The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet come to believe. (John 20:29)
There is something, self satisfied, almost smug, about Jesus’ words to Thomas which are the punch line of our Gospel. They seem to be addressed to us, the late comers, who, although we have not had a physical experience of the risen Jesus, yet believe in him. This makes us blessed or happy, and by implication more blessed than those who did witness the risen Lord. Perhaps John is just encouraging the latecomers, but I find something unsatisfactory about this; first why should it be more blessed to believe without evidence? And anyway what exactly is it that we are to believe?
On the first question, our belief in our salvation is, of course, a matter of trust. We are not going to be convinced, that we are healed, and forgiven, and that we are to enjoy the abundance of eternal life, because of the evidence of our senses, or through logical mental process alone; that realisation requires the imaginative leap of faith. But this is not to say that it is blind trust. It is not a leap in the dark. Belief in our salvation is not a woolly mental state; it is a human experience and it has consequences for us as human, and in some sense too, as divine beings, but is not an escape from Planet Earth, rather a full understanding of what being human can mean.
Second, what is it exactly that doubting Thomas doesn’t believe? He demands very specific proof, but what it is that the tactile evidence of scars and wounds would prove?
It is striking that while the three other Gospels are full of touching and feeling, John never mentions the tactile sense until his last chapters. There are occasional scenes which presuppose touching (the healing of the man born blind with mud made from Jesus spittle is particularly vivid example) but the frequent touching that brings healing is almost totally absent in John’s Gospel, until it comes to the resurrection stories where John has Mary Magdalene wanting to touch, or cling, to Jesus. And Thomas wanting, almost ghoulishly, to feel Jesus’ wounds and poke his finger into his gaping side. Similar words are used on both occasions to express their realisation of the true nature of the risen Christ; Christ tells Mary to tell the others that He is going to his Father and their Father and his God and their God; Thomas exclaims “My Lord and my God” If this is the resolution of their doubt, what is it that they understand? What is it that they experience in seeing the risen Christ?
There was much argument in the early Church about the true nature of Christ; whether he was human or divine or both. These arguments which were resolved more or less finally, or at least formally, in the West in the Nicene creed which we shall say shortly. I suspect, however, that the difficulty for the early Church was rather different from ours in grappling with this idea. The Classical world and Hebrew tradition were both, in their different ways, at home with the idea of God or gods intervening in human affairs. The history of Israel was full of divine interventions by which God saved or punished his people, not it is true, in human form, but dramatically, and perceptibly. The Hellenistic world was equally comfortable with the idea that Gods might come to earth, usually although up to no good. Paul and Silas’ experience in Ephesus when they were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes is evidence that these ideas were not just the stuff of remote myths. So what the early Church found difficult to grasp was not that Jesus was God, but that he was truly human. The “Docetic” heresy was the tempting belief that Jesus was really wholly God but just pretending to be human. The idea is still around in the belief the “Holy” should not get involved in the nastier aspects of human existence, and so the Church shouldn’t mix in politics.
Generally, however, this is not our problem; we are much more tempted to think that Jesus was really just a man; a supremely, perhaps uniquely, wise, charismatic and good man, but only a man. We find the miracles a little embarrassing and the resurrection is the hardest miracle to swallow of them all. Hardest, that is, for us. It was not perhaps such an extraordinary idea for Jesus’ contemporaries who, when asked who he is, think he may be “Elijah or one of the prophets”
If there is little touching and feeling in John’s Gospel, there is plenty of faith, trust and belief (all the same word in Greek) and this word is always used of those who follow Jesus and recognise him for what he is and more specifically of those who recognise him as the bringer of everlasting life. It is used of Nicodemus as he is told how to attain eternal life and for the Samaritan woman as she was offered the water of life and the Five thousand given the bread of Life and finally as Jesus brings Lazarus back to life.
Everlasting life is, of course, strictly a contradiction; life is finite and presupposes generation and decay; things that last forever are not alive. So we are talking figuratively when we speak of everlasting life and what I think Jesus meant (perhaps among other things) is that life has a significance that goes beyond the material facts of pain, guilt, bondage, ignorance, malice and so on that we experience in our lives and which each contribute in their way to our mortality. And yet Jesus’ own life, so nastily and brutally cut short, shows us what everlasting life is. His holiness is not something entirely other, but something we come to understand though his humanity.
The climax of John’s Gospel is Christ, raised up and glorified, on the cross. The resurrection stories are something of an explanatory epilogue. We might expect the descriptions of Jesus, in his resurrected state, to employ more the senses of sight and sound, not just because they are less tactile, and so less ghostly, but because sight and sound, manifested for example in great music or painting, can give us insight into the world, into the “meaning of life”, in a way touch and taste and smell , generally, do not. But it was important that Mary’s and Thomas’ experience of the risen Jesus should enable them to see that he was the same person whom they had known in fully human form. They realised that to be God was to be fully human too. Indeed his mortality, his wounds and his excruciating death were in fact evidence that he was God. It was on the cross that he was glorified. It takes the messier and earthier senses to appreciate this.
Thomas and Mary’s experience points the way; most us must find our living God in, and through, the very tactile pain and suffering of the world; in the taste of starvation and the stench of corruption. With luck we will not undergo these sufferings ourselves, but we will be blessed and lucky indeed if we can come to see Christ without experience of others in such plights. And as faith gives us this understanding of Christ’s real nature, so it tells us something about ourselves and our lives. It tells us that we have significance beyond the mundane and merely mortal; that we enjoy everlasting life. Which entails that what we do matters and as we have a Christ like potential, so we have a Christ like responsibility.
Amen.