarring. I’m sure I would prefer that. Scars big enough for Thomas to poke around in would surely be a graphic reminder of a horrific event he wanted to forget. Even in this sermon, I didn’t particularly want to focus on the scars on Jesus’s resurrected body. Surely I could find something a bit more resurrection and a bit less crucifixion to focus on.
The second time I sat down to read this passage I was by the river. I wanted to be fully alone but had reached a point where I could walk no further and so had sat down directly opposite a pair by a fire. As I read and pondered the passage, I realized that before long that I knew that pair. I realized that one of the people sitting across from me bore in her body permanent scars that may be for her husband a constant reminder of a past he wishes he could forget. I knew that this man was working hard at new life, that he was experiencing Jesus’ touch, reading the Bible and doing all that he could to stay away from things that bring harm. I watched him lovingly tend the fires that morning and I knew that there was something about scars and resurrection that I needed to ponder more.
Because unfortunately, to varying degrees, we all carry scars and have inflicted wounds on others. Some of us may wish we could forget things we have said and done, to forget our difficult pasts. And for many of us here, we feel acutely the lasting marks of past sins all the time.
If God removes our sin away from us “as far as the East is from the West” then why do these difficult reminders of the past stick around? What does the prophet Jeremiah mean when he says that God will remember their sins no longer? Is “forgive and forget” really the goal? For God? For us? Is it possible let alone Biblical?
I don’t believe that it is, and many respected theologians agree with me. Not at least as we would understand the words remember and forget. The Hebrew concept of remember was an active verb. That is why the Hebrews are called to remember the Sabbath, not just to think about in in their minds but to act it out. If God was to remember our sins, it would mean acting upon them and treating people in accordance with them. And it is good good news that he does not. So no the prophet Jeremiah probably does not mean that God can erase God’s memory, any more than I can sit down and forget that thing I wish I didn’t say 10 years ago.
I am someone who at times prides myself in being quite optimistic. And when I find it hard to find the bright side of a situation, I start problem solving. The act of sitting in the discomfort of a thought or memory I don’t like and not being able to do anything is excruciating for me.
Each year reflecting on the violent murder of Jesus, followed by the impossible Holy Saturday on which the disciples remember Sabbath forcing them to stop, I am greatly confronted. There certainly was no problem solving to be done, no positive thinking was going to undo what had just happened. Those two days must have felt like 5 lifetimes for the disciples.
In 1994, after a long long wait for some, the Uniting Church of Australia entered a covenant with the Aboriginal Congress of the Uniting Church to walk together as first and second peoples. There is a poster in the mapping room of Adelaide House which will be open during morning tea.
The covenant document starts with truth telling about our difficult history. And in no way suggests that forgiveness means forgetting this. It speaks of the wounds inflicted and calls for practical ongoing responses.
Almost shockingly in the response from the chair of the Aboriginal Congress, he says “it would be wrong to just say “I forgive”, without reaching a commitment to work together to lay a new foundation”.
I am struck that this forgiveness is not taken for granted and I think of Jesus’s words we just heard “if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld”. It seems to me that people who are wronged are usually the ones who need to forgive. And reading this verse at face value sounds like victims have some choice in extending or withholding forgiveness.
Even though no-one I could find on the internet entertained for 2 seconds the possibility this is Jesus meant.
I myself still do not know what to make of it. I find tension at times in the massive importance of forgiveness in the Christian gospel, while remembering that the foundation of God’s throne is righteousness and justice. Because I sense that a gospel in which forgiveness is automatically assumed as the highest good and goal without talk of justice is one which risks silencing victims.
There will be discussions in the Northern Synod this October about whether or not the covenant is working. The theme of the Synod meetings will be “Kulani?” which is a Pitjantjara word meaning “Are you listening?”
I think many Australians are afraid of this kind of listening, including myself at times.
But Thomas was not afraid of looking at the difficult truths of the past. He asks to put his hands into the wounds, and Jesus grants his request.
So what is the significance of this?
In the preaching course some of us have been doing, we have been considering three aspects of Christ’s identity: Christ the incarnate one, Christ the Crucified one and Christ the Resurrected one.
When Thomas asks to put his fingers in the marks of Jesus’ resurrection he encounters Christ as the incarnate and crucified one, forever bearing the marks of being human and dying for us, as well as the resurrected one who has defeated death.
It is encountering this Christ, that Thomas says “My Lord and my God”. It is the whole being of Christ who Thomas recognises in this moment where he finds faith.
Jesus goes onto say “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”. I do not sense a rebuke of Thomas here. And despite generations of people calling this disciple Doubting Thomas, I don’t think that he felt guilty about asking a hard question, or suffered from ongoing shame or low self-worth. When the resurrected Jesus appeared to the disciples, he brought peace.
And yet, I do always enjoy the extra encouragement for those of us, that nod directly to us, who don’t get to physically see or touch the resurrected Jesus and yet we believe.
Despite not seeing the incarnate, crucified and resurrected Christ in the flesh like Thomas, we do get to see him all around us. Jesus reminds us that whatever we do for the least people, we do for Christ. The apostle Paul says that the spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in our mortal bodies.
Maybe sometimes it feels like the scars that we carry and that our world carries mean that the power of the resurrection is lacking. But Jesus’s body tells another story.
Seeing scars shouldn’t make us doubt the resurrection, but somehow like Thomas, maybe they can give us faith. Maybe in encountering the marks of the crucifixion in our world, we encounter the full person of Jesus, our Lord and our God.
Nardia Botz-Weber says, “scars will always be part of our story, but they will never be the conclusion of our story”.
Even as we face the grief and heart-ache of scars we wish would go away, Jesus really can identify with us.
I pray that we like Thomas may encounter Christ as the incarnate one, the crucified one and the resurrected one. I pray that we see the work of this Christ in our own difficult pasts. I pray that we recognise the very body of Christ, particularly in those who carry confronting and significant scars. And that we would see the impossible power of the incarnation and resurrection pulse through our broken world.
I pray that we, the church, continually have the courage of Thomas to ask to face the difficult things, even to get our hands stuck into them. To ask the difficult questions, have them answered within the 8 day mark, and find faith in the profound and ever new ever surprising mystery that is resurrection. And there be able to declare like Thomas “My Lord and My God”.
Amen.
